For someone like me, who is trying to grasp as fully as possible all the implications of the distinction made by the Bahá’í World Centre between the West as it sees itself (‘developed’) and the West as it really is (merely industrialised), a recent Guardian article by Pankaj Mishra provided much food for thought. The Bahá’í document reads (page 5):
To seek coherence between the spiritual and the material does not imply that the material goals of development are to be trivialized. It does require, however, the rejection of approaches to development which define it as the transfer to all societies of the ideological convictions, the social structures, the economic practices, the models of governance — in the final analysis, the very patterns of life — prevalent in certain highly industrialized regions of the world. When the material and spiritual dimensions of the life of a community are kept in mind and due attention is given to both scientific and spiritual knowledge, the tendency to reduce development to the mere consumption of goods and services and the naive use of technological packages is avoided.
Mishra has much to say that probes these issues and their origins quite deeply. In some ways it took me back to Amy Chua‘s excellent book, World on Fire and also links with John Ehrenfeld’s insightful co-authored book, Flourishing. His analysis covers somewhat different areas than theirs though, especially in terms of the complex history of these problems. Below is the first section and a bit: for the detailed exposition of his thought as a whole see link.
The Western Model is Broken
“So far, the 21st century has been a rotten one for the western model,” according to a new book, The Fourth Revolution, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. This seems an extraordinary admission from two editors of the Economist, the flag-bearer of English liberalism, which has long insisted that the non-west could only achieve prosperity and stability through western prescriptions. It almost obscures the fact that the 20th century was blighted by the same pathologies that today make the western model seem unworkable, and render its fervent advocates a bit lost. The most violent century in human history, it was hardly the best advertisement for the “bland fanatics of western civilisation”, as the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called them at the height of the cold war, “who regard the highly contingent achievements of our culture as the final form and norm of human existence”.
Niebuhr was critiquing a fundamentalist creed that has coloured our view of the world for more than a century: that western institutions of the nation-state and liberal democracy will be gradually generalised around the world, and that the aspiring middle classes created by industrial capitalism will bring about accountable, representative and stable governments – that every society, in short, is destined to evolve just as the west did. Critics of this teleological view, which defines “progress” exclusively as development along western lines, have long perceived its absolutist nature. Secular liberalism, the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen cautioned as early as 1862, “is the final religion, though its church is not of the other world but of this”. But it has had many presumptive popes and encyclicals: from the 19th-century dream of a westernised world long championed by the Economist, in which capital, goods, jobs and people freely circulate, to Henry Luce’s proclamation of an “American century” of free trade, and “modernisation theory” – the attempt by American cold warriors to seduce the postcolonial world away from communist-style revolution and into the gradualist alternative of consumer capitalism and democracy.
The collapse of communist regimes in 1989 further emboldened Niebuhr’s bland fanatics. The old Marxist teleology was retrofitted rather than discarded in Francis Fukuyama’s influential end-of-history thesis, and cruder theories about the inevitable march to worldwide prosperity and stability were vended by such Panglosses of globalisation as Thomas Friedman. Arguing that people privileged enough to consume McDonald’s burgers don’t go to war with each other, the New York Times columnist was not alone in mixing old-fangled Eurocentrism with American can-doism, a doctrine that grew from America’s uninterrupted good fortune and unchallenged power in the century before September 2001.
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 briefly disrupted celebrations of a world globalised by capital and consumption. But the shock to naive minds only further entrenched in them the intellectual habits of the cold war – thinking through binary oppositions of “free” and “unfree” worlds – and redoubled an old delusion: liberal democracy, conceived by modernisation theorists as the inevitable preference of the beneficiaries of capitalism, could now be implanted by force in recalcitrant societies. Invocations of a new “long struggle” against “Islamofascism” aroused many superannuated cold warriors who missed the ideological certainties of battling communism. Intellectual narcissism survived, and was often deepened by, the realisation that economic power had begun to shift from the west. The Chinese, who had “got capitalism”, were, after all, now “downloading western apps”, according to Niall Ferguson. As late as 2008, Fareed Zakaria declared in his much-cited book, The Post-American World, that “the rise of the rest is a consequence of American ideas and actions” and that “the world is going America’s way”, with countries “becoming more open, market-friendly and democratic”.
A world in flames
The atrocities of this summer in particular have plunged political and media elites in the west into stunned bewilderment and some truly desperate cliches. The extraordinary hegemonic power of their ideas had helped them escape radical examination when the world could still be presented as going America’s way. But their preferred image of the west – the idealised one in which they sought to remake the rest of the world – has been consistently challenged by many critics, left or right, in the west as well as the east.
As a rebuttal, I didn’t much like the books by Amy Chua, any of them. I didn’t even like her much better but still detestable Tiger Mom book.
http://www.johnlocke.org/news_columns/display_story.html?id=1759
Amy Chua’s other thesis and her conclusions have been disputed by George Leef of the John Locke Foundation, who proposes that many other factors may account for ethnic violence, including the most simple motivation of pure racism. Leef includes in his review:
Nothing does more to reduce violence and many other social ills than the rising standards of living that capitalism alone makes possible. What a tragedy it would be if nations were to forego the tremendous long-run benefits of capitalism out of fear that there might be violence in the short-run against those who take advantage of business opportunities the earliest. All that World on Fire proves in the end is that governments cannot be depended upon to prevent violence against people who have been, for whatever reason, demonized by others. That’s nothing new.
Andreas Wimmer and Brian Min, criticizing the book, state:
By contrast, our analysis shows that what has been observed in recent decades may simply be more of the same old story. Although history never repeats itself, the same process patterns may be operating at different times and in different historical contexts (cf. Collier and Mazzuca 2006). The dismemberment of empire and the formation of the nation-state have led to wars since the time of Napoleon. The patterns of warfare in the Caucasus and the Balkans in the 1990s resemble those on the Indian sub-continent in the 1940s, those of Eastern Europe during and after the World War I, and so on. The return of the “Macedonian syndrome,” as Myron Weiner (1971) has called the intermingling of ethnic conflict and irredentist wars, explains such recurrent patterns of war much better than any variant of globalization theory. To treat them as a fundamentally new phenomenon, brought about by the end of the Cold War or increased globalization, represents yet another example of the widespread tendency among social scientists to perceive their own times as unique and exceptionally dynamic (on “chrono- centrism,” see Fowles 1974).
They also note that several studies support a variant of the democratic peace theory, which argues that more democracy causes a general decrease in systematic violence, at least for the most democratic nations. However, intermediately democratic nations do have a higher tendency for conflicts such as civil war than autocracies.
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Many thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.
The complexity of the variables that impact on these issues takes me well outside what I consider to be my areas of expertise. None the less, though I think what you say has a degree of truth, and I agree that Chua simplified the situation somewhat in her analysis, I also need to stick my inexpert neck out and suggest, from what I remember of her book, that you have somewhat oversimplified her simplification.
There were two threads to her argument: one was capitalism, and the West’s over-eagerness to export it, as well as democracy, and the problems which arise with forcing the pace of its implementation.
The statement you quote that capitalism alone can make possible the rising standards of living that will reduce violence, is immediately suspect, along with almost all those statements which include ‘always’ and ‘never’ and the like.
I have been influenced greatly by Kahlberg’s book – Beyond the Culture of Contest – which raises serious questions about a society like ours that is founded historically on: competition in politics, when the urgent and critical need now is to achieve consensus across all divisions of opinion in certain areas; adversarialism in the court room, where truth is less important than winning; and hyper-competition the market place, where the need for profit and the desire to consume find their perfectly destructive match.
Which brings me onto the third point.
While I am sympathetic to those who argue that these problems are not new and even to those rational optimists who believe the statistics prove that most of us have never been safer or healthier, I am attracted by the credibility of Rifkin’s case, to give just one example, in his book, The Empathic Civilisation – where he argues that our strong empathic tendency has enabled us to build ever larger civilisations and the current version is globally interconnected. He writes (page 44):
‘The tragic flaw of history is that our increased empathic concern and sensitivity grows in direct proportion to the wreaking of greater entropic damage to the world we all cohabit and rely on for our existence and perpetuation.’
In short, in history our separate civilisations have all too often got too big to sustain themselves and thereafter collapsed. In the past, that has been tragic but not catastrophic, in that there have always been other parts of the world totally unaffected by the crash. Not so now, possibly, when we have a virtually single civilisation planet-wide. If one part goes down we probably all do. In that respect, as well perhaps as in others, our situation is therefore not exactly the same as it has always been, and our degree of interconnectedness potentiates the impact of destructive processes in a way that lifts them to a higher level, a a difference of degree only perhaps, or possibly renders them of a different quality, i.e. different in kind.
I don’t think any of us, expert or otherwise, can claim to have a clear and valid picture yet. In my view, though a layman in terms of my mastery of the complex evidence involved, it seems that we can either learn to sink our differences to a degree that will transform our culture, or else stick with our current patterns and sink without trace under our differences.
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A more complete analysis is here.
• Amy Chua: World on Fire; Doubleday; 2003; 294pp.; $14 (paperback)
The list of complaints against laissez-faire capitalism is very long, including such contradictory notions as that it is guilty of impoverishing the masses and that it enables the poor to escape from their “proper” station in life. In her book World on Fire, Amy Chua adds to the list, arguing that capitalism, when combined with democratization in economically developing nations, has the terrible effect of producing violence. The reason for the violence is that “market-dominant” minorities will amass wealth far in excess of that of the majority population group or groups and thereby unleash resentment against their success. The result, she writes, can be “catastrophic.”
Understand that Chua is not advocating socialist economic controls — she forthrightly states that “market capitalism is the most efficient economic system the world has ever known”—but her book may be read by opponents of the free market as proving that government policy should be used aggressively to redistribute wealth in order to avoid the kind of violence she describes. For that reason, it is worth examining World on Fire to see whether Chua makes her case, and if so, what conclusions logically follow.
Chua, who is a professor at Yale Law School, begins with a painful personal experience. Her aunt was brutally murdered in the Philippines, a victim of anti-Chinese violence. In the Philippines, as in many other nations, ethnic Chinese have been more economically successful than has the indigenous population generally. Tragically, that wealth disparity has been seized upon by demagogues who are eager to exploit the envy of their less-successful countrymen. Consequently, many Filipinos have come to believe that violent “retaliation” against Chinese “exploiters” is justified. Chua points to many examples around the world of the phenomenon of majority hatred directed against “outsiders” who, by virtue of their superior business acumen, become conspicuously wealthy.
The author’s contention is that envy-driven violence against “market-dominant” minorities is apt to occur when a nation moves from political authoritarianism to democracy at the same time it moves from a centrally planned or highly regulated economy to capitalism. That combination of changes, she says, leads to rapid accumulation of wealth for a few, but the breaking of the political restraints that had previously held outbreaks of racist envy in check. How to deal with that problem is a question she leaves unexplored, but free-market opponents will say that nations should keep democracy and forget about capitalism to avoid the violence that inequality brings.
I do not find Chua’s thesis convincing and certainly do not agree that the way to avoid outbreaks of racially driven violence against those who prosper the most under capitalism is to maintain socialism.
First, her supporting examples do not really provide much support for her contention that the combination of laissez-faire economic policy and political liberalization are such an incendiary mix. That is because the world is virtually bereft of instances of significant reforms in both directions. Chua continually writes about nations that have adopted “free-market democracy,” but the cases she cites involve no more than small steps in those directions, especially toward capitalism. For instance, she notes the ethnic violence in Zimbabwe, but that pitiable nation remains a state with little freedom of any kind.
Second, it is easy to find instances of the sort of violence against the economically successful occurring without either of Chua’s two conditions being met. She cites Jews in Russia as a case in support of her argument, and while it’s true that Russia has moved somewhat in the direction of political and economic freedom over the last decade or so, there was a great deal of violence against Jews by majority Russians for centuries under the autocratic rule of the Czars.
A third difficulty with Chua’s thesis is that she attributes ethnic violence to hatred engendered by economic success of a minority group without pausing to consider that the violence may have its roots in simple racism.
Nothing does more to reduce violence and many other social ills than the rising standards of living that capitalism alone makes possible. What a tragedy it would be if nations were to forego the tremendous long-run benefits of capitalism out of fear that there might be violence in the short-run against those who take advantage of business opportunities the earliest.
All that World on Fire proves in the end is that governments cannot be depended upon to prevent violence against people who have been, for whatever reason, demonized by others. That’s nothing new.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Politics_country_lists
Various indices show the various ways countries differ in various political stats.
Freedom
Political Trade Press Freedom House Reporters Without Borders Economic Fraser Institute The Heritage Foundation/The Wall Street Journal
Corruption
Bribes Corruption barometer Corruption perceptions
Competitiveness
e-Government Nation Brands Index Composite Index of National Capability Comprehensive National Power
History
Empire size First human settlement Flag adoption date Formation date
Rights
Democracy Index Rule of Law Index Privacy Property rights
Other
Discrimination and violence against minorities Government transparency Ease of Doing Business Index Failed States Index Globalization Index Global Peace Index Global Terrorism Index
On democracy, as the Democracy Index shows there are full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes, and authoritarian regimes. India, Israel, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Turkey? India is listed as flawed democracy, Israel is listed as a flawed democracy, Sri Lanka is listed as a hybrid regime, Thailand is listed as a flawed democracy, and Turkey is listed as a hybrid regime. I just listed a sample. A look at all 167 countries would be more informative.
On another topic, suprantional unions are new. The European Union is a controversial example given Euroscepiticism.
Global map showing several regional organisations of non-overlapping memberships
The only union generally recognised as having achieved the status of a supranational union is the European Union.
There are a number of other regional organisations that, while not supranational unions, have adopted or intend to adopt policies that may lead to a similar sort of integration in some respects.
African Union (AU)
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)
Caribbean Community (CARICOM)
Central American Integration System (SICA)
Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (CCASG)
Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC)
South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC)
Union of South American Nations (USAN)
Union State
Turkic Council (TurkKon)
Economic Cooperation Organization(ECO)
Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI)
Other organisations that have also discussed greater integration include:
Arab League into an “Arab Union”
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) into the “North American Union”
Pacific Islands Forum into the “Pacific Union”
Customs Union of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia into the “Eurasian Union”
Back to liberal democracy now.
Liberal democracy is a form of government in which representative democracy operates under the principles of liberalism, i.e. protecting the rights of the individual, which are generally enshrined in law. It is characterised by fair, free, and competitive elections between multiple distinct political parties, a separation of powers into different branches of government, the rule of law in everyday life as part of an open society, and the equal protection of human rights, civil rights, civil liberties, and political freedoms for all persons. To define the system in practice, liberal democracies often draw upon a constitution, either formally written or uncodified, to delineate the powers of government and enshrine the social contract. After a period of sustained expansion throughout the 20th century, liberal democracy became the predominant political system in the world.
Although they are not part of the system of government as such, a modicum of individual and economic freedoms, which result in the formation of a significant middle class and a broad and flourishing civil society, are often seen as pre-conditions for liberal democracy (Lipset 1959).
For countries without a strong tradition of democratic majority rule, the introduction of free elections alone has rarely been sufficient to achieve a transition from dictatorship to democracy; a wider shift in the political culture and gradual formation of the institutions of democratic government are needed. There are various examples—for instance, in Latin America—of countries that were able to sustain democracy only temporarily or in a limited fashion until wider cultural changes established the conditions under which democracy could flourish.
One of the key aspects of democratic culture is the concept of a “loyal opposition”, where political competitors may disagree, but they must tolerate one another and acknowledge the legitimate and important roles that each play. This is an especially difficult cultural shift to achieve in nations where transitions of power have historically taken place through violence. The term means, in essence, that all sides in a democracy share a common commitment to its basic values. The ground rules of the society must encourage tolerance and civility in public debate. In such a society, the losers accept the judgment of the voters when the election is over, and allow for the peaceful transfer of power. The losers are safe in the knowledge that they will neither lose their lives nor their liberty, and will continue to participate in public life. They are loyal not to the specific policies of the government, but to the fundamental legitimacy of the state and to the democratic process itself.
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I forgot to include a section on capitalism.
In the late 19th century, the German Historical School of economics diverged, with the emerging Austrian School of economics, led at the time by Carl Menger. Later generations of followers of the Austrian School continued to be influential in Western economic thought through much of the 20th century. The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, a forerunner of the Austrian School of economics, emphasized the creative destruction of capitalism—the fact that market economies undergo constant change.
The Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek were among the leading defenders of market economy against 20th century proponents of socialist planned economies. Among Mises’s arguments were the economic calculation problem. It was first proposed by Ludwig von Mises in 1920 and later expounded by Friedrich Hayek.The problem referred to is that of how to distribute resources rationally in an economy. The free market solution is the price mechanism, wherein people individually have the ability to decide how a good or service should be distributed based on their willingness to give money for it. Mises and Hayek argued that only market capitalism could manage a complex, modern economy.
From the perspective of the German Historical School, capitalism is primarily identified in terms of the organization of production for markets. Although this perspective shares similar theoretical roots with that of Weber, its emphasis on markets and money lends it different focus. For followers of the German Historical School, the key shift from traditional modes of economic activity to capitalism involved the shift from medieval restrictions on credit and money to the modern monetary economy combined with an emphasis on the profit motive.
Ludwig von Mises.
In the late 19th century, the German Historical School of economics diverged, with the emerging Austrian School of economics, led at the time by Carl Menger. Later generations of followers of the Austrian School continued to be influential in Western economic thought through much of the 20th century. The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, a forerunner of the Austrian School of economics, emphasized the “creative destruction” of capitalism—the fact that market economies undergo constant change.
At any moment of time, posits Schumpeter, there are rising industries and declining industries. Schumpeter, and many contemporary economists influenced by his work, argue that resources should flow from the declining to the expanding industries for an economy to grow, but they recognized that sometimes resources are slow to withdraw from the declining industries because of various forms of institutional resistance to change.
The Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek were among the leading defenders of market economy against 20th century proponents of socialist planned economies. Mises and Hayek argued that only market capitalism could manage a complex, modern economy.
The effect of the people’s agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go; with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all. — Friedrich Hayek; The Road to Serfdom
Among their arguments were the economic calculation problem. It was first proposed by Ludwig von Mises in 1920 and later expounded by Friedrich Hayek. The problem referred to is that of how to distribute resources rationally in an economy. The free market solution is the price mechanism, wherein people individually have the ability to decide how a good or service should be distributed based on their willingness to give money for it. The price conveys embedded information about the abundance of resources as well as their desirability which in turn allows, on the basis of individual consensual decisions, corrections that prevent shortages and surpluses.
Mises and Hayek argued that this is the only possible solution, and without the information provided by market prices socialism lacks a method to rationally allocate resources. Ludwig von Mises argued in a famous 1920 article “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” that the pricing systems in socialist economies were necessarily deficient because if government owned or controlled the means of production, then no rational prices could be obtained for capital goods as they were merely internal transfers of goods in a socialist system and not “objects of exchange,” unlike final goods. Therefore, they were unpriced and hence the system would be necessarily inefficient since the central planners would not know how to allocate the available resources efficiently. This led him to declare “…that rational economic activity is impossible in a socialist commonwealth.” Mises developed his critique of socialism more completely in his 1922 book Socialism, an Economic and Sociological Analysis.
All rational action is economic. All economic activity is rational action. All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts. — Ludwig von Mises
Since a modern economy produces such a large array of distinct goods and services, and consists of such a large array of consumers and enterprises, asserted Mises and Hayek, the information problems facing any other form of economic organization other than market capitalism would exceed its capacity to handle information. Thinkers within Supply-side economics built on the work of the Austrian School, and particularly emphasize Say’s Law: “supply creates its own demand.” Capitalism, to this school, is defined by lack of state restraint on the decisions of producers.
Austrian economists claim that Marx failed to make the distinction between capitalism and mercantilism. They argue that Marx conflated the imperialistic, colonialistic, protectionist and interventionist doctrines of mercantilism with capitalism.
Austrian economics has been a major influence on some forms of libertarianism, in which laissez-faire capitalism is considered to be the ideal economic system. It influenced economists and political philosophers and theorists including Henry Hazlitt, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Israel Kirzner, Murray Rothbard, Walter Block and Richard M. Ebeling.
I already posted the links to lists of countries by various indices. Economic freedom indices are relevant here.
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I may need a whole post to respond to your two recent comments adequately and with the care that they deserve. However, I thought it might be worthwhile sharing my first reactions.
I’m not sure whether we both feel that the future of humanity may well be at stake. None the less, I suspect we are each operating from a significantly different worldview. What is clear is that we both feel there is quite a lot depending upon the degree to which a wider audience accepts our particular model of the way the world works – one which accepts the inevitability of competition, the other with hope about the probability of co-operation.
Evolutionary theory, when it has taken a psychological turn recently, accepts that humanity has a dual potential in that respect and, according to McCullough, we can move beyond revenge towards forgiveness and cooperation, just as Wright can legitimately argue that, throughout human history, we have proved ourselves capable of widening our sense of identity beyond the family or tribe to include ever more disparate and distant groups of people.
Clearly you have read more widely in the field of economic theory than I have or probably ever will. The problem with economics, as with any other social science such as psychology, my own discipline, is that it only goes as far as to provide a lens of our own albeit systematic creation through which to observe and understand ourselves – a very tricky process whose conclusions have to be approached with extreme caution.
What you say reads well within its own assumptions, as does mine to me of course. What you describe may apply if we accept the same premises and assumptions especially concerning human nature and the consequent social dynamics. I am not sure I have properly understood such statements as: ‘All rational action is economic. All economic activity is rational action.’ But I find it hard to see a way of reducing all reason to economics in this way.
For example, you argue: ‘Nothing does more to reduce violence and many other social ills than the rising standards of living that capitalism alone makes possible. What a tragedy it would be if nations were to forego the tremendous long-run benefits of capitalism out of fear that there might be violence in the short-run against those who take advantage of business opportunities the earliest.’
While I accept that capitalism has brought many benefits, as has liberal democracy, it seems to me that what you write is missing a crucial point. It is not ‘rising standards of living’ that is necessarily the main issue but the rising inequality which unrestricted capitalism seems inevitably to produce, with all the socially destructive consequences this brings in its wake. Hardly a rationally desirable outcome, it seems to me, and certainly not a morally desirable one. I have already posted a review of The Spirit Level so I won’t rehearse those points again here.
Setting aside inequality, moderately rising living standards on their own can come with an excessively high price tag in terms of quality of life in general. An example that comes readily to my mind is that of China. Figures, as I remember them from about four years ago, indicated that economic growth had lifted 200 million Chinese people out of poverty, obviously a welcome development for all those who benefited. Part of what helped drive that growth was the building of coal fired power stations at the rate of roughly one per week. New cars were flooding onto the road in their thousands per week. During the same period nearly one million Chinese people were dying of pollution-related diseases per year, obviously not a welcome development for those affected. Yes, the Chinese economy is managed by a one-party state, but that does not devalue this as a good example of where untrammeled growth on a capitalist economic model can lead.
Therefore the question arises: ‘Do we have to exert ourselves to meet expectations of living standards which have unacceptable consequences?’ Want is not the same as need.
This inevitably leads to a consideration of the kinds of restraints that need to be placed upon a ‘free market.’ Basically how laissez faire can we afford to be about market forces? Surely they have to be counterbalanced and constrained by other considerations including moral ones.
Even when we are at war, while we need to listen to the generals, we must also be aware of the need for the constraints we currently call the Geneva Convention. Just as war is clearly not a desirable permanent mode, the same may be true of capitalism and its attendant dependency upon growth. There has to be some kind of constraint on its operations. How tight would those measures be before you ruled them out as de facto if not de jure socialism?
Moreover, if evolutionary thinkers see us as capable of developing beyond revenge and competition, and see cooperation as equally wired in and more compelling perhaps, maybe we can transcend what drives us to consume as well as what makes the idea of profit so compelling. If so, would capitalism then be the only viable model still?
Even as it stands, there are models of economic activity that, within their own terms, operate on a somewhat different logic, for example distributing profits more equitably and giving some power to influence company decisions to workers and surrounding communities. Economics is evolving – natural resources are no longer treated in economic models as inexhaustible gifts that do not have to be taken into account when determining the long-term costs and viability of projects.
This goes some way to explain why, in my view, socialism is not the only alternative to relatively unbridled capitalism, as you would imply when you write: ‘I do not find Chua’s thesis convincing and certainly do not agree that the way to avoid outbreaks of racially driven violence against those who prosper the most under capitalism is to maintain socialism.’ I am assuming that my description of the capitalism you endorse is accurate, as you appear to approve of ‘laissez-faire capitalism’ as ‘the ideal economic system.’
I am also not sure that ‘racism’ is that simple, anymore than I see capitalism as the only answer, as you suggest: ‘violence may have its roots in simple racism. Nothing does more to reduce violence and many other social ills than the rising standards of living that capitalism alone makes possible.’
I have dealt at length on my blog with the sources of prejudice which include the disgust reflex (Hauser), the hive switch (Haidt), culture (Pettigrew), and there is more to group violence than prejudice as Zimbardo explains in The Lucifer Effect and Millgram suggested very early on in his studies of obedience. So, violence is not reducible to racism, and racism is not simple.
I accept your analysis of the benefits of liberal democracy. However, there are reasons for believing that its party political divides may need to be transcended as no longer fit for purpose, and just as they were the result of evolutionary processes over long periods of time it seems likely that we are going to have to undergo similar processes to lift us further up the ladder of development – economic, political, and legal – to create structures and systems adequate to the world in which we now find ourselves. As the Bahá’í World Centre indicates, this will be the work of centuries. If we do not, we will find that our modes of operation are too simplistic for the global conditions that confront just as other systems have been tested and found wanting in the past.
Whether the shift in economic and political systems will be one of degree or kind is not yet clear, though I suspect we would have our money on different horses in that race. Certainly that a massive shift of some kind is required, is unarguable, in my view.
The Bahá’í view is that our civilisation is at a tipping point and a fundamental change of focus is demanded of us. It is not just a question of replacing money as a central driving force, nor even about efficiency in some narrow sense. It is to do with consciousness-raising. A statement from the Bahá’í World Centre on social action explains:
‘In addition to a sound financial system, the question of efficiency needs attention. What should be avoided are limited conceptions of efficiency, for instance, those that consider only the relation of output to material input, even when the latter includes some quantitative measure of effort. A more sophisticated understanding of efficiency seems to be required. With regard to input, for example, work that is motivated by a spirit of service and an inner urge to excel clearly has a different value than work that is used as a vehicle to advance one’s personal interests. As to results, to give another example, the accomplishment of a particular task—say, the construction of a small facility for a school—may be far less important than the development of the participants’ capacity to cooperate and engage in unified action.’
And there perhaps I’d best leave it for now. Many thanks for stimulating my thinking by your careful comments.
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I would say that I am a supporter of non agression more than competition. The issue of voluntary versus coerced is more important than competition versus cooperation.
The non-aggression principle (NAP)—also called the non-aggression axiom, the zero aggression principle (ZAP), the anti-coercion principle, or the non-initiation of force principle—is a moral stance which asserts that aggression is inherently illegitimate. NAP and property rights are closely linked, since what aggression is depends on what a person’s rights are. Aggression, for the purposes of NAP, is defined as the initiation or threatening of violence against a person or legitimately owned property of another. Specifically, any unsolicited actions of others that physically affect an individual’s property or person, no matter if the result of those actions is damaging, beneficial, or neutral to the owner, are considered violent or aggressive when they are against the owner’s free will and interfere with his right to self-determination and the principle of self-ownership.
Supporters of the NAP often appeal to it in order to argue for the immorality of theft, vandalism, assault, and fraud. In contrast to nonviolence, the non-aggression principle does not preclude violence used in self-defense or defense of others. Many supporters argue that NAP opposes such policies as victimless crime laws, taxation, and military drafts. NAP is the foundation of libertarian philosophy.
The principle has been derived by various philosophical approaches, including:
Argumentation ethics: Some modern libertarian thinkers ground the non-aggression principle by an appeal to the necessary praxeological presuppositions of any ethical discourse, an argument pioneered by libertarian scholar Hans Hermann Hoppe. They claim that the act of arguing for the initiation of aggression, as defined by the non-aggression principle is contradictory. Among these are Stephan Kinsella and Murray Rothbard.
Consequentialism: Some advocates base the non-aggression principle on rule utilitarianism or rule egoism. These approaches hold that though violations of the non-aggression principle cannot be claimed to be objectively immoral, adherence to it almost always leads to the best possible results, and so it should be accepted as a moral rule. These scholars include David Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek.
Natural rights: Some derive the non-aggression principle deontologically by appealing to rights that are independent of civil or social convention. Such approaches often reference self-ownership, ethical intuitionism, or the right to life. Thinkers in the natural law tradition include John Locke, Lysander Spooner, Murray Rothbard, and Robert Nozick.
Christian worldview: There is an emerging Biblical argument that the Natural Rights of Locke, Rothbard and others are most truly derived from the Biblical principles of Self-Stewardship and the Image of God in man. The rights to life, liberty and property derive from the fact that God has granted each person to be the steward of himself and none other, granting him the human authority to manage his own life and property, which morally requires him to do so according to God’s Law, but civilly requires him to respect the dignity and property rights of his neighbor. The Biblical purpose of Civil Government is to serve on behalf of individuals who have had their life, liberty, or property violated by another.
Social contract: The social contract is an intellectual device intended to explain the appropriate relationship between individuals and their governments. Social contract arguments assert that individuals unite into political societies by a process of mutual consent, agreeing to abide by common rules and accept corresponding duties to protect themselves and one another from violence and other kinds of harm. Many libertarians, however, reject the “social contract” term as it has been historically used in a non-voluntary fashion. They argue that for a contract to be enforceable it must be voluntarily accepted. Philosophers in the contractarian tradition include Jan Narveson.
Social progress: Herbert Spencer, the 19th century polymath, first proposed that aggression either between individuals or the state against the individual inhibits sociocultural evolution. Based on his theory of social evolution (from Lamarckian use-inheritance), he concluded that aggression in all its forms impedes progress by interfering with the individual’s ability to exercise his or her faculties. He wrote, “… when each possesses an active instinct of freedom, together with an active sympathy—then will all the still existing limitations to individuality, be they governmental restraints, or be they the aggressions of men on one another, cease. … Then, for the first time in the history of the world, will there exist beings whose individualities can be expanded to the full in all directions. And thus, as before said, in the ultimate man perfect morality, perfect individuation, and perfect life will be simultaneously realized.”
Objectivism: Ayn Rand rejected natural or inborn rights theories as well supernatural claims and instead proposed a philosophy based on observable reality along with a corresponding ethics based on the factual requirements of human life in a social context. She stressed that the political principle of non-aggression is not a primary and that it only has validity as a consequence of a more fundamental philosophy. For this reason, many of her conclusions differ from others who hold the NAP as an axiom or arrived at it differently. She proposed that man survives by identifying and using concepts in his rational mind since “no sensations, percepts, urges or instincts can do it; only a mind can.” She wrote, “since reason is man’s basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it [i.e. initiatory force or fraud] is the evil.”
300s BC Epicurus “Natural justice is a symbol or expression of usefullness, to prevent one person from harming or being harmed by another.”
30s Jesus “Do violence to no man.”
30s Jesus “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” Jesus of Nazareth advocated, and is closely associated with, the Golden Rule, otherwise known as “the ethic of reciprocity.”
900s Abu Mansur Maturidi, Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya, Averroes These Islamic theologians and philosophers wrote that man could rationally know that man had a right to life and property.
early 1200s Ibn Tufail In Hayy ibn Yaqdhan the Moorish philosopher discussed the life story of a baby living alone without prior knowledge who discovered natural law, and natural rights, which obliged man not to coerce against another’s life or property. Ibn Tufail influenced Locke’s notion of Tabula rasa.
1682 Samuel von Pufendorf In On the Duty of Man and Citizen he wrote “Among the absolute duties, i.e., of anybody to anybody, the first place belongs to this one: let no one injure another. For this is the broadest of all duties, embracing all men as such.”
1689 John Locke In Second Treatise on Government he wrote “Being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”
1722 William Wollaston In The Religion of Nature Delineated he formulated “No man can have a right to begin to interrupt the happiness of another.” This formulation emphasized “begin” to distinguish aggressive disturbances from those in self-defense (“…yet every man has a right to defend himself and his against violence, to recover what is taken by force from him, and even to make reprisals, by all the means that truth and prudence permit.”)
1790 Mary Wollstonecraft In “A Vindication of the Rights of Men” Mary Wollstonecraft states: “The birthright of man … is such a degree of liberty, civil and religious, as is compatible with the liberty of every other individual with whom he is united in a social compact, and the continued existence of that compact.”
1816 Thomas Jefferson “No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.” (Thomas Jefferson to Francis Gilmer, 1816)
1851 Herbert Spencer In Social Statics, he proposed the law of equal freedom – “Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.” – as the best political arrangement to promote social progress. This being the implication of his theory of human social evolution he developed from Lamarckian use-inheritance.
1859 John Stuart Mill The harm principle formulated in On Liberty, states that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”
1961 Ayn Rand In an essay called “Man’s Rights” in the book “The Virtue of Selfishness” she formulated “The precondition of a civilized society is the barring of physical force from social relationships. … In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use.”
1963 Murray Rothbard “No one may threaten or commit violence (‘aggress’) against another man’s person or property. Violence may be employed only against the man who commits such violence; that is, only defensively against the aggressive violence of another. In short, no violence may be employed against a nonaggressor. Here is the fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory.” Cited from “War, Peace, and the State” (1963) which appeared in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays
Natural law theorist Murray Rothbard traces the non-aggression principle to natural law theorist St. Thomas Aquinas and the early Thomist scholastics of the Salamanca school.[67] This, in turn, may be seen in relation to Aquinas’ view on greed, “a sin against God, just as all mortal sins, in as much as man condemns things eternal for the sake of temporal things”, and on envy, which be defined as “sorrow for another’s good” (cf. Seven deadly sins).
Early formulations that use terms such as “harm” or “injury,” such as those of Epicurus and Mill above, are today generally considered imprecise. “Harm” and “injury” are too subjective; one man’s harm may be another man’s benefit. For example, a squatter may make “improvements” that the owner considers detrimental. Modern formulations avoid such subjectivity by formulating the NAP in terms of individual rights or observable conduct (initiation of force/violence).
In modern social-political culture advocating civil liberties, laissez-faire markets, and limited government, i.e. by the US Libertarian Party (US LP) and by Young Americans for Liberty (YAL), similar formulations of NAP are commonplace (see the libertarian pledge).
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Is China really capitalist? The difference between State Capitalism and State Socialism has never been fully explained. It’s ironic that despite the fact that Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan being Chinese societies more Capialist than Mainland China without the same issues as Mainland China, people still bring up China as an example despite the other societies being counterexamples especially Singapore.
Murray Rothbard, a laissez-faire capitalist philosopher, uses the term interchangeably with the term state monopoly capitalism, and uses it to describe a partnership of government and big business in which the state intervenes on behalf of large capitalists against the interests of consumers. He distinguishes this from laissez-faire capitalism where big business is not protected from market forces. This usage dates from the 1960s, when Harry Elmer Barnes described the post-New Deal economy of the United States as “state capitalism.” More recently, Andrei Illarionov, former economic advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin, resigned in December 2005, protesting Russia’s “embracement of state capitalism.”
The term is not used by the classical liberals to describe the public ownership of the means of production. The Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises explained the reason: “The socialist movement takes great pains to circulate frequently new labels for its ideally constructed state. Each worn-out label is replaced by another which raises hopes of an ultimate solution of the insoluble basic problem of Socialism—until it becomes obvious that nothing has been changed but the name. The most recent slogan is “State Capitalism.” It is not commonly realized that this covers nothing more than what used to be called Planned Economy and State Socialism, and that State Capitalism, Planned Economy, and State Socialism diverge only in non-essentials from the “classic” ideal of egalitarian Socialism.”
Ultimately without the economic dimension, political worldviews can be divided into two camps. You have the Communist and Fascist camps who think all suffering in the world is evidence that government needs to do more to make people safe and happy. You also have the Collectvists Anarchist (Left Libertarian) and Individualist Anarchist (Right Libertarian) camps who think people are tough, self suffcient, community minded (in a voluntary rather than coercive way), etc to not née government interference to make them safe or happy and would even g further and say that suffering is caused by government interference and that the government needs to de less or even nothing at all.
Collectvists Anarchism is the belief that a perfect society is one in which there is no government and no capitalism. Moderate collectivist anarchists want to organize people to help themselves and help each other depend less on government and capitalism. Extreme collectivist anarchists want to destroy the government and capitalism. The personal ideal is a self reliant person who needs few physical goods, doesn’t need the protection of others, and who is always willing to share and work with others for the greater good. The “enemy” is greedy bullies who enjoy telling people what to do.
Individualists Anarchism is simmilar to Collectivist Anarchism, but with capitalism rather than without capitalism. Minarchism is a variant where the government’s only duty is to enforce the non agression principle, so that individuals have the freedom to choose how to run their lives. Individual anarchist believe that the government has overstepped its charter (the Constitution of whatever specific country that is) and needs a return to a strict, limited, originality interpretation of it. Individualist anarchist believe the voluntary sector (non profit charity) should replace lots of the things government currently does. Moderate individualist anarchists want to pass laws which reduce government interference and they want to eliminate laws against victimless crimes. Extreme individualist anarchists want to overthrow the government. The personal ideal is a successful small business owner who gives to charity voluntarily rather than as a result of coercion and has the means for self defense of self, familym property, etc. The “enemy” is pampered government officials who want more power, meddling moralists who want to regulate people’s lives, and statist capitalists who benefit from government control who are the main evil in the political realm (as opposed to free market entrepreneurs who were described earlier in the personal ideal section who are innovators, risk takers, producers, and the strength of the free market). Note: A criticism of Marxoids and crude collectivists is that they conflate entrepreneurs with statist capitalists into one groups. Furthermore, Agorists come up with capitalists as a third more netutral groups of drones who blindly follow and don’t innovate or take risks or produce and are basically puppets of the statists.
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