The Doubter's Companion (20 page)

2. “The Global Economy will produce more goods at lower prices.”

Do we need more goods? Do we need cheaper goods?

We already have too many goods on the market and can easily produce more. Our problem is a lack of purchasers. The Global Economy reduces still farther the number of those who can buy. You can only be a consumer if you are employed.

As for cheaper goods, in absolute terms the lower the retail price, the lower the standard of living of the producers. This is because these goods are either produced by fewer people, leaving more unemployed, or by people paid lower wages. These savings theoretically decrease the retail price.

Would it not be reasonable to suggest that what the West needs is neither more nor cheaper goods, but a quantity of goods appropriate to the population at a fair or reasonable price—that is, a price which makes them affordable within a generalized middle-class social and economic system without undermining that system.

3. “To resist the Global Economy is to deny the Third World its opportunity.”

Complete nonsense. The question is: Can the Third World only develop by going through the profound disorder and suffering endemic to early, unregulated capitalism? If our desire is to encourage economic growth in underdeveloped areas, there are far more effective and civilized ways of doing so.

The suggestion that by setting conditions on internationalization the West would be denying the Third World its opportunity, contains an unstated assumption: that the Third World will benefit from the Global Economy. But the creation of several million low-wage jobs in nineteenth-century conditions does not necessarily bring prosperity or development. This is more likely to bring social disorder with very real costs attached.

Given that an underlying principle of the Global Economy is that industry will continually move to the area of cheapest production, these Third World jobs will disappear from each location the moment there is enough local development to bring on demands for respectable work conditions.

There is an undeclared assumption in this notion of unfair Western denial: that some areas will benefit from the Global Economy. But it is not true that every economic system contains winners. Many systems are fundamentally negative and destabilizing. A few individuals will always prosper, and in this case some large corporate structures may benefit without even their employees prospering. But all societies will suffer. From what can already be seen, it is likely that acceptance of the Global Economy as currently presented will bring long-term poverty in the Third World.

4. “The Global Economy is the future.”

The Global Economy is a nineteenth-century concept dressed up in high-tech and posing as the future. The fundamental question which this raises is, how can the developed nations protect a century's worth of social progress unless they agree to cooperate in regulating both the transnational corporations and the international money markets?

Passive acceptance of the Global Economy as an unregulated international demolition crew would mean a return to the past. Any use of the word “future,” as a concept suggesting economic advancement, would require the consolidation of our social and economic progress over the last century by concentrating on new international agreements.

So far, the Japanese and the Europeans have treated the Global Economy as an ideological screen put forward by foreign special interests. They have therefore resisted its tenets. The American academic community, however, has tended to fall in line with its own corporate structure. As a result, the words “Global Economy” are more often than not used by Americans as if they represented a disinterested truth. This passivity is mimicked in countries such as Canada and Britain, where the influence of American acolytes is strong. So long as the ideology disguised in the words Global Economy has an institutional base inside Western civilization, any sensible resistance will be undermined. That is why the nineteenth-century disorder promised by globalization seems to be inevitable when in practical terms it is not.

GOD
   Either God is alive, in which case he'll deal with us as he sees fit. Or he is dead, in which case he was never alive, it being unlikely that he died of old age.

If God has always been a figment of our imagination, then, given organized society's distrust of the imagination, he must have been created for a reason. At best this figment was probably intended to provide us with a shared ethical relationship. At worst it was just an excuse for a small group of clerics to wield power in the name of an invisible person who could not interfere.

By acting as if he were dead without settling upon an existential alternative, we have invited a reign of negative confusion. This has encouraged charlatans and opportunists to propose complete replacements; that is, ideology.

The best way to avoid such confusion and the resulting exploitation is to ensure that God is replaced (if we are assuming that he never existed) not by a theory or a dialect or market forces or structure but by a generally agreed-upon ethical relationship. That, interestingly enough, is the central purpose of democratic society. The citizen has trouble remembering this because the ideologues and specialists who win power keep telling us that
ETHICS,
although worthy, are naïve. Who can blame them? Like all priests they want to be God and failing that to speak for him without the interference of free-standing values. See:
IDEOLOGY
and
NIETZSCHE.

GROWTH
   Complete nonsense. The The assumption that prosperity is dependent on growth is an inseparable part of our obsession with
COMPETITION,
our confusion over
DEBT
and our exclusionary approach towards economics.

The dogma of twentieth-century economics presents growth as a divine expression of health. The stronger the growth, the greater the health.

Why this should be so isn't clear. Most civilizations have defined social well-being as either stability or modest growth. Even prosperity has usually been seen in those terms.

Instability, inflation, boom-and-bust—these phenomena, more than that of useful progress, have been associated with growth. Not that boom-and-bust cycles are of no value. Often they leave behind long-term infrastructures—railways, road networks, fleets of airplanes, urban development. But it would be a sign of congenital pessimism to think that civilization can only progress by lurching along irresponsibly.

Modern growth appeared first with a series of technological breakthroughs from the eighteenth century on. These provoked social and economic instability from which society eventually recovered, but at an encouragingly higher level of production. The eventual effect was the messy and unpleasant creation of a more balanced society.

Most contemporary economists insist that this untidy process is the inevitable cost of progress. They rarely talk about the uncontrollable social anger produced by each lurch of such economic determinism. Without a rapid increase in the overall standard of living, that anger could and often did lead to the overthrow of the élites in place.

The other detail often ignored is that, between these lurches, there was relative stability. For long periods in the nineteenth century, for example, companies sought a stable return, not growth.

Each abrupt lurch raises the question of how much production a society can consume. Theoretically there are no limits. It isn't simply that one person needs only so many objects or one country only so many factories or communications or apples. There is enough of a gap between rich and poor in the West that we could make good use of more production and consumption, providing that it was better spread throughout society. Instead the gap between top and bottom is growing as is the percentage at the bottom.

The question of consumption limits becomes interesting at the level where there is consumption. It seems that élites are capable of consuming only limited amounts of production before ceasing to function effectively. It is as if a single person can only control, own and wear so much property, so many objects and clothes. Beyond a certain quantity these inert elements no longer play a useful role in that person's life. They become a burden.

History indicates that most societies are eventually destroyed not by the laziness, incompetence or uncooperativeness of their poor or of their lower-middle classes or even of their middle classes, but by the failure of the élites to do their job. One of the factors which disables them is the imbalance between their sense of themselves as functioning individuals and the great weight of accoutrements with which their civilization has burdened them—from factories and investments, houses and clothing, to a paralyzing sense of social propriety and self-importance. One of the signs of this sickness is a conviction that the only solution to their sluggish and confused personal state is increased growth. And the more they consume, the more they see their situation as sufficient unto itself—as a personal right rather than a privilege which involves obligations to the society whose growth feeds them.

After the Second World War growth took on a new shape. It combined the continuing technological revolution with a need both to recover from the pre-war Depression and to rebuild Europe. To these three elements was added the sudden conversion of state
PROPAGANDA
into public relations.

A century and a half of gearing up political and military salesmanship spilled over into commercial advertising. And as the central theme in
ADVERTISING
was consumption, the underlying theme was the virtue of continuous growth.

The process of rebuilding after the Depression and the War began to peter out in the early 1970s. The Depression that began in 1973 awakened everyone to this problem and growth began fading mysteriously away. Rather than face this reality, we set about inventing mechanisms of artificial growth. Our two most successful illusions were
ARMAMENTS
production and financial speculation. Because we could no longer feed the mechanisms of useful growth, we began spinning ever more complex pieces of useless machinery and paper around and around. It was a return to the illusionary or inflationary economics of the early eighteenth century—the world of South Sea Bubbles and the John Law scandals.

There is of course still room for substantive growth. A revolution in communications and high technology based on increased production by fewer people is under way. So far the effect has been to undermine the existing economy. It can be argued that this is what happens each time we leap forward. However, in this case it comes at a time when we are already in overproduction and underemployment. Increased efficiency is only worsening our state.

A more sensible approach could turn this contradiction of development to advantage. Instead of increasing production, we could concentrate on improved quality and a better balance of consumption throughout society. For example, agricultural overproduction has already led to disastrously low prices and these to subsidies. The need is not for increased post-modern production but for a reduction in production, which could be compensated for through higher quality. (See:
IRRADIATION.
)

Equally there is no need for more cars or more televisions at cheaper prices. There is a need, however, to employ the labour we have so that they can earn enough to finance their own lives and join in the purchasing of the goods we produce. So long as a society capable of overproduction sees itself in Darwinian terms, new production breakthroughs will accentuate the problems we already have.

The availability of cheap foreign labour demonstrates the reality that large parts of the world are still susceptible to growth in the way the West was a century ago. The former Soviet Bloc, Asia and the developing world exist in situations very different to our own. Many economists believe that our future growth lies in selling to these people.

But (parts of Asia aside) they can only pay us for these mythological goods if they produce and sell an equal amount themselves—unless, that is, we further weaken our own economies by printing money we don't have to lend it to them to buy our goods.

Second, their need for real growth will not be satisfied if they become reliant on the West. Their need is not to buy goods from us. It is to produce goods themselves.

Third, while there is practical hope for growth over the next decade in parts of Asia and perhaps inside the former Soviet Bloc, the developing world is faced with a tragic long-term problem. During the 1970s and 1980s we attempted to jump-start their economies by force-feeding them with grandiose industrial strategies and vast loans. As a direct result their economies have collapsed, their populations have been destabilized, and their agricultural production has disintegrated, leading to recurrent famines.

The question which all of this raises is whether basing our economic hopes on growth is useful, healthy or even an historically accurate supposition. It may be that the key to dealing with our problems is to demote growth, at least for a period of time, to a secondary or tertiary position in our planning and replace it with a sophisticated concept of stability.

H

HAPPINESS
   A tired and twisted notion which has become an increasing embarrassment in a confused society.

Happiness rose to great social and political prominence in the eighteenth century, when it was used by most European philosophers as one of the essential qualities of a reformed society. It was legally consecrated at the highest possible level by Jefferson who, in the American Declaration of Independence, made it one of the citizen's three inalienable rights: “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Thanks to its philosophical and legal position, happiness has stayed at the forefront of social and political policy throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, the meaning of the word has gradually changed.

Its Aristotelian sense was spiritual harmony. But Aristotle was the justifying genius of the
SCHOLASTICS
and spiritual harmony was one of the concepts which helped them to maintain a state of intellectual and social stagnation. It was no accident that the Enlightenment's attack on scholasticism included the reorienting of this word to give human harmony a more practical, active meaning. As a result, in the eighteenth century happiness came to include basic material comfort in a prosperous, well-organized society. As the Western upper-middle and solid middle classes gradually accomplished this for themselves, the word's meaning declined into the pursuit of personal pleasure or an obscure sense of inner contentment. Both the spiritual and the necessary material were forgotten. Few writers and public figures have dared to point this out or to suggest that, since the meaning of the word has changed, it no longer needs to be treated as a question of primary importance.