The two books here, like my previous time capsules, came from the North Queensland Conservation Council garage sale in June. They are more philosophical than the others but motivation drives action so understanding motivation is every bit as important as understanding facts.
(1) Economics
Clive Hamilton: The Mystic Economist (1994)
Many of us know Clive Hamilton through his leadership of The Australia Institute; he wrote The Mystic Economist on his way to that role. It’s as strange as its title. It exposes the utter irrationality of neoclassical economics and argues that only real solution to our deep unhappiness is to assert the centrality of community and spirituality, as exemplified in (e.g.) the environmental movement. His argument can be summarised thus:
- The Enlightenment put rationalism at the pinnacle of human thought and set the individual, rather than community or faith, at the centre of our thinking. Economics is a rigorous application of Enlightenment rationalism to society.
- Neoclassical economics has completely replaced all competing economic theories. Monetarism (aka neoliberalism) is an extreme version of neoclassical economics.
- Its central concept is homo economicus, the rational agent whose free choices make the market perfectly efficient and therefore the only rational way of organising society. Government intervention in the market is therefore inefficient if not totally abhorrent;
BUT - Homo economicus does not exist, since in reality consumers’ choices are never free and rarely rational.
- Neoclassical economic theory depends completely on reducing all values to dollars but this foundation is fatally flawed because there is no way to put a price on ethical, religious or emotional choices. Economics has no way of incorporating non-monetary values, any more than mathematics has a way of incorporating colours. “Is red larger or smaller than 23?” is meaningless within mathematics. “Is a species worth more than a tin mine?” is equally meaningless within economics.
- Consumerism does not meet people’s deepest needs, which are often described in religious terms, so the theory’s only cure for our unhappiness (i.e., consuming more) is a pseudosolution, a fraud, a scam.
- Environmentalism is an excellent example of a response to this failure.
- The only true solution is to (re)assert the importance of community and spirituality.
All of this, of course, is heresy within economics but fairly obviously true to most of us in the real world.
Fortunately, Hamilton has company in the profession: Affluenza (etc) about 20 years ago, and now Joseph Stiglitz with The Road to Freedom (book) (interview). Less fortunately, the myth that economics is a sufficient basis for running society is still dominant. This is where Martin Palmer comes in.
(2) Motivation
Martin Palmer: Dancing to Armageddon (1992)
We like to think we are rational decision-makers but, as Palmer argues persuasively, many of our ‘rational’ decisions are unconsciously based on our stories, the myths we live by. There are the competing myths of Original Sin and human goodness; Utopia/Heaven/the Garden and the Apocalypse; ‘the Devil made me do it’ or accepting our our responsibility; mankind’s ‘dominion’ over creation or his stewardship of it. They are all originally Judeo-Christian but we have transformed them repeatedly to suit our needs.
Palmer points out that we live by stories or myths without being aware that that’s what we are doing. That is, the average person values a policy as being ‘realistic’ or ‘current’, rather than dismissing it as ‘theoretical’ or ‘outdated’, because it happens to align with a myth or set of values so deeply embedded that they are oblivious to it.
His book concludes by saying that one reason our world is a mess is that the stories we’ve been living by are not fit for purpose. I think he is right. Palmer suggests that we drag those myths and values into the light and look at them. Further, that we then correct or reshape the stories so that we are more likely to accept full responsibility for our actions and more able to live with ambiguity and difference.
That’s the main point of his book in the context of the environmental crisis which was already under way when he was writing and is now far worse.
There is, however, more for those interested in philosophy and religion. It’s the sort of thing which would normally appear on my parallel general-interest blog, Words & Images, but splitting the discussion doesn’t seem sensible.
More myths
Palmer’s suggestion that we drag our myths into the light and look at them was not novel. It was Jung’s approach, too, and Freud had an alternate version of that. Outside the health sciences, Joseph Campbell is known for describing the way myths define meaning for us, and more recently Yuval Hariri has been saying that the stories we tell actually enable human beings’ incredible, if flawed, success. And then there’s the idea that we are really Homo narrans, the story-telling ape, not Homo sapiens.
After a lot of analysis of the Judeo-Christian origins of our myths, many of which are Biblical, Palmer argues that the early Christians, particularly Augustine, messed up the original biblical stories and we would be better off going back to the Jewish versions. (That may be so for Christians like himself and most of the western world, although Buddhists are likely to suggest that turning towards the dharma is a better idea.)
Palmer looked at the Jewish texts and said ‘then the Christians reshaped the story’ and ‘then the Muslims reshaped it again’, and so on. If we went further back, rather than forwards, we might see some really fundamental patterns of which the Jewish stories are late iterations. Some of the Buddhist stories may also be (independent) iterations of the same patterns; likewise the Greek, Norse, Native American and African myths, and all the rest.
That wouldn’t invalidate our myths, of course, but suggest that myths which were new 2000 years ago may themselves have been shaped by stories thousands of years older.
At that point our speculations could scatter in so many different directions that we should stop. Stories dissolve into stories, as modern myth-makers well know.
In the beginning … were the words, and they came with a tune. That was how the world was made, how the void was divided, how the lands and the stars and the dreams and the little gods and the animals, how all of them came into the world.
They were sung.
(Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys)
More on the invalidity of neoclassical economics and recent attempts to reform the science: https://johnmenadue.com/sustainability-scientists-challenge-the-dominant-economic-system/
“Knowledge, however, is not enough. Emotion is needed to drive us forward.” – Vincent Serventy, pioneering Australian naturalist.