On Wendell Berry's "Faustian Economics"

Harper’s May 2008 issue is rich. Wendell Berry’s essay “Faustian Economics: Hell hath no Limits” has had me reflecting on my philosophical education.

Let me begin by saying that I do believe Berry’s overall reflection on limitlessness as a grotesque and problematic mechanism in our “American Way of Life,” in other words our Marketplace, is both powerful and substantial. I am not a fan of intellectual harangues, smart-scoldings, which I must admit I thought his essay was after reading the first several paragraphs. Berry is certainly emotional about his focus and claims, yet he has touched on somethingbI think Americans overlook during our everyday discussions concerning our general extravagance and our environment.

First, I think Berry realizes who is audience is. He is, after all, preaching to the choir. Though Berry takes this sense of telling it like it is and turns its attitude inwards forcing us members of the choir to consider just how our nature permits us to live as limitless animals, or rational animals. Berry’s outcry is just, I think, and one that asks us why we do not organize ourselves in a manner that addresses the apparent contradictions our social-organizing-forces might be asking us to confront. In other words, as individuals we find it easier to ignore the contradictions and live extravagantly than to organize as a society in recognition of our limits and live according to our own best interests.

Second, I think Berry’s outcry is a call to tune in to philosophy as a meaningful tool for rigorous thinking about how we live and how we ought to live. This is something that reminds me of Kant, even Aristotle and Plato. No matter how we address philosophy, modern thought is marked by a consistent call for a more proper ordering of our thinking, knowing, being, and speaking/writing. But Berry seems concerned with how our freedom and our nature work together.

I will first address Berry’s points. Outline his essay. For my purposes. I do suggest reading it. (And then Marilynne Robinson’s awesome lecture “A Great Amnesia” and then Aleksandar Hemon’s “The Death of Lazarus Averbuch.” I will get to those in subsequent posts.)

Berry begins at the beginning, so to speak, as a historiographer might, by marking his spot: “The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel....”

I think Berry’s naming of our era is significant. His title places his discussion in the debates about the American Capitalist Market. It implies a participation in an on-going debate about how Americans organize themselves as sovereign consumers in a market they have been taught consumers guide.

This may be a bit Whiteheadean, but we must allow for contemporaneity when we map our intentional courses through history. We are certainly forward-thinking individuals ever looking backwards for clues about how we should proceed. (See Benjamin & Bellamy for examples of this.) But we need to think beyond, in a horizontal manner maybe, what is happening here and now and next.

Berry insists that our reaction to the apparent end of our era has been to “delay any sort of reckoning.” And the strategies for our delay: “willed oblivion,” or “faith” in science, or “visions” of new markets for cheap fuels. Our delay is a re-enforcement of our investment in The American Way of Life. For Berry, and I think he is right, this means that Americans continue “consuming, spending, wasting...."

Berry’s first claim is that our problems are grounded in an “assumed limitlessness.” We are a society that refuses to define itself. Berry addresses a contradiction: how can we be limitless animals. He claims that limitlessness is a forgotten “godly trait.” Worse for Berry is that our forgetfulness is based in a refusal to recognize limits.

I believe the claim about our insistence upon our definition as “higher animals” is a bit precious. Berry's claim has an old-school tone that hearkens back to early arguments about the immaturity of American folk from the likes of the cultural elite from Europe and Britain. See D.H. Lawrence’s famous essay “A Spirit of Place.” Lawrence claims Americans aren’t free simply for wanting freedom and claiming freedom and founding a nation based on the principles of freedom. Lawrence insists we are merely “masterless."

Berry writes: “In keeping with our unrestrained consumptiveness, the commonly accepted basis of our economy is the supposed possibility of limitless growth, limitless wants, limitless wealth, limitless natural resources, limitless energy, and limitless debt.”

Berry argues our investment in limitless economy “implies and requires a doctrine of general human limitlessness.” In other words, all of us are entitled to pursue whatever we desire. Importantly, Berry claims that this associates the Christian Capitalist with the “lowliest pornographer.” We might want to reflect on why Berry modifies Capitalist. It makes sense to me: he is speaking about a particular quality of American culture that has its roots in Puritan/Calvinist virtues and culture from the late 17th Century. We might consider the wake of The Great Awakening as a good, solid, comprehensible marker.

I don’t rightly know how to address the real contradictions American Christians face as they pursue wealth in the market. After all, contemporary Christians live in constant contradiction. Consider the heartfelt outcries for a cultivated Culture of Life that still builds into such Culture a place for the death penalty and arsenals for chemical and nuclear weapons. In addition, I do believe that addressing folks’ religion is an emotional appeal that simply will not work. Unless, of course, Berry is preaching to the choir. But then, what’s the point?

In addition, I think that desire might not be the best word. I believe that individuals-as-consumers are encouraged to achieve and possess through market exchanges only what they fancy. Ideally, consumers are supposed to be sovereign and steer the market according to their desires. (Read the Austrian Economists that so much of our economics is based upon, guys like Ludwig Von Mises, who in a detailed manner defines what A Market is and how A Market functions. See, maybe, Human Action.)

Business, through corporate strategies of cooperation, has debased desire to mere fancy. Desire can embody both needs and wants. Desire can function with/in choices based on performing social goods in addition to exchanging market goods. One can, after all, desire to be good and to do good for oneself and for others. Fancy, on the other hand, is a purely self-motivated activity in the marketplace. Possibly the phrase “pursue whatever we desire” is a demand that pursues fanciful behavior in the market. The key word being “whatever,” which means without motivation, without thought, without consequences. Therefore, without Ethics, without Character.

Berry on Moral Minimalism. As I mentioned above while addressing the mechanism of fancy in place of desire, the more we invest in a doctrine of general human limitlessness, to use Berry’s phrase, the more we live in ignorance of consequences of our daily behavior. Here the use of General instead of Specific becomes clear. I believe Berry has uncovered a problem with individuals acting within a community as a culture. The cuture itself is involved with cultivating a doctrine of general human limitlessness, while individuals are free to act as they choose within that culture with their daily attitudes addressing a specific doctrine of whatever they choose. Individuals are lost in the crowd of generality.

This moral minimalism is based in our purposeful ignorance of limits. Berry argues because our concept of human limitlessness is a fantasy--I guess in Berry’s mind "fantasy" means "a thought not based in reality"--our concept is limited. By space and time, apparently, since resources are finite. Berry writes, “we are entering a time of inescapable limits.” So, TIME is limited as well as resources. Our reliance upon a culture that generalizes each of our intents results in a shrinking setting and time with which to address problems with our real conditions of existince.

I suppose we could address the metropolitan mind here, with maybe a reference to Georg Simmel's work on the subject. And possibly some Althusser. Specifically, his definition of Ideology. We're dealing after all with hegemony and hegemonic structures here. In other words, Berry's claims imply that though many of us care and do work that we feel addresses our real conditions of existence, we may only actually be scratching the surface of reality since we live within the culture of a Capitalist market.

Once again, let us reflect on what a Market is: according to the Capitalist economists, the pro-Capitalist Market theorists might be a better title for folsk like Mises and Hayek, according to these folks a market is a social organizing force. We cannot sense this force because it works as we work, produce, exchange--buy and sell--goods. And supposedly the more we labor and buy and sell the more force the market provides as an organizing force. Hence, magically our market expands and grow consistently over long periods of time. And business then becomes a mechanism for performing work that allows its owners to make a profit in the long term. And so it goes.

Notice: you have to faith in the market. Not God. This is why I find Berry's use of Christian Capitalist significant. In other words, Nature has moved from the Kantian sense that nature is the realm of all objects that make experience possible and which we determined as a whole by learning and cultivating various laws of the understanding. Nature has become, simply, a social organizing force that magically works on its own and at its best without regulation. I use the word magically because Capitalist economists like to marvel at how the West was won and how the market consistently grows year after year without understanding the laws of such a natural force. It just works that way.

If you think I am being a bit ridiculous, read F.A. Hayek's Principles of a Liberal Social Order or Mises's Human Action. Both authors address the effect of the market working as liberal social order for our cultural benefit yet neither actually scientifically explain the mechanism of the social organizing force. They do nothing more than point to it.

I need to address the use of the word Freedom and its etymology in Berry's essay and a concept Hayek coins in Principles of a Liberal Social Order, the catalaxy. More on this below.

Berry insists that our faith in technology is at the core of our moral minimism. It’s important, I think, to recognize Berry is addressing issues like Faith. He seems to be making a Christian appeal. Berry’s emotional appeal is transformed into an appeal to redirect and cultivate a different Faith. Berry writes, “We are, in short, coming under pressure to understand ourselves as limited creatures in a limited world.”

Berry writes: “This constraint, however, is not the condemnation it may seem. On the contrary, it returns us to our real condition and to our human heritage, from which our self-definition as limitless animals has for too long cut us off.”

I can’t help but think about Kant here. And I will adress this later. I am currently rereading some Kant and gathering passages I believe are relevant.

Berry’s language is important when considering his overall plea. It may seem simple at first reading: we need to pay attention to and address our limitations in a manner that transforms culture and uses nature according to natural limits. I believe we can insert Laws for Limits, by the way. And if we do, Berry’s message becomes very clear. We are outlaws: we are lawless. Working according to limits is actively working within laws, both natural and cultural/human. The Market, then, becomes a fantastic replacement for Nature. And think of grammar here. The Market, the Austrians will argue, is not a place. Yet we offer it Object status: it is The Market. Moreover, if we take Nature and its importance to us seriously, we can quickly realize that The Market is merely one of the many objects subsumed within nature that we should be concerned with understanding.

Here we are: people need to be educated and guided. According to Berry, even Christian Capitalists have degraded themselves and misplaced their faith in natural laws with faith in the fantasy of a limitless market filled with limitless resources for limitless exchanges.

Of course, the market, so far, has been an ever-expanding social force.

Berry addresses how we define Freedom: “In our limitless selfishness, we have tried to define ‘freedom,’ for example, as an escape from all restraint.”

From Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus:

“Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place, but where we [the damned] are is hell,
And where hell is must we ever be.”

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More to come later. I will continue updating this later today and tonight. If you’d like to participate in this discussion please use the comments section.