Take Dr. David C. Korten, for instance, a Stanford University Business School graduate who went on to work for the US Agency for International Developent (USAID). After more than a decade of work at the agency, Korten grew increasingly disillusioned with official aid policies. He could no longer deny that the government of the United States “was actively promoting -- both at home and abroad -- the very policies” that were “deepening” regional deprivation: “For the world to survive, the United States must change.”
After writing his seminal book, When Corporations Ruled the World, Korten was quickly recognized around the world as a leader in “the movement of movements”; and he has followed it up with a series of books and educational programmes aimed at generating awareness of the dangers of globalization. One of Korten’s most intriguing observations, however, is his contention that behind the global economic system is not merely an ethical and ontological philosophy of life and human nature, but what borders on being a fundamentalist theology in which unlimited profit is the sole criterion of value:
“In the quest for economic growth, the free market ideology has been embraced around the world with the fervour of a fundamentalist religious faith. Money is its sole measure of value and its practices, advance policies that are deepening social and environmental disintegration everywhere. The economic profession serves as its priesthood, it champions values that demean the human spirit. It assumes an imaginary world divorced from reality and it is restructuring our institutions of governance in ways that make our most fundamental problems more difficult to resolve yet to question its doctrine has become virtual heresy.”
Korten’s indictment of free market ideology has important implications. But to understand them, we need to first make clear what we mean by “values”. And to do that, we also need to understand how “values” are embedded in social systems.
Any given social system is linked to its fundamental conception of nature, and a corresponding value-system. Energy is the bedrock of society. The way a society derives and makes use of energy defines its relationship to nature, because nature’s resources are our source of energy. In turn, the way a society exploits natural resources, produces, consumes and functions, is therefore inseparable from the way a society conceptualizes its relationship to nature, the way a society views both itself and nature. In other words, any given social system consists not only of a set of particular social, political and economic structures, but rests on a body of (often implicit) assumptions about human nature, the way nature works, and the way humankind ought to relate with nature. It is within these assumptions that one finds a set of (equally implicit) values about what is good and bad for human life.
This is where we get specifically to the notion of a moral or ethical “value”. One of the most interesting attempts to get to grips with the value-system underlying the neo-liberal politico-economic order is from the Canadian philosopher John McMurtry. Professor Emeritus-Elect at the University of Guelph in Ontario, McMurtry came to philosophy after a rich and diverse career as a professional football player, print and television journalist, academic English teacher, world-traveller and a student of Eastern philosophy. Selected by the United Nations as organizing editor of the philosophy volume of its Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems, he is a leading intellectual voice among those critical of the global market system, a system which, he argues, is deeply destructive precisely because of its deification of the market.
Moral values may well be human constructs. But they are more than just constructs. They are categories constructed to differentiate between the usefulness of different kinds of social behaviour. Value, in other words, is tied to action. But the essential core of the concept of “value” is exactly that: worth. Something is valuable if it’s worth doing. But if it’s not worth it, it’s not valuable. So value is all about worth. An ethical value is thus a category that implies certain types of action are intrinsically worth doing. Moral values therefore designate special kinds of social behaviour as having this sort of intrinsic worth.
All social systems are tied to values, because they encourage certain types of behaviour while discouraging and prohibiting others. So why certain types of behaviour are encouraged and others discouraged depends on the nature of that specific social system; it depends on the way that social system conceives human beings and nature; it depends, in summary, on a particular conception of life and nature – whether or not that conception is unconscious and implicit. There is therefore an objective dimension to values – which is whether they work or not, whether they lead to forms of behaviour that generate well-being, or do the opposite. Values are more likely be useful, if they reflect reality – human nature, the nature of the world, and the way their mutual interrelationship.
One of Professor McMurtry’s most well-known and disturbing areas of focus is his analysis of global markets as an ethical system. He points out that the global economic regime is based on “an unexamined and absolutist value system.”
Capitalist scientific technology, transnational trade apparatuses, Anglo-American wars and the intensifying suppression of civil liberties are all symptoms of a “new totalitarianism cumulatively occupying the world and propelling civil and ecological breakdowns.” Conventional neo-liberal economic theory is supposed to be value-free, objective, scientific. But it isn’t, at all:
“To the contrary, the positions of a ‘value-free’ or positivist economics still presuppose as given and self-evident the value system of private property rights, the pursuit of self-interest and profit, and the monetized production and exchange of needed goods as the foundational, regulating norms of their analyses…. The principle of self-serving for money accumulation in all conditions, with no constraining obligation to one’s own society or to use-value production, has become the overriding, abstract imperative of market doctrine. The promotion of the public interest, on the other hand, has become a token mantra with no demonstrated connection to money self-maximization.”
Like David Korten, John McMurtry sees in this free market ideology subtle but deeply engrained fundamentalist strains that elevate materialist market principles of self-interest and profit maximization to unquestionable levels of God-like status: “We find that government and their leadership now assume that the value system of the global market is to be the proper order to social organization and that societies must be made to adapt to this order as the needs and demands of the market requires. The market is not now seen as a structure to serve society, rather society is seen as an aggregate of resources to serve the global market.” He continues, “No traditional religion had declared more absolutely the universality and necessity of its laws and commandments than the proponents of the global market doctrine.”
So the question is, how do we overcome this hidden theology of market fundamentalism that is so deeply embedded in our dysfunctional social systems? Beyond our activism on the pressing issues of our times, this needs to be at the forefront of our thinking, as a matter of urgency.
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