Alan Roxburgh: Response to Colin Greene on the Economic Crisis

The Blind Leading the Blind

[Karl] Polanyi’s thesis is that there can be no self-regulating market. The functional ideology behind the last quarter century of economic life in the West has been, of course, the orthodox conviction that the self-regulating market is the form of economic life whose laws, if left to themselves, will cause all human life to thrive.

Who can forget the image of Alan Greenspan, this past October, sitting before the US Congress to answer questions about the economic meltdown? It took shape during his long tenure at the head of the Federal Reserve. Greenspan had been before this very same Congress many times over the past decades. Congress had attended to him with the reverence and silence one would greet a Bishop or Pope. Greenspan is the quintessential ideologue of the self-regulating, ‘free market’ shaping the economic policies of the West for some two decades. There he sat as Congress wanted answers to why this crisis had happened on his watch. All Greenspan could offer was the reflection that we’re all shaped by ideologies - he prevaricated, choosing to confuse frameworks with ideologies – and the penultimate confession: ‘I never saw it coming.’ Why? Because of this ideology, this belief that would and could not be swayed by any counter argument, that markets regulate themselves.

Not far behind such ideology lies Rousseau’s romantic idealism about human nature – apparently when individuals are left to themselves, out of self-interest they will do the right thing! At least John Locke was enough of a realist to believe that when the men came back home from the (economic) hunt, their claws blood red, the women at the hearth would be able to ameliorate and domesticate the law of the jungle, which is the selfish drive to get and win at all costs.

What has happened since 1989 (end of the East-West power struggle and then State economies) has been the systematic dismantling of institutional frameworks intended to protect people from the greed and ravages of the free market (note the shift, it is no longer home or church that protects society but the legislative powers of impersonal government). The protective legislative systems developed through much of the 20th century were dismantled with great rapidity after 1989 in the flush of the new economic order of globalization (the free market globalized and, therefore, made even more unaccountable to any social end other than itself). In retrospect, the past twenty years looks like a time when we recklessly embarked on a blind journey shaped by laissez faire principles stripped bare of historical memory. This is the side of globalization we tend not to talk about in the midst of the panegyrics about Friedman’s so called flat world.

Shaping the Imaginaries

We know that economic systems impact and transform the cultural imaginaries of a society. They shape how we use language (from person to laborer, from land to real estate) and then, from within this language, we are shaped also through the way we see, treat and understand our relationships to other human beings and the creation. Polanyi’s argument wasn’t new but it did focus the essential condition of social life under the language games of free-market capitalism. He wrote that the so-called self-regulating market was a radically new development in human history with no parallels in any other time or society. It disembedded and disconnected both human beings (whom we now euphemistically describe as ‘labor’ or ‘workforce’ and study in terms of economic units or purchasing demographics) and the creation from their social relationships of belonging formed by a teleology of ends and turned them into impersonal, rationalized commodities that are a function of money and market value. This transformation occurred in the early part of the 19th century when money is reified as an end in itself so that human beings and the creation become means subject to and defined by the inevitable laws and invisible hand of the euphemistically termed ‘free’ market!

Prior to this time, according to Polanyi, economic activity was embedded in and a subset of human social community. Money (where it existed) and economic activity were a function of and controlled by, social norms and rules rather than the other way around. There wasn’t a separate, determinative economic system encompassing all other forms of social life. Polanyi argues that from the 19th century onward there emerged a double movement within Western societies. On the one side, is the self-regulating market with its claim of heteronomy and commitment to being the primary metanarrative of modernity. On the other side, counter movements continually seeking to safeguard human social life as primary. These movements (see, for example, Robert Owen’s alternative models of work and social organization) keep presenting counter imaginations to human life and our relationship with the creation.

At stake in this continuing tension and our current crisis, for Polanyi, is the question of what it means to be human and the sources where a society goes to find the language for that conversation. How do we define what it means to be human if it is other than labor, work force and homo economicus? If it is not the invisible hand, the determinative laws of capital, and the market that define that question, then what? Critical to this question of what it means to be human is the question of how a cultural imaginary and its language games, such as the free-market, come to penetrate, disembed and, finally, determine all other social imaginaries in a culture? How does that happen? If we can’t address this question about social formation and the shaping of imaginaries it will be difficult to imagine an alternative at this particular point in time.

A Crisis of Meaning and Identity

In the end, argues Polanyi, the reification of capital with its resultant redefinition of human life and creation as subsets of market capitalism tore apart social community and, therefore, the basis of being human in the recognition and embracing of the other as genuinely other and not a commodity (here Levinas is of great assistance in clarifying the situation of late modernity). This is the reality in which we all now live; it is the crisis under the crisis. People like Zygmunt Bauman (In Search of Politics) chronicles the effects of this social dissolution, the liquification phase of modernity, and the consequent diminution of our capacities to cultivate thriving social community.

The malaise of modernity and its current crisis is not, fundamentally economic in nature. It is a crisis of meaning and identity – about teleology and ethics: Who are we? Where are we going? What does it mean, therefore, to be in relationship with the other who is not me? How do we begin to have these kinds of conversations again when the self-regulating market set out by the world of Alan Greenspan is irreconcilable with the kind of human thriving set out in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures? It seems to me that these are questions increasingly difficult for the primary institutions of modernity to address. That body to which we gave primary responsibility for watching over the social good of ordinary citizens (national governments) abandoned that role a long time ago. Surely, this crisis is precisely that which needs to be addressed at the local level. Isn’t this where churches in neighborhoods and communities need to be creating dialogue about the meaning of human thriving? It is these perduring social institutions of the Spirit’s creation that have the capacity to create safe spaces where people can cross boundaries in order to meet each other and, in that space, ask fundamental questions about the meaning of human thriving. What makes this such a difficult task these days is that the churches are still, whether in their traditional, emergent or missional forms, entangled in conversations about making the church work. We desperately need an alternative narrative. This, as we know, is what Newbigin did all the time. He kept pushing us to think about what it means for a focused Biblical imagination to enter and engage this space we call late modernity.

This article originally appeared as a three-part series at the Metavista Blog; reprinted with permission. Alan Roxburgh also commented on the original post:

Colin — I want to respond to your reflections on the economic crisis that is over-running the world these past months. In reading your blog I was aware of Karl Polanyi’s book, The Great Transformation. Polanyi was the brother of Michael — of Personal Knowledge — who significantly influenced Lesslie Newbigin’s thinking in terms of epistemology and the framing of the conversation with late modernity. Written in 1944, The Great Transformation became a 20th century classic translated into eight languages, sadly, however, the book is hardly known on this side of the Atlantic.