Re-Thinking Economics and the Meaning of Value

A Voicecraft session with Daniel Garner and Tim Adalin

It was a genuine joy to be in dialogue with Daniel and Tim yesterday. I want to reflect on some of what I shared during our discussion. The first thing I think, to frame my remarks, would be to say that over the last couple decades of my adult life, in thinking about economics and finding my way politically, I like to think that my thoughts are my own and not just some ideology I've absorbed in an attempt to become part of some group that will accept me and where I can feel like I belong. Belonging is very important, and I think ideology often has to do with where we find ourselves belonging and speaking the way that the people we belong to want us to speak.

The problem for me, as I drift away from something more or less like socialism as the answer to all our problems, is that the question becomes how do we get to where we'd like to be from where we are. The revolutionary energy that says “all of this is wrong, let's just burn it all down and start fresh,” is a kind of youthful energy. We need young people to have that attitude because it keeps society on its toes. However, an actual revolution might leave things way worse than they are now. It might be hard to imagine, but it could get much, much worse in terms of how the economy functions and how society functions. This is the pragmatist in me that wants to figure out “how do we get there from here without sawing off the branch that we're perched upon as we do so?”

All of our critiques of existing economic forms and social forms are valid and important in many cases, but we also need to be constructive and build from where we are in a realistic way. That said, business as usual is going to get everybody killed. I like to think of economics as a subset of ecology. An important influence on me here is Thomas Berry, often referred to as a “geologian.” He was a Catholic priest who began to study ecology and cosmology and ended up collaborating with a cosmologist named Brian Swimme, who was a teacher of mine. I never met Thomas Berry, but I feel as though I'm in his lineage because Brian Swimme is a teacher of mine.

What Thomas Berry suggests is that ecology is functional cosmology. How we engage with the energy flows and the other organisms that share this planet with us is going to be a function of our cosmology, our worldview, and what we think the universe is and what the human place within it is. Downstream of all of that is economics. The human economy is a subset of the Earth's ecology. Human beings have come to play a rather outsized role in this Earth ecology, this planetary community of life. I was just seeing this graphic the other day about the amount of human-created stuff—everything from concrete to metals to plastic and so on. All of the human mass that has been created has now surpassed the rest of the biomass of the planet.

This is what is meant by “the Anthropocene”: human beings have become a geological force on par with super volcanoes and asteroid impacts.

When we ask questions about economics and how to model the economy, how to think about supply and demand, how to engage creatively with the role that disruptive technologies play, it's important to keep this larger context in mind: the cosmological frame. When we place economics in this context, what becomes immediately relevant is this distinction between human needs and human wants, human desires. At least in the developed world, most of our needs are met. There is tremendous inequality, but in terms of food production, in terms of the amount of housing that's available, all human needs could be met easily. There's a distribution problem and an inequality problem that prevents those needs from being met. We are mostly in an economy now that's trying to grow by increasing and inventing new human desires to feed patterns of consumption that I would say actually take us further and further away from healthy human existence.

I saw an ad the other day, which I initially thought must be a parody, for a new device called “Friend.” You wear this little pendant on your neck and it listens to everything you say. It's an AI, and it texts you as a friend would just to try to cheer you up, make you feel less lonely. I can't tell you how much more lonely I felt after watching this ad. It's not a parody; it's a real product, apparently.

This is the type of economy, the type of product that is increasingly going to be driving us away from real human connection and driving us away from paying attention to the world that we're destroying.

Creativity is very important. I'm not a Luddite; I think technology is exciting. I can also see the way in which it functions as a new kind of religion. The idea of endless technological progress is part of what keeps our modern society motivated. Maybe the future will be better because we'll invent the new thing that will solve that problem. Climate change? Some technology will fix it, and we won't have to change our consumption habits. I don't want to sound like technological progress isn't a possibility and doesn't occur, but it's not the solution to our problems. Human economics has always been about the application of intelligence to nature to generate surpluses. We already have more than enough technology to meet all of our needs, so what are we doing?

Modern economic theories have really emphasized human vices and ignored human virtues. Models treat human beings like selfish agents trying to maximize return on investment, maximize profit. We're constantly calculating how we can get more. That is a self-fulfilling prophecy because everyone assumes everyone else is behaving in that way. We get a society that becomes increasingly atomized and selfish. We think of human beings just by virtue of the lowest common denominator, just in terms of our selfishness. We downplay our virtues. We downplay the extent to which people like to cooperate with one another, like to associate with one another, like to be helpful. We naturally feel a sense of sympathy for others; we want to help. But we don't have an economy where that virtuous side of our humanity is encouraged or fostered. Quite the opposite.

Daniel spoke about the importance of a metaphysics rooted in creativity and how our economic models have not understood it well. We have to put the human economy within the context of the Earth's ecology (and of course the Earth is part of a larger circuit with the Sun, feeding us energy). The Earth system is a living organism and we live by virtue of it. There's a tendency among environmentalists and the environmentalist left particularly to imagine that nature is some sort of harmonious, steady-state system and that it's human beings that have come in and disrupted all of that.

I really appreciate Slavoj Žižek's approach to this question, where he reminds people that actually the history of life on this planet is a series of cascading catastrophes. This is the sixth great mass extinction event, yes, this time precipitated by industrial civilization. But there have been at least five prior, and we weren't here. We're not the source of all of the disruption of this planet. But rather than thinking of it as just catastrophe after catastrophe, this is the nature of creativity. It always comes with destruction. After every one of these prior mass extinctions, there was more diversification of life. More species emerged a few million years later than had existed prior. That's the creative nature of life on this planet.

We're trying to imagine not just a more sustainable economy but a regenerative economy, so we need to get over this idea that's quite popular among the environmental left that human beings can only mess things up. We have a role to play on this planet, a creative role to play, and we could enhance life. Our economy could be regenerative. It's just a matter of giving birth to a new worldview. I'm not an expert in how you should go about doing that. Cultural transformation is quite mysterious. Look at the birth of new religions. What catches fire in people's souls is not something you could have an algorithm that would help you predict. It's not something AI is ever going to understand, although AI is probably going to give rise to new religions as people project their fantasies onto it. It already is.

Ultimately, we need an economic model, an economic approach, that acknowledges the full spectrum of human capacities, both our vices and our virtues, that acknowledges that creativity comes with destruction, and that the natural world is not just this perfect, harmonious place. Human beings belong on this Earth. We have a role to play here. But we need to acknowledge that economics is not everything. There are so many things nowadays in our neoliberal capitalist context that are considered to be part of the marketplace, part of the capitalist economy, that I really don't think should be commodified. We don't want to stifle innovation, but at the same time, I'm not sure that things like food production, healthcare, education, and even government should be part of the capitalist economy. Increasingly, you just buy politicians now, and it's done right out in the open.

There are certain things that belong in different spheres of human life and that aren't best considered as functions of the economy. That cuts against this ever-expanding market logic that has come to dominate the planet. Even in formerly communist countries, this logic of the market has continued to spread, and I don't think the consequences of that have been positive. We can talk about these charts that you'll see and these arguments about how many people capitalism has lifted out of poverty, but it depends on how you look at it. You could think a subsistence lifestyle, living close to the land, embedded in community, is impoverished. On the other hand, people living jobs they hate in the middle of a big city, making $100,000 a year, might also be impoverished in a different way. Qualitatively speaking, even if quantitatively they're making more money.

How can we identify, define, and inoculate ourselves against ideology? What came to me is that an ideology is anything that prevents you from encountering the otherness, the mystery of other human beings. If you're assuming that you already know who someone is and what's motivating them, you're working within some kind of ideological framework that has reduced the mystery of that other to some kind of abstraction, some idea that you have about how human beings behave. That leads to all sorts of violence in human history. Ideology also functions to distance us from creativity because we think we know more than we actually know. We lose our capacity for curiosity.

Thinking about the role of the market in human societies, there was an anthropologist named David Graeber, who passed away several years ago, who wrote this book called Debt: The First 5,000 Years that came out right around the time that Occupy Wall Street was happening. He pointed out that markets have always required states. You have these libertarian ideologies that think, “Oh, we’ve got to get the state out of the way. If we just had the market, everything would be great because it would maximize freedom and so on.” Graeber's point was that anthropologically and archaeologically, if we look at history, there's never been such a thing as a market without a state. Markets have always required states. Someone's got to enforce those contracts.

One of the approaches to dealing with our social problems that I've continued to study—but it's not just a theory to study; it's a proposal to experiment with and to enact—is Rudolf Steiner's idea of social threefolding. It's a description of a process that Steiner perceived unfolding over human history. We begin in ancient civilizations with what Eric Voegelin would call a compact cosmology, where the church or the religion, the market, the state, they're all part of the same basic structure. It's all more or less oriented around some kind of spirituality or religious vision. Over the course of history, this compact form of civilization and cosmology has differentiated itself. In the modern period, you get very clear distinctions between the political sphere, which is courts, law, and eventually a sense of democratic self-governance where the rights of individuals and the rights of individuals to freely associate with other individuals become something we enshrine. Then you have the marketplace, where we engage with one another via trade and seek to harness surpluses again by applying intelligence to nature. Then you have the cultural sphere, which is everything from art and religion to science, education, and athletics.

In terms of values, the sort of society I would like to see would be one that values cultural production, meaning-making activity, value creation in the sense of not just economic value but the values of human connection, the values of beautiful art, of admiring a very talented athlete. Science itself is also part of this cultural activity, this cultural sphere, where we are curious creatures, we want to understand the universe, and we want to explore and deepen our knowledge. All of this finds expression in the cultural sphere. When capitalism, the capitalist market, dominates everything, art is reduced to advertisement, science becomes captured just by the profit motive, and you don't get that open-ended inquiry into the sorts of questions that we're curious about. Research is funded based on the industrial application or the military application that it might have. Everything gets commodified, including culture. Is there anything left in the cultural domain that hasn't been commodified? We're getting pretty close to the bottom of that barrel, and we've forgotten how to make culture that doesn't have some economic pay off. We've been de-skilled and convinced that it's of no value unless it's going to earn you something. That is an absolute catastrophe.

This threefolding idea is really only continuing a process that has been occurring kind of unconsciously, where these spheres are differentiating. In a capitalist society, the market is dominating too much. In a communist society, the state is dominating too much. In a theocracy or fascist society, it's a particular form of culture that is dominating everything else. We want to avoid any of those extremes. It's not just that the market is bad; if any sphere takes over everything, it's bad. We need to maintain this differentiation. It's not that the spheres are separate; we don't want to isolate them. It's not that we want to imagine different classes of people who would work only in one sphere or another. No, each human being has each of these capacities. We are physical beings who have needs and are enterprising and want to engage in the economy. We are spiritual beings who engage in cultural activity and cultural life. We are beings with rights and responsibilities and so engage in politics. Everyone is involved in every sphere, and I think so many of the hot-topic political issues of our day that divide our society could be clarified if we acknowledged in which sphere they lie.

Take abortion, for example. It's a cultural issue, really, but there's also the issue of the political rights of individuals: the woman, the child. How do we work that out? If we can have this live-and-let-live attitude in the cultural sphere, acknowledging the plurality of different approaches, but in the legal sphere, arrive at some reasonable determination about when a being becomes an individual and has rights, maybe we can start to adjudicate these sorts of issues instead of making everything a battle to the death for political power to impose your cultural view as a law on everybody else. There are various other issues that we could apply the threefolding vision to in a way to untangle some of these knots.

When I saw that ad for that horrible AI device, I thought of this line from Iris Murdoch: "Love is the difficult realization that people other than yourself exist." Going back to the question about what ideology is, perhaps it is as simple as this: the opposite of ideology is love. Philosophy is the love of wisdom. Plato, in his Republic, which I read more as satire than as an actual plan for a city-state because it's quite hilarious and comedic, the sorts of proposals he makes. He knows he's being funny, and it's even funnier that people read it as a literal plan for a utopian society. Anyway, he says that we need philosopher-kings to be in charge of everything. Plato and Socrates are kind of down on democracy. Plato has Socrates say that democracy is something like a drunken pleasure cruise, and is the shortest path to tyranny. Here in the US, we seem to be playing that out. Now, I think times have changed, and democracy is the only way we have to sustain a pluralistic society. But Whitehead says that in a modern democratic context, it's not that we don't need philosopher-kings and philosopher-queens, it’s that everybody must have an educational context wherein they can come to love wisdom, too. Without philosophy, democracy does become tyranny.

What is philosophy? Plato has Socrates tell us in the Phaedo, just before he drinks the hemlock, that philosophy is learning to die. It is a confrontation with the abyss. Unless we can confront our mortality head- and heart-on, we have no idea what is of value in life, and we seek cheap substitutes to distract us from that. The anthropologist Ernest Becker talks about death denial, and so much of our consumer society is rooted in the denial of death. How can I fill this void that results from my fear of that fact? I can't take any of these cars and houses and any of this money with me after I die. There's this deep wound and emptiness at the core of our consumer society. Abyssal is the word for it. I think it's rooted in this death denial. I see philosophy as a time-tested response to that human situation. Here we are together, philosophizing. None of us is being paid for this. We're all well off enough that we could do this in our spare time, but it's intrinsically valuable, what we're doing. I imagine and hope some people will listen to this later and find it valuable, not because it has any economic application whatsoever, but just because we're all human beings being-towards-death, as Heidegger would say, and we're trying to make meaning together.

We've lost sight of this core question: What is the human being? Bringing it back to the cosmic: the human is a microcosm. Our purpose is to revel in that fact, explore that fact, deepen our relationship to this larger context within which we find ourselves, which is deeply mysterious. Each one of us as individuals is a microcosm, the whole universe recapitulated in a unique form. What more could we want with life than to explore that together? It's endlessly fascinating and beautiful. It's risky too; none of us is getting out of this alive. What are we resisting? What are we fearful of? That's a foregone conclusion: we're all going to die. So much of our economy is just trying to paper that over, as if there could be some meaning we might create that could be maintained without first confronting that fact of our own mortality. We just want to ignore that and pretend like everything's fine. I can fulfill all of my desires with these shiny products; I don't have to think about death.

The threefold social idea is a reflection of our human threefoldness, which you can think of in different ways. One way of thinking of it is “head, heart, hands,” or again, “thinking, feeling, willing.” When we engage in our economic life, we're building things, engaging our will. Of course, all three spheres engage all three parts of ourselves: while we're engaging in the application of intelligence or the head to nature, we're also engaging with our will to transform the environment. In politics, it's about acknowledging this feeling we have for our own individual rights and the rights of others. We feel individually free and we feel responsible to protect the rights of others. In the cultural life, we're exploring ideas and thoughts. All of this together, this integral human being where head, heart, and hands connect, makes us perhaps the most creative creatures in the cosmos. We need this sort of cosmogram, a deep archetypal symbol around which our whole society could be organized. We've totally lost sight of what it is to be a human being.

In my book, Crossing the Threshold, I do end up combining beauty and the sublime. Kant keeps them quite separate: he sees the form of beauty as finite. But on my reading, there is infinite beauty—that's what the sublime is. It's this infinite beauty that recedes and is just as terrifying as it is alluring, and we are like a moth to the flame in response to it. In our contemporary post-post-modern context, beauty has burst the frame. We have to participate in that abyssal nature and unfold ever-new forms of beauty creatively. Kant was just, I don't know, his pessimism about human nature or his... yeah, I don't want to psychoanalyze Kant, but he just didn't want to dive into it.

We ended by discussing the importance of uselessness and reimagining our relationship to time. I introduced the idea of play. It's our capacity to go offline, off the clock, and engage in play with one another where creativity happens. On the nature of time and how capitalism obscures it—I think of Ben Franklin, his famous line: "Time is money." I then think of William Blake: "Energy is eternal delight." In our capitalist culture, we feel pressured to be workaholics. And when we work for somebody else, we're pretend we are selling our labor time, selling our very productive capacity to someone else who's making a profit off of that. They're paying us, and there's a whole market for labor. We hope that people get paid a fair price for their labor, but Rudolf Steiner would say there's a deep fundamental lie embedded in this idea that an individual could sell their productivity to somebody else. This is our life force we're talking about. The idea that I might sell that, that I could somehow separate it from myself and give it to someone else for a price, is a kind of slavery. It's wage slavery. It's not as bad as chattel slavery, but it's still a form of enslavement. My very life capacity, my productivity, my creativity, is being taken from me, severed from me.

Steiner would propose that we don't pay people for their labor time. Your time belongs to you, in some mysterious sense it is you; it couldn't belong to anyone else. What we pay people for is the products of their labor, not their labor time. Putting that issue aside, the nature of time changes when we shift from that working mentality into one of playfulness. It's out of time, but time still passes. The clock is still ticking, the days are still turning, but when we're playing, it's as if we're engaged in a form of behavior that is an end in itself. You could say, “well, it's useless then.” It's not exactly useless; it's just self-justifying. Just like beauty is self-justifying. What does beauty get you? Nothing beyond the experience of it. Play is intrinsically valuable; it's not extrinsically valuable. It's an end in itself.

There's a limit to what policy changes can do to solve our problems. It's a deeper cultural and spiritual transformation that we need. But there was a proposal, I don't know if it was Bernie Sanders who introduced it or if I just heard him talking about it, but a four-day workweek seems like a simple enough thing. It opens up a longer weekend. Think about how much more spacious a three-day weekend feels in terms of just having fun, not worrying about Monday. I actually think, and this is part of the argument for this, that people would be far more productive in those four days of the week if they had three days to play. Even more fundamental is getting away from this labor theory of value that you can sell your labor time. There's something deeply perverse about that. We need to really examine that because when we're working, we're going to be stuck in a groove. We have a job to do, expectations to meet, boxes to check. There's no creativity that's going to come out of that. We're selling our productive capacity and channeling it into somebody else's mold versus feeling like we can explore our own creativity as an end in itself and engage cooperatively with others as we explore that. It's not like this would harm the economy or stifle growth and productivity; it would unleash it.

One last thing on the question of mimesis. It's an inescapable part of being human—monkey see, monkey do. On some level, though, Daniel is correct that people need to be enculturated to value ideas and to think that just sitting around and philosophizing is worthwhile. A certain amount of training is required for that, of course, but I think also a large part of education ideally would allow the curiosity, the wonder, the creativity of children to flower instead of filling them with information. They already know on some level how to be creative, and we can foster that instead of stamping them with the mold so that they're pliant workers. There's another kind of mimesis, maybe we call it cosmic mimesis, where primal peoples observed the Sun and witnessed this ceaseless prodigality, this generosity. The Sun is ripening the harvest, warming them, all for free, giving without expectation of return. That is a lesson. The mimesis there, solar mimesis if you want, is in some sense the basis of all our religions. The wisdom of the world religions is just observing what's going on in the natural world around us and transforming, translating that into culture. There is guidance here. Mimesis need not produce ideology; it can also free us from it.