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.
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