Quotes
“The Lockean ideal of the autonomous
individual was, in the eighteenth century, embedded in a complex moral
ecology that included family and church on the one hand and on the other a
vigorous public sphere in which economic initiative, it was hoped, grew
together with public spirit. Without overlooking its many injustices, we
may note that it was still a society that operated on a humanly
intelligible scale. Both the economy and the government were sufficiently
small-scale as to be understandable to the ordinary citizen. Looking back
from our present position, we can see that citizens then were faced with
two possibilities, which we may denote as ‘cultivation’ and
‘exploitation.’”
“The pattern of exploitation was destructive to both the natural
environment and the life of the community. It appealed to that aspect of
the tradition in which individual accumulation , measured in monetary
terms, came loose from other social goods and became an all-consuming
concern, undercutting even the devotion to self-cultivation and the family
that were originally compatible with the Lockean ideal. But what should
have been even more disturbing to true followers of Locke is that this
pattern of exploitation led to the development of large economic and
governmental structures that grew ‘over the heads’ of the citizens and
beyond their control, making a mockery of the most fundamental principle
of Lockean political philosophy: government by the consent of the
governed. When this was followed not only by plundering the natural
resources of the North American continent but by the development of an
imperial military state, operating with the secrecy and arbitrary
domination that empires always employ, the eighteenth-century notion of a
republican polity, answerable to its citizens in the full light of day,
was hardly recognizable.” Bellah, Robert et al. The Good Society. Vintage
Books. 1992. pps. 265-6.
“The process of capital
accumulation–the transformation of life (living work and nature) into
commodities, money, and steadily increasing capital–is polarizing and
irreversible. In other words, money and capital can grow out of life, but
no new life can grow out of capital and money. Life always has to be added
to capital in order to make it palatable and bring it to life. Money that
‘breeds’ more money out of itself (as through interest) is a myth.”
Bennholdt-Thomsen, Veronika & Mies, Maria. The Subsistence Perspective:
Beyond the Globalised Economy. Zed Books (London). 1999. p. 21.
"'...consumerism kills the soul, as
any good Augustinian can see, because it places things before the valuing
of God and human community.' It deadens our consciousness and thickens our
senses. Drug and alcohol addiction are leading symptoms of this. The
evangelicals cry out about this, but what do the mainline churches have to
say? Almost nothing. 'Why?' asks Hatch. 'Because we have defined religion
as a deeply interior or otherworldly reality prior to any kind of life
practice. Once you do that, how you actually live every day doesn't affect
it one way or the other.'" The Good Society, Bellah et al, Vintage, 1992,
p. 211.
“The politics of demand frequently
lies at the root of the tension between merchants and political elites;
whereas merchants tend to be the social representatives of unfettered
equivalence, new commodities, and strange tastes, political elites tend to
be the custodians of restricted exchange, fixed commodity systems, and
established tastes and sumptuary customs. This antagonism between
‘foreign’ goods and local sumptuary (and therefore political) structures
is probably the fundamental reason for the often remarked tendency of
primitive societies to restrict trade to a limited set of commodities and
to dealings with strangers rather than with kinsmen or friends.” Appadurai,
Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective.
1986. Cambridge University Press. p. 33.
“...I would suggest that barter is
the exchange of objects for one another without reference to money and
with maximum feasible reduction of social, cultural, political, or
personal transaction costs. The former criterion distinguishes barter from
commodity exchange in the strict Marxist sense, and the latter from gift
exchange by virtually any definition.” Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life
of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. 1986. Cambridge University
Press. p. 9.
“Keynes in turn leavened the call of
duty with G.E. Moore’s ethical philosophy, which postulated personal
cultivation and friendship as the core values of a life worth living. This
complex background provides some understanding of the reason he insisted
that economic growth was never an end in itself and that capitalism could
neverr by itself produce a decent or humane civilization.
“The point, Keynes liked to insist, was to maximize not material abundance
but ‘goodness’ in that sense ofcultivated humanity that Moore advocated.”
Sullivan, William. “Politics as the ‘Public Use of reason’: Religious
Roots of Political Possibilities.” pp. 236-253. Madsen, Richard & William
Sullivan, Ann Swidler, Steven Tipton. Meaning and Modernity: Religion
Polity and Self. University of California Press. 2002. p. 242.
Examples
Statement of Point
Interlocking
both primary societies subverts the economics focused on the exchange of
fixed objects (conceptscape) and expands it forwards towards a genuine
spiritual-material ecology and backwards to its origins where extensive
mental alliances turned traditional ecological pathways into the dedicated
alliances of the humans. Economics was born in ecology, the lifescape, and
moved into the conceptscape as relationships in the ecological web became
awarely hardened into expectations–of an animal’s tracks, of a seed’s
growth, of a stock’s return. And economics can return to ecology–to a new
ecology of the conceptscape’s human material hybrids--by a recovery of the
meaning that places us in our producer/consumer roles and in our social
identities. We can imagine and begin to create such a future
spiritual-material ecology by letting the rich, actual relations of our
individual lives breathe life into all interactions and exchanges and by
acknowledging all the specific dependencies and advantage-taking of our
individual economic patches.
Bibliography
Further
Considerations