QA 20. (Dec 09) Reason of the heart

Talk about racism moves like a veld fire. It flares up, is spread by strong winds, then hunkers down until the next spark ignites. It would be best to stop feeding it, but mostly we keep on producing more wind. Why?

It feels like intransigence, as if people have dug in their heels, refusing to yield unless the other side meets some impossible demand. A deadlock. Couldn’t that indicate a secret longing for something alive, and open? Something unconditional, something that could surrender itself without shame. Something fearless. Something like love, or ubuntu, although these words grow more unusable by the day.

This intransigence locks us inside our skins (our culture, our side), like they were our very essence. In some sense, of course they are. But if this is the only truth, or the highest truth, then we have nothing ahead of us but the endless war of all against all.

We try to manage these conflicts of interest, but that only damps the fire down. It doesn’t bring peace. What is needed is a counter-logic, another understanding of our humanness.

It’s not going to be simply what we have in common. Finding commonality with others is lovely, but our differences are not going to disappear. This is not a bad thing – quite the contrary. Blaming difference for our troubles leads directly to dreams of totality, of “one big happy us”. If there is anything we should know from history, it is that this is a seriously bad idea. Our differences matter.

It’s not going to come from willpower, as if we could (and should) simply decide to get over ourselves, as if we could (and should) shed our own skins, if only we had the right intention. Nevertheless, intention – like identity and community – matters.

It can’t be through idealism. We must find this logic already operating in our lives, equally as evident and imperative as the logic of our desire for self-preservation and identification with self-same others – and yet contradicting it entirely.

And of course it exists. Two millennia ago, Rabbi Hillel framed it as elegantly as anyone has: If I am not for myself, who will be for me? When I am for myself alone, what am I? The first appeals to the reason of self-interest. The second is to the reason of ethics and justice, of finding oneself responsible for the lives of others.

It’s difficult to speak of this. One can’t praise one’s own humbleness or preach it to others without running into what philosophers like to call a “performative contradiction”. Nevertheless, it’s all around us. Even something as simple as letting a stranger go ahead of you in traffic can refute the myth of almighty self-centredness.

If we started to notice this essential goodness of human being, if we didn’t dismiss it, but accepted its reality as unquestioningly as we accept our instinct for striving and self-defence, what then would become possible?

And if not now, then when?

QA 19. (Nov 09) What’s fundamental?

From the Cape Times, 1 December 2009, in their series on “The Next Economy”

No wonder they can’t fix it: it doesn’t exist

Helen Douglas

It’s another day in the global financial crisis and I’m looking at the front page of Business Report: “Worse still to come, says economist”. The article offers three expert opinions. One says that the global economy could face a second dip as a result of recent massive injections of liquidity. Another sees a threat in South Africa’s reliance on exports. The third is hopeful the current recovery will be sustained.

On SAfm’s Market Update, they speak confidently of corrections, profit taking, sideways adjustments and – my favourite – the dead cat bounce. Yesterday the analyst said that prices had fallen because “traders were nervous”. Why were they nervous? “No, it’s a herd thing,” he laughs. “They’ll sell first and make up a reason later.” He’s equally frank today why the market has rallied. He doesn’t know – but he’ll “take it”.

Such are the specialists who report on the performance of the economy. They have two things in common. First, their analysis is not very reliable. Second, they all work primarily in the financial sector. This is the sector that, internationally, has caused all the trouble. Can somebody tell me why we’re still listening almost exclusively to them? Why share prices are the measure of everything?

Look. See. This emperor is stark naked. His counsellors are blinkered or blind. These economists (and financial journalists) didn’t see the crisis coming and they don’t know the way out. The empire’s treasury has been stripped by bandits who are laughing all the way to the bailed-out bank. Even Joseph Stiglitz says so.
If the roof of your house fell in, you would have a pretty good idea of why and what to do about it. If you consulted three builders, they would likely offer similar advice. Why is there no such common sense around the economy?

Answer: The economy does not exist. It’s just a way of talking, a story we tell.
Language is tricky. Because we give names to things that are real, we sometimes believe that a thing is real just because it has a name. This is one of those times. There is no “the economy”.

Think about it. What is real is people participating in a range of activities – producing, consuming, buying, selling and trading. These activities are naturally interrelated and interdependent. By bringing them together in a conceptual framework we are able to look at those relationships within a system. This is a good thing. We can generate useful knowledge. We can find patterns, look at trends and rates of change, measure costs and benefits, and regulate our economic activities accordingly.

So the theories get theorised and the numbers get crunched until it all gets so complex that those who dedicate themselves to this work have to tell the rest of us what’s going on. And soon these established economists start to think that their beliefs about “self-regulating markets” and such are the actual facts of the matter. This makes everyone happy, because now all that’s needed is disciplined management and technical precision to hold the ever-expanding economy on course. It’s just a matter of getting the fundamentals right.

But what happens when it all goes wrong? That’s where we’re at now. We don’t know what to believe. The orthodoxy tries to prevail. They’re manning the pumps, striving to get the ship of global market capitalism back on keel and on course. Pointing to “green shoots” in the distance, like Noah on his ark. Trying to restore our confidence.

At the same time, a lot of contrary voices are coming in from the wilderness. Interestingly, we’re more likely to find them on the newspaper’s general leader page than in the dedicated business pages. If you’ve always trusted the conventional economic wisdom, then you’re used to thinking of these people as cranks, fools and ideologues. But maybe now they’re not so easy to dismiss.

Here is the underlying philosophical question. As non-expert members of the general public faced with these conflicting views, what are we to believe? Should we continue to accept what mainstream economists tell us? How do we gauge the alternatives presented? How do we make up our minds?

I’d suggest a return to the fundamentals: that is, to all of us real people trying to make a living, and to how this is understood by conventional economics.
Three related issues come up. First, the range of activities our current economic account includes is rather arbitrary. Not every act of production or trade is counted by the gross domestic product – for instance, unpaid domestic work. Second, inclusion comes without regard to social or environmental costs. A coastal oil spill is good for this economy, and war can be a windfall.

Moreover, the objective of “restoring the system” is not a matter of quantitative technical measures. We have to wonder whose cost and whose benefit is considered. And, as the saying goes, not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. Alternative economics books carry titles like Economics As If People Mattered, or Economics As If the Earth Really Mattered or If Women Counted. For free market capitalism, these are really big ifs.

However we may respond to these questions, the act of raising them shows that our perspective of “the economy” is indeed the result of choices and not objective observation. We are therefore responsible for the consequences of the perspective we endorse. And we are free to choose differently. Getting the fundamentals right is first of all a matter of values, not value, of ethics before economics.

A very readable new book by Cambridge economist Jonathan Aldred, The Skeptical Economist: Revealing the Ethics Inside Economics (Earthscan, 2009), unpacks a lot of the dubious ethical assumptions made by mainstream economics. For instance, the belief that people are motivated solely by self-interest suggests that employees will perform better when competing for financial incentives. Aldred shows how, in practice, this only serves to diminish trust, undermine morale and encourage selfishness.

The truth is that we simply are not the self-serving dishonourable creatures that neo-liberal economists believe us to be. We’re better than that. (Perhaps the company they keep has skewed their judgement.)

What is the way forward? Since the crisis emerged, many economists and political leaders have been pushing for certain reforms, improved checks and balances and other technical programmes to get the pre-crisis system back on course. Is that the best we can do?

Consider this. The word “economy” carries a sense of prudence, thrift and harmony. Its Greek root means “household management”. How are we doing in those terms? When we imagined our democratic rainbow nation, did we imagine that red, orange, green, blue and indigo would suffer terrible poverty while violet did quite nicely and ultraviolet was right off the scale? Please.

I’m just a skeptical philosopher. I don’t know what comes next. But as I study the different opinions, I know what I’m listening for. Economists and policy-makers who know that their job is to ensure everyone eats. Alternative thinking that takes our local, national and global “households” as seriously as it takes “management”. A fundamental combination of urgency, honesty, practicality, vision and courage.

Douglas is a philosopher with a counselling practice in Kalk Bay.

QA 18. (Oct 09) Feeling lucky? Or getting what’s yours

Scene 1. Walking along Vancouver’s False Creek, two joggers stride past me just as one remarks to the other: Entitlement is a terrible thing. Well. I couldn’t agree more.

Scene 2. A friend sends pictures of her island cottage. Lucky you! I reply warmly.
What the #$% is luck?! she flames back. I mean, I get it, but ‘lucky’ can be used to express envy [hatred] at someone else’s good fortune… I’ve always railed at it because I have always worked my ass off and pushed all the edges and risked losing everything.

What entitlement and luck have in common is the role they play when we try to understand circumstances as consequences.

QA 17. (August 09) The path of stupidity

What a mess we make when a person’s worth is measured by their perceived intelligence. The “smart” ones strive to distinguish themselves and the “stupid” ones struggle to get by. It’s precisely a stupid mess, both cruel and irrational. How could anything thrive in such bitter soil?

We have begun to realise that there is more to intelligence than was believed back in the glory days of phrenology, eugenics and IQ tests. Now we recognise different kinds of intelligence and tend to accept a more open-ended concept of human potential. This is well and good: our ability to appreciate others increases as our understanding of intelligence becomes more complex. But it doesn’t go far enough to break the “smart-is-good/stupid-is-rubbish” bind. While the fundamental mistake is to think that there is a quality by which some people can safely be deemed more worthwhile than others, I am here today to praise stupidity.

QA 16 (July 09) “There was this goat”

What do you do when someone says something to you that you don’t understand?

It happens all the time. The someone may be someone we know or a stranger. The event might be inconsequential or it might be important. It is always unsettling. The usual, easy choice is to let it go by, hoping that the miscommunication will either become clear or fade away in time. The safe choice is to dismiss the other as incomprehensible, or to interpret the misunderstanding away.

The difficult and risky choice is to walk into the confusion and ambiguity of not knowing quite where we stand with this person who is speaking to us. There was this Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile is the story of such an adventure.

QA 15. (June 09) Essence of philosophical counselling

I have been explaining, exploring and writing about my philosophical counselling practice since I began in 2002. I’ve presented papers at conferences here in South Africa and in Canada and the US, which are available on my website along with other published articles. But recently a couple of friends challenged me to cut to the chase, and get down to the bare bones: what is this thing you do with people? And so here it is, in less than 300 words! – the essence of philosophical practice.

Who should come to a philosophical counsellor? Basically, anyone who finds the idea appealing – but likely candidates include those who are regularly told that they “think too much” (and get really, really annoyed by that), or those who feel blocked by worries or confusion. It’s not about being intellectual or having high language skills or being able already to clearly express yourself and your troubles. It also isn’t about studying philosophical traditions, although these provide useful resources. Philosophical practice goes back to philosophy’s roots of love (philo) and wisdom (sophia).

QA 14. (May 09) The first priority

www.newsinphotos.co.za

What should be the single priority for the new South African government? In his Sunday Times column (3 May 2009), Mac Maharaj invited readers to answer this question, following Peter Bruce’s observation that a government that tries to fix everything achieves nothing. “Let us… find some common purpose, which is the first step to success.”

But because any choice refers to a prior and more fundamental commitment – to the criteria by which we choose – it seems to me that clarity of purpose is at least as necessary as common purpose. What we believe the government’s priority should be depends on how we understand its purpose, and this in turn will shape the way it functions and is evaluated.

So here’s my response:

QA 13. (April 09) Tug of war, tug of words

Michael the teacher was talking about what he says to new classes to disarm them. To disarm them? An ambiguous phrase. Did he mean to charm the children or to take away their weapons? Which reminded me of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s view that discourse (conversation, dialogue) is the way we can engage with each other without violence. Which started me thinking about how we use language to arm and disarm ourselves and each other.

QA 12. (March 09) In defence of ego

“Struggle is ego.”

“All ambition is vanity.”

“I’ve been meeting my ego a lot recently.”

These three comments came my way over the course of a few days. They all seem to express some nervousness, disapproval or dislike of “ego”. Is that fair? Is ego simply a problem?

QA 11. (Feb 09) A wedding

For David and Corinna, 21 February 2009

What does it mean, to marry?

Marriage is an event, both simple and extraordinary. Something will be accomplished, here, today. Something will end and something begin. To marry is “to unite intimately”. It is rite of passage in which two lives are transformed. Two singular people say I – I will, yes – and find themselves we, us. First person plural.

This event takes place through words that are spoken: a solemn vow, a promise made, carried on the breath “from your lips to God’s ear”. One pledges one’s troth, one’s truth. Whatever words are used are words of honour. I take you as my husband, my wife, and I give my life into your care. In this exchange, the two become as one.