Groucho Marx versus Market Suicidalism

November 29th, 2007

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Posted by ChrisG at 3:04 pm

“Why should I do anything for posterity? What has posterity ever done for me?”. With these words from Groucho Marx, John Kay leads an assault (found via Phila) on attempts to found the idea of an obligation to posterity on ‘abstract principles’ and ‘sacred texts’, or indeed, on anything beyond the entirely non-abstract principle of self-interest, which only enjoins us ‘to sell [future generations] assets to pay our pensions’. Kay seems to view Groucho here as offering us rootsy common sense about human motivation – which would be a pretty bizarre primer for watching a Marx Brothers film. A Marx Brothers n00b would perhaps be better served by David Thomson’s description of Groucho, ‘the trickster tricked by his own trickery’.

What if we reclaim Groucho by reading him as showing us what absurd conclusions result when you try and impose the logic of the marketplace onto non-market relationships, and why in fact the result inevitably cuts against our broader interests?

The key to understanding why Kay is wrong (and not just wrong, but complacently, dangerously wrong) lies in how he understands what is abstract and what is not. For him, abstract means divorced from the mechanisms by which people express their own interests, reaching decisions ‘in the marketplace’ according to more-or-less complex algorithms whose outcomes can be quantitatively compared in terms of some overall measure. Morality is necessarily abstract on this definition, as moral principles come from some other source than the naturalised sources of preferences for different consumable goods. Whether this other source is a divine commandment inscribed in a sacred book, a legislative statute, or the voice of Kantian conscience, it cuts against the sources and expressions of self interest. Kay’s position demands we accept this duality of morality and what moral philosophy used to call appetite.

Now this assumption leads directly to three points that Kay makes about obligations to posterity. Each one of them is as baseless as the belief that there is any overwhelming reason to accept the duality of morality and emotion he describes. Together, his points map out a worldview which is chronically destructive to the point of being suicidal, and (what’s more…), at odds with a comprehensive understanding of human wellbeing, i.e. the target that decisions about what to do generally aim at. I want now to suggest, in relation to each of his main points, why there is no reason to accept his conclusions, given the baselessness of his assumption.

1. Kay’s background assumptions about morality and ‘appetite’ imply the view that, as he puts it, ‘[g]overnments cannot be expected to do more, and should not be permitted to do less, than express the concerns their citizens really feel’. The implication here is that no-one really gives much of a toss about the future, so what justification is there for collective action? The problem here is the last part of the conclusion, for what do people really feel? To answer this question, Kay thinks we need to infer the interests of individuals from how they are expressed through market decisions. The problem with this is that we assume that the information we get from the market is a reliable guide to how individuals understand their interests. One obvious rejoinder to Kay’s Hayekian view of the market as a source of reliable information about preferences is that there are interests which cannot be expressed through decisions in the market, but only through other forms of decision making (e.g. decentralised democratic politics).

One reason why there are forms of interest that cannot be so expressed is because one of the ways people understand their lives is in terms of the relationships with people (and things, institutions and even ideas) through which they are constituted. These relationships are often defined by social meanings which are not necessarily reducible to forms which are amenable to exchange, and indeed, can expressly rule out the possibility of exchange. Friendship, love, ‘ties to the land’ (which, rather than implying some idealised form of rural life could include such experiences as growing up next to a huge playing field on a council estate)- it is part of what it means to experience such things that, when we (or somebody else, say an economist or utilitarian philosopher organising an auction) turn them into exchangeable commodities, we do harm to them. This is not only sociologically unsurprising, it is entirely rational, given the nature of the ‘goods’ in question. One might also venture to extend this definition of constitutive goods to cover the gamut of the ecological support systems that underpin human well-being, at least those that are arguably sui generis and therefore non-exchangeable.

As well as being outside the sphere of market exchange, such relationships have an intimate relation to space and time. In other words, their meaning is subject to change, as the result of intended and unintended consequences of action, as these become revealed to us (in ‘reports’ from distant others and through the passage of time). We understand our lives as going well or badly in relation to our understanding of the past and in relation to how we interpret our futures, and how what we do changes our relationship to the past and future. This is why there are duties to the dead, which we understand in terms of the continuity of our individual and collective histories – both as the preservation of what is valuable in what we inherit, and as the criticism of what we consider burdensome or unjust.

The meaning of an action, for Kay, lies in the fixed interest which drives it. Action is merely the outward manifestation of a hidden inner spring, whose existence can be read off that which it produces. But ‘motive’ means more than this: as sociologists influenced by ethnomethodology and a more general approach to motive going back to C. Wright Mills might say, to talk of motive is to talk about how we justify ourselves to ourselves, and how we vary this with context. Crucially, the meaning of actions changes over time for us, as we learn what good and bad consequences they had for us and for others. We learn over time that what we thought were our real interests were not, in actuality. We learn that we were prepared to deceive ourselves, and we realise that we must always be prepared to risk self-deceit by projecting our self-understanding outward into action. Whatever, whether we consider the constitutive form of our interests, or how they relate to our self-understanding, there is no reason to believe, with Kay, that a reliable guide to reasoning about our interests is provided in toto by market signals. In fact, as such signals tell us nothing about significant portions of our lives, they are entirely deceptive about the ‘big picture’.

2. In fact, part of the social meaning of the evolving, non-market relationships we are enmeshed in is their ethical significance, that is, how they enjoin us to modulate our actions in certain ways which we view as responsible (as opposed to simply advantageous). In other words, Kay simply refuses to understand the sociological context in which people seek the furtherance of their interests, which means that he cannot understand the ways in which people actually do attempt to further their non-market relationships, and how these relate to obligations to posterity. In separating off morality and non-moral preferences, he insulates the latter within the sphere of particularistic ties to the spatially and temporally local:

Most normal people feel sympathy and solidarity. But the intensity varies with the closeness of the relationship. Closeness may be familial, linguistic and cultural, or the product of shared attitudes or physical proximity. We care about the suffering of others, but less about the suffering of those in far continents, are ready to make sacrifices for our grandchildren, but less for their descendants. We care more about dogs and cats than about newts or flies. We care about the environment, but more about the buildings we have seen and the mountains we might hope to see than about states of nature in remote locations we will never visit.

Is Kay writing about the kinds of relationships I was just describing? Only in a distorted form, because he refuses to see these as telling us anything about the specifically ethical content of our lives. Ethical significance, remember, is for Kay purely about moral rules, which are by their very nature imposed by authorities who do not derive their legitimacy from the market. But he cannot therefore countenance that it is possible for morality to be derived from forms of reasoning which arise from our particular relationships.

Such ways of reasoning might seek, by establishing moral principles that can be enshrined in law, to defend and promote both these particular relationships and the general possibility of people finding their lives meaningful through the search for such relationships. In fact, the kinds of relationships I mentioned earlier, and the ways we have of thinking about and taking care of them, demand that we view the violent imposition of rule upon them, whether by forms of authority which are charismatic in nature, or through forms which justify themselves solely in formal, instrumental terms (like Kay’s market rationalism), as unjust.

It is here that we can give an answer to Groucho’s question that doesn’t cut against our ecological supports. When people care about the future, is it not part of their concern that how the future might turn out matters to them here and now? If I thought that, through my actions in the present, I would bring about a world in which my name and those of my contemporaries would be cursed for the rest of human history, how would I feel about my own life? Our reaction to this question is rooted in the degree of solidarity we have grown up feeling with others, and can be judged rational or irrational on this basis. The existence of obligations to future generations, like obligations to the dead, is rooted in a dimension of significance which cannot even in principle be captured in a market calculus. This dimension concerns our wider sense of what matters to our own wellbeing here and now, and precisely how far this extends beyond market relationships. We might even say that this excess of our relationships over their marketisation is arguably a ‘measure’ of well-being.

3. Part of how we assess our well being is therefore how we judge the way the future might turn out. If we judge this in terms solely of our presumed ‘right’ to pursue maximum benefits as soon as possible, then we have to be prepared to lose much of what we consider important. Or, as Montgomery Burns said:

I’ll keep it short and sweet — Family. Religion. Friendship. These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business.

Amongst the total body of stuff we care about, there are bound to be things which we recognise as supporting the wellbeing of other things. These can be quite specific (like the sports field behind my council house, which allows people to play football and hockey, opens up the space of a residential area to reveal the sky, and so many other things), or very encompassing (like public health care or grammar schools, depending on your political compass), or almost all-encompassing (the possibility of a life under conditions that make it possible to care about stuff in the non-marketisable way I have described). If our well-being now is tied up with the real possibility of a future worth inhabiting, then our obligation to the present is always bound up with an obligation to the future. This responsibility is not something which is imposed from outside – rather, it is I would argue, a human need to feel responsible in this way, to experience one’s actions as enlivened by the possibility of embracing the future of a valued good.

Cutting against this connection to the future is the disconnection embraced by Kay when he writes that economists frame the question of obligations to the future ‘in terms of the social time preference rate: what number should policymakers use to discount future costs and benefits?’ But there is no reason to conclude that human well-being is best captured in terms of principles which, in fact, are harmful to this wellbeing both now and in the future (I’m writing a post on unknowable risk at the moment which will deal with this in more detail). And, in rejecting this contradictory conclusion, we should reject the theory of motivation that leads to it, and with this, the duality of moral law and naturalised personal preference on which this theory is built.

Kay writes, employing a familiar trope embraced by generations of those who like to imagine themselves hard-headed realists, that market forces (he meant to write those words, but slipped and wrote ‘democracy’ instead) force politicians ‘to confront the world as it is rather than as they would imagine it’. However, what Kay is describing in his account of a present divorced from the future is a world in which caring is no longer possible, one in which no-one is motivated to pursue non-market relationships, and one where the redistribution of risk onto those unable to avoid it is an emergent guiding principle. However, despite the best efforts of suicidalists like Kay, this world does not yet exist – indeed, if I am anything like right, it is the kind of world that no-one really wants to bring about.

The hard headed realist turns out to have not noticed most of the reality he is describing, and so, whereas Groucho is tricked by his own tricksiness, Kay turns out to be a cynic mocked by his own cynicism.