Every Value Has Its Price
Yesterday I happened across this piece by Lawrence Mishel in the American Prospect, talking about the moral blind spot of free markets, then last night I saw “Super Size Me,” the documentary about the negative consequences of junk food. Both are aspects of the same question: the relationship between traditional human needs and values, and the impersonal dynamics that govern economic relationships in capitalist economies.
Several generations ago, these issues were fairly well-understood. Marxists, for example, posed a systematic critique whose main points are not substantially invalidated by their ideology’s failure to provide a better solution. Modernists also concerned themselves with the alienation caused by increasing urbanization, industrialization and growth of mass markets. Some celebrated it; others fretted about its dehumanizing effects. But today, the coherence to the argument has been lost. We can only look at facets of the problem – obesity, gun violence, falling educational standards, rising fundamentalism – and grope around for cause-and-effect, but we lack the explanatory power of a big-picture theory, even a flawed one like Marxism.
The alignment on the right between free market advocates and traditional-values conservatism makes this especially difficult for the discourse, because talk about “values” has come to be equated with divisive social issues like abortion and gay marriage, or cast in exclusively religious terms. It seems that while the division between Church and State has diminished, a wall between Church and Market has arisen. There is no longer a universally-recognized moral language to denounce, for example, the effect that Wal-Mart or McDonald’s has on the values of exurban America, because these are economic institutions, not only sanctioned but positively celebrated by our free-market system. If you talk about economic inequality or class as a moral issue, you begin immediately to sound like some kind of retrograde socialist or wild-eyed 60s flower-child with an anti-American antipathy to the manifest wonders of capitalism. Systematic critique has been pushed to the margins, in some cases with justification, but the result leaves the field open to unscrupulous exploiters with no line of defense for common humanity.
What’s been lost is a sense of civil virtue and recognition of the value of community. This is not by accident. It’s the result of a deliberate ideological campaign by free-market conservatives to undermine the social assumptions that lead to public policies such as corporate regulation, progressive taxation and redistributive government programs, which they oppose on principle. At some point, economic conservatives knew they would continue to lose these debates on political grounds so long as citizens felt that their rights and responsibilities as members of a community entitled them to set boundaries on individual and corporate behavior, and to appropriate a share of private wealth to provide for those at the bottom. The solution was to valorize individuals over communities – a common theme in libertarian-conservative ideology – and position the notion of the “free market” as some kind of abstract force of nature, rather than a human institution subject to human rules and in service to human goals.
That this has largely been accomplished is not a complete surprise. The free market has many benefits and has brought rising prosperity and the benefits of innovation to vastly improve quality of life in all kinds of ways. Government efforts to regulate its activities often have unintended consequences. The changes it forces on communities are often for the better. Occasionally, its internal self-correcting mechanisms work as intended. Defending it, therefore, is not an intellectually-disreputable position, or even necessarily an immoral one.
The problem is that to defend it down the line, you need to downplay a lot of human suffering and ignore a raft of indubitably negative social consequences. “Super Size Me,” to cite only one example, paints an alarming picture of the impact of the food industry on, for example, the education system. Kids are fed junk food in schools, which contributes not just to obesity, but likely to attention and discipline problems, depression and other health issues.
It’s plain obvious, but somehow, we have lost the ability to see that eating shit shaped to resemble food out of a paper bag every day is not a normal human activity. Good, honest church-going folks have no problem putting their neighbors out of work and driving local businesses under by shopping at Wal-Mart to save a few dollars. The moral climate that would force them to face the human consequences of their choices no longer exists. It’s been replaced with a reverence for markets and a validation of individual gratification over community that borders on the religious, and certainly dovetails with the patriotic.
To regain this ground, we need to start at the bottom. Piecemeal attacks on the manifestations of corporate abuse are bound to be ineffective because large institutions are well-positioned to outlast outrage. We won’t be able to effectively confront the forces that dehumanize and immiserate us in the name of higher profits until we can reclaim the language of values and start talking about these issues in ways that universalize the problems and empower people to retake control.
We don’t need to embrace Marxism or deny entirely the benefits of market capitalism, but we do need to bring the discussion down from the ennobling abstractions of “individual liberty” and “the invisible hand” that delegitimize the actions of communities who try to mitigate the negative impacts of corporatism on their people and cherished institutions. Last week, Hillary Clinton mentioned the notion of “the common good” in a speech, and conservative pundits nearly went apoplectic. The same people who are badgering Catholic prelates to deny communion to pro-choice politicians are mute when the Church talks, with commendable passion and moral clarity, about social and economic justice. These are good beginnings. We don’t need all the answers right now, but we do need to start asking the right questions again.
10:42:50 AM 
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