HOWARD RICHARDS
A poster publicizing Social Security benefits. Franklin D Roosevelt Library website LINK
Those ideals –without which markets cannot work, and therefore cannot do either the good or the bad that markets do -- were packaged, and are still packaged, as “freedom.” When you open the freedom package and find the market, you also find the loss of some old traditions that – evaluated in terms of meeting needs-- deserved to be kept in one form or another.
At the heart of the 18th revolution in ethics was the transfer of the criterion of moral legitimacy from God to man.15 Human freedom, not God’s will, became the major premise of the new logic for deciding what was right and what was wrong. If humans chose it of their own free will, it was right. But the net outcome was not always in Ed and Hazel’s favour. When they left their faith community, and then failed to sell their labour power in the labour market because they found no willing buyers, the basic legal framework of modernity did not meet their needs. Although Ed and Hazel were not wrong to put their faith in Darwin’s theory of evolution and in science generally, they –like the 18th century philosophes—underestimated the achievements of traditional cultures. They did not anticipate that science itself –applying the theory of evolution rather than denying it- would come to understand culture in all its variety and flexibility–not the ethnocentric juridical construction of homo economicus-- as defining the human species. 16 As of 2017, ancient wisdom has fared rather better in the judgments of the high courts of scientific objectivity than Ed and Hazel expected. 17 The claims of 18th century jurisprudence and economics to be grounded in natural reason have fared rather worse than Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine expected.18 As it has turned out, I myself have had occasion to experience some of the good things that ancient wisdom in its 19th century Mormon version has going for it. When my parents separated, my brother and I were placed for a time in a foster home. My foster parents were Mormons. My foster father was unemployed. Every week a large cardboard box of merchandise arrived at the house, full of food and other necessities branded “Deseret.” “Deseret” is the Mormons’ in-house label for goods made in church-run enterprises. The church was taking care of its own. Now I am in a position to answer my two questions. Why did this happen?
The answer to the first question is that fascism is making a comeback because it is the normal shadow of the basic cultural structure.19 The fascists lost World War II, but the liberal culture whose civil ideal is economic man for the most part continued unabated after VE day and VJ day. As time wore on the New Deal in the USA and social democracy in other countries proved to be unsustainable © Howard Richards
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