The Ethical Economy

If capitalism before it collapsed in the West was about ownership of things and processes and intellectual capital that could be valued and stored and transported, the new ethical ecomony, it says here, is about establishing and maintaining a network of ethical and reciprocal binding ties or relationships. In other words it is about community, solidarity, tradition, of faith kept across space and time with respect for human worth and dignity. Of course one question is how to monetize this social capital so that it can be bought, sold, hypothecated, sold short, bundled into derivatives and further leveraged. Another better question is how to prevent it being montized by the forces of a capitalism that is clearly bankrupt morally and ever more obviously bankrupt economically. The ethical economy is pretty close to the economy of love and care and giving that some of us associate with the voluntary sector. "Love among the ruins," to take a phrase from John Browning. Small business, by the way, locally owned, is not too far removed from the ethical economy. A network of face to face ties and service provided reliably is how you build such a firm, with your own name on the door and your own reputation at stake. That these business owners are often devout is a fact worthy of respectul consideration. Ethical systems undergird ethical relationships. Whence cometh these? Religion, the arts, philosophy. It may turn out that it is these that are our priceless, now eroding social capital.  

Comments

[tom m]

Small business is the front line of people who have the gumption to take real risks, and whose stake in community is largely bound up with those risks and potential rewards.

What has happened in USia tho is that small business has been suckered into a not very wise or thoughtful place from which to reflect on its role in the broader polity. It's gotten a big dose of Chamber speak, of god and country, flag and military, mom and talk radio. Too busy to listen, too full of daily challenges to concern itself with larger cares.

The intellectual loss of the past 70 years thanks to middlemen whose narrow, cringing notions of public mind created the bumper crop of useless TV, movies, and other modes of broadcast is incalculable. Small business people are often people of courage and common sense, who now find themselves following raving demagogues into a wasteland void of ideas, values, vision.

[Raven Tintype]

Circa 1971, it was advanced that this tendency towards ruin could be cured with the application of an ontological lapsometer

[Phil Cubeta]

TM,

"Small business people are often people of courage and common sense, who now find themselves following raving demagogues into a wasteland void of ideas, values, vision." Working through that mess of issues, including he Heisenberg effect (the viewer's viewpoint and its impact on what is observed) seems critical. ObamaCare's town hall meetings being a case in point. TeamObama would probably share your commpassionate account of Fox News watching small business owners, and they would position themselves as above the fray, post-political, and wise - as opposed to the Trogs and and their Teabagging. Yet, of course the Teabagger's feel the tacit contempt of the educated types and it is to that they are reacting. "Revanchism" going back to a lost Civil War, to Reconstruction, to an influx of Yankees behind MLK, to intellectuals coining the term "Babbitry," etc. Maybe the truth is that our educational system has not created that many citizens, very few, and a whole bunch of voters.

In my work, in a more routine way, I find that even "top producers," very successful people in law, accounting, and finance, have an impossible time with an open-ended conversation about what the client is trying to acccomplish as a human being, rather than as bag of moneey. They have no models of Socratic conversation. They were not educated that way. Their teachers told them, preached to them, lectured them, and tested them against objective tests for compliance. Their parents did the same. They know only authority. And they want it and want now to exercise it. They want to sell as they were sold.

[tm]

This is a crucial observation. Your finding that

even "top producers," very successful people in law, accounting, and finance, have an impossible time with an open-ended conversation about what the client is trying to accomplish as a human being, rather than as bag of money.

suggests that education has assimilated the old sales trick - "are you more interested in a sporty model or a luxury sedan?"

The marketing frame has become the all-encompassing Mammon frame for USian discourse.

It speaks to larger matters too. A crucial insight.

I suspect some small biz owners would be open to larger conversations, but it's not in the nature of US business, US politics, or US education to suggest there is anything except Doors A, B, and C. Helps keep control of the conversation in the proper place.

Entrepreneurs may use their imaginations, but only to obtrude the next widget, with soundbite.

[Phil Cubeta]

I am writing now, doing public speaking, and creating courses for financial advisors and fundraisers to encourage them to work with small business owners around these questions of meaning, purpose, and "legacy" planning for a better life in a better world. The thing, Tom, that is stunning is that the people who can do the meaning conversation well have degrees in art, music, mythology, sociology, dance, psychology, literature, philosophy, or theology. They work for nonprofits and do not have access to the planning table where the big dollars are planned. Those who control that table, the financial planners, lawyers, and accountants describe who control the planning table describe the conversation of purpose as "touchy feely," "soft," and essentially effeminate. Getting the liberal arts majors to take finance courses and so learn the language of planning is equally difficult. The two groups sociologically do not converse with each other in any shared professional language. Chartered Advisor in Philanthropy is on a mission to change that by cross-training the people of the head and the people of the heart to work well together in specific markets, Boomers, Small Business Owners, Faith groups, colleges and private schools, women of wealth. You can check out a draft of a powerpoint to be given to a national conference of fundraisers by me and Tracy Gary next month.

http://www.gifthub.org/ppp.html

[tm]

I wasn't aware the philanthropy game counted such serious MEN among its accountants, planners and lawyers. Must be some scary macho dudes there. And I assumed they were all good Lutherans. Anybody who can get in a room with the likes of Aeschylus, Thucydides and Swift and find himself in effeminate company is, well, I'm not sure I'm qualified to say.

Phil, I'll look at the ppp's in more detail. If anyone can do this, it's you.

[Phil Cubeta]

Accounting, law and finance on the one hand and the liberal arts on the other, getting the means to answer to the ends. That would be a change.

[Antonio Carlos 'Green' Jobeam]

Ya see, you're showing your effete snootivision right there, callin' them 'the means.' LOLOLOL. Oy. (Hope you get you a whiff.)

[Phil Cubeta]

Right, got it backwards. The means are ideals, spirituality, wisdom, love, care. The ends are financial. This is good brand logic.

[wirearchy]

The intellectual loss of the past 70 years thanks to middlemen whose narrow, cringing notions of public mind created the bumper crop of useless TV, movies, and other modes of broadcast is incalculable.

[ Snip ... ]

The marketing frame has become the all-encompassing Mammon frame for USian discourse.

It speaks to larger matters too. A crucial insight.

Indeed. And if I am not mistaken, Erich Fromm saw that the foundations for this frame were in place in his 1941 book "Escape From Freedom".

The first paragraph of the the first chapter (titled "Freedom - A Psychological Problem") lays out what he explores.

"Modern European and American history is centred around the effort to gain freedom from the political, economic and spiritual shackles that have bound men. The battles for freedom were fought by the oppressed, those who wanted new liberties, against those who had privileges to defend."

In the 40's Erich Fromm. In the '00's, Dr. Phil.

The advertisers are happy.

[Phil Cubeta]

Have you noticed, though, how hungry popular culture is to fill its endless emptiness with material that rises up from true community? Even Star Wars is built on myths collected from Joseph Campbell. Disney is parasitic on Brothers Grimm. The language of pure reason that was to set us free from the village and its religious superstitions has become MBA logic that will measure and manage all things for profit. The MBA starts from "what people want," then without regard to quality or susbstance or inherent value feeds it to them. The result is like seeding a lawn with weeds. Over time, some psyches are just weeds. Those who want tend their own garden and that of their children must withdraw from the weed infested public spaces into a walled garden or community, whether club, school, or religious organization. Then, the person becomes once again a "brother or sister" in the fraternity or sorority of human kind. (Fraternity like equality was once a revolutionary ideal.) The person so embedded in a seedbed, so rooted, begins to speak a particularistic language, whether of a sacred text o literary tradition or a language that has evolved from within the cultural group, say, gay night life. Then along comes Madonna, or Elvis, and riffs on the particularistic language of a given living face to face community.

In philanthropy I experience this strongly. The received langauge is englightenment style empty politneness. But when you ask, "what do you want to change or preserve in the world," the donor slips into his or her own particularistic language of commitment and rootedness.

That is, the donor does unless the donor is an MBA or exec through and through. Then the tribal language from which identity and community stem is "investing," "social investing," "return on social investment," "high performance nonprofits," "double bottom lines," and the poetry of the spreadsheet.

[Christopher Locke]

Loathe as I am to make any sort of common cause with "the financial planners, lawyers, and accountants," when I hear "mythology," "spirituality" and "purpose" in the same paragraph, I reach for my...

http://mysticbourgeoisie.blogspot.com/

[Phil Cubeta]

For your Jungian branding strategies? Brand builders as the high priests of a religion in which many are the rituals and one is the God $.

[tm]

When you speak of charity as "giving," aren't you shifting, within the capacious signifier, from a particular mode of incommensurable caritas to a pragmatic, quantifiable activity susceptible of MBA management and marketing?

[Phil Cubeta]

Trying to keep them in tension. The p2p giving of caritas, the top top down largess of Aristotle, and the MBA social investing with its own implied elite.