Beneficence

Market Bonds

From Chris Corrigan:

Our traditional sense of markets are changing largely because of the world wide web, but have we got to the place where markets are actually places where people create bonds?

This question called to mind a book of Frederick Turner's: Shakespeare's Twenty-First Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money.

In fact, this might be a productive one to read together once Chris finishes The Gift.

Turner opens chapter 1 with this sentence:

"I love your majesty/According to my bond," says Cordelia to her father, King Lear, at the beginning of Shakespeare's great play."

The next paragraph begins:

Bonds, at the most fundamental level, form the essential structure of the universe.

And before we're out of chapter one, we have this:

What we need is a human economics, a capitalism with a human face; that is, a kind of market that fully expresses the moral, spiritual, and aesthetic relationships among persons and things. It is clear that we should revise our earlier mechanistic notion of economics. Must we find a new language for it?

The answer, surprisingly, is no. As Shakespeare shows, buried within our existing language of finance and business are the living meanings that we seek. Such words as "bond," "trust," "goods," "save," "equity," "value," "mean," "redeem," "redemption," "forgive," "dear," "obligation," "interest," "honor," "company," "balance," "credit," "issue," "worth," "due," "duty," "thrift," "use," "will," "partner," "deed," "fair," "owe," "ought," "treasure," "sacrifice," "risk," "royalty," "fortune," "venture," and "grace" preserve within them the values, patterns of action, qualities, abstract entities, and social emotions that characterize the gift and barter exchange systems upon which they are founded. Indeed, these words, whose meanings are inseparable from their economic content, make up a large fraction of our most fundamental ethical vocabulary?

Might it be that what we've been looking for has been with us all the time?

Witnesses

Gerry asks in comment on Lay Down Your Hammer about my reference to Golgotha as well as points us to an interesting discussion taking place at Wealth Bondage.

Having neither read Multitude nor having much affinity for Fukuyama's take on the world, I don't have much to contribute to the WB conversation. I think that Fukuyama's End of History missed a fundamental point about the human condition that Samuel Huntington probably better addresses in his article and book on the Clash of Civilizations. I can critique neither in detail, but this brings me to the question about Golgotha.

The reference is to the hill where Christ was crucified, and the phrasing I used was meant to echo the resonant and pregnant words of Whittaker Chambers in the last paragraph of A Letter to my Children.

Chambers' essay is haunting, and I find it worth re-reading often. The point about freedom is one I share with Chambers--

One thing most ex-Communists could agree upon: they broke because they wanted to be free. They do not all mean the same thing by "free." Freedom is a need of the soul, and nothing else. It is in striving toward God that the soul strives continually after a condition of freedom. God alone is the inciter and guarantor of freedom. He is the only guarantor. External freedom is only an aspect of interior freedom. Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible. Religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom the soul dies. Without the soul there is no justification for freedom. Necessity is the only ultimate justification known to the mind. Hence every sincere break with Communism is a religious experience, though the Communist fail to identify its true nature, though he fail to go to the end of the experience. His break is the political expression of the perpetual need of the soul whose first faint stirring he has felt within him years, months or days before he breaks. A Communist breaks because he must choose at last between irreconcilable opposites-- God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism.

I'm not sure whether Gerry is stating or asking if I believe that "For the powerless, to hold to the path of moderation is to choose Golgatha over Mars, martyrdom over the battlefield." In either case, to the extent that a martyr is a witness in the sense that Chambers uses the term (the Greek martyr literally translates as witness), I believe this may be true.

I am no pacifist, and understand that war is sometimes a necessity. Yet even to question honestly whether the Christian virtues might serve us better in fighting the violence of radical Islam than the martial virtues has earned me criticism from friends in certain circles... including people with whom I share a religious faith. Politics at its worst divides even friends. At its best--marked by civility and humility--it can unite even certain kinds of enemies.

My point about Golgotha, however, is merely to say that I have quite limited expectations about our our ability to create heaven on earth. Substantive equality/social justice seem to overshoot the possibilities for me, and so I favor procedural equality/rule of law. We should explore just how/whether these differences in language really reflect differences in vision.

Words Matter

The biggest lesson I'm taking from my initial foray into blogspace is that we have a lot of work to do to find a language in which to discuss the social and political issues surrounding philanthropy and its role in a free society. Even that little phrase "free society," I've learned is loaded!

In an earlier comment, Gerry accuses me of positivism! A move that had me apoplectic, since positivist I ain't! How, I wondered, did he draw that conclusion?! Which leads me to the unfortunate conclusion that the politicization of language is even worse than I thought.

Samuel Gregg in his recent book On Ordered Liberty begins with this quotation from Hayek:

If old truths are to retain their hold on men's minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations. What at one time are their most effective expressions gradually become so worn with use that they cease to carry a definite meaning. The underlying ideas may be as valid as ever, but the words, even when they refer to problems that are still with us, no longer convey the same conviction; the arguments do not move in a context familiar to us; and they rarely give direct answers to the questions we are asking. (The Constitution of Liberty, 1)

Phil and I have found common ground in our love of literature, particularly Milton's Areopagitica, but to expand this conversation to include others unfamiliar with this context, we have our work cut out for us! I'm looking forward to continuing the conversations.