Ideology

Musing further about the current crisis of capitalism, why do we need ideologies at all? Surely it’s because we live in huge, complex societies where we need to be able to communicate, reference and invoke ideas and values easily so as to mobilise opinion. That is how power is won, directed or exercised. Ideologies are like totems or badges for doing the trick because we can’t explain everything every time something needs to be done. The trouble is that we have fallen into thinking that the core of any ideology is what it has to say about economic life. It all started some time around the so-called Enlightenment, was hammered home by Marx and was cemented so hard by the Soviet revolution that by mid-century everyone took it for granted. The battle was all about which economic ideology to adopt, no thought that there might be an ideology not based on economics. 

One says: “The Party needs you to do this” and people either take that as a moral injunction or understand that the consequences of disagreement will be severe. Another says “This is what the markets dictate and they know best” and people either take it as a moral injunction or understand that the weight of capital and power is against them. But in each case an ideology has been invoked. There is a whole structure of ideas and values (as well as threats and forces) standing behind these simple statements, values and ideas which people absorb slowly and learn to associate with their own welfare because they are so often repeated, so that in the end they can be referenced by a hint or a suggestion. “This is what we are and what we stand for - surely you don’t disagree with that?”

The US senator who said the Paulson plan was un-American understood perfectly: the pure ideology of free market capitalism is against the very idea. The cold war was fought (or would have been if it had got hot) precisely so that the US should be the sort of country which doesn’t nationalise banks and insurance companies. The senator’s mistake was that he had swallowed the ideology in its older, public form. He should have read the small print. Now that socialism is not a global threat to the US the need for ideological purity seems less important to those in power. 

But ideologies do not have to be based on economics just because Marx said they were. There could be clusters of ideas which guide and embody the values of a society which do not assume that economic relations are all that matter, indeed there have been many such in history. Nationalism and militant religion provide several even today. The unlikely but successful grafting of evangelical Christianity onto Republican economics may even be a partial example, although it may just be a coalition. OK, in practice the strong exploit the weak and the rich make the rules but that does not mean that from the menu of values we can only choose exploitation, revolution, corruption or bureaucracy which is where economic values tend to take us. If people had different values in their lives, values which did not put getting and spending first, leaders would eventually get the message.  

Why bother? It would be great if we could live in an idealised ancient Athens where every citizen understood every issue and policies could be rationally and fully debated until a solution was reached. But it was never like that even in Athens and there is no chance it could be like that now. We need the shorthand of an ideology. Trying to formulate a humane one which treats people as people not primarily as consumers or workers is an urgent task. It won’t solve the current crisis, but it might help with the next one.

Natural selection 2 - financial market turmoil

The turmoil we are seeing in the financial markets is no doubt partly the result of huge bonuses skewing the risk profiles of firms which should have known better, partly the result of excessive and ill-considered securitisation, partly the result of regulators not keeping up. But the underlying cause is surely that people - in other words, we -  have borrowed more than we can pay. The consumer dream which politicians and businessmen alike have told us was real for decades has turned into a nightmare. We all know that if a person lives beyond their means they may eventually suffer the consequences. The same applies to a society and that is what is happening. But no politician is going to say that: it certainly won't win any votes.

One useful consequence of the turmoil may be to explode the surprisingly common idea that markets are somehow wise and know what is good for us. This is a wild extrapolation of the fact that in certain very specific circumstances markets help to allocate resources efficiently. But that only happens when buyers and sellers are free to express rational preferences. Most of the time people are constrained or don't behave rationally and then the market gets garbage as an input, so what do you suppose it gives out?

Markets though are very innovative places - that is usually a strength but sometimes a weakness. Left to themselves, markets follow their own version of natural history. Constant experimentation and innovation mostly doesn’t get far before it is culled by natural selection - if there is no niche or the product doesn’t fit, the innovation will not survive. Survival of the fittest and all that. (How ironic by the way that those who are most fervent about the necessity of such carnage as the price of progress in economic life are so often the same people who cannot accept that it happens in nature. Look at nature as a market and natural selection becomes obvious, no need for an Intelligent Regulator. But I digress.) Occasionally something seems to work so well that its growth becomes exponential, just as when conditions and food supply favour a mutation in nature. So we have market crazes, in stock markets or banking - 1928-9, oil in the early 80’s, sovereign borrowers, commercial real estate, Japan, internet stocks, emerging markets, securitized subprime mortgages to name a few at random. But the one thing sure about exponential growth in nature as in finance is that it stops - it has to or there will be nothing else left! In nature we then have a population crash or extinction, with consequences for every related eco-system. In finance we have a banking crisis. 

The ideology which worships markets never recognises this natural cycle until it is too late. Then it identifies the particular cause, labels it an aberration and so forgets until the next time. Each time bankers or brokers have excellent reasons to explain, quite sincerely, why this is something new and different, this is sound sense. The regulators, bless them, are taken in just as much as the participants, in fact the whole thing depends on shared belief. So each time the regulators are shocked, shocked to learn that such risks have been taken and that the emperor has lost his shirt.

Perhaps none of this mattered so much when economies or indeed markets were isolated one from another. Someone somewhere would have a lean time of it for a while and then recover, or not, but the rest of the world went on as usual. But there is only one market now: loans, shares, commodities, insurance, currencies and even manufactures all interact in one global eco-system. 

It is madness now to think that we can rely on markets to deliver or be guided by some sort of sublime wisdom. Markets never have been about wisdom. Like evolution, they have no aim, good or bad, they just happen. They will bring, as it might be, people who want loans but can’t afford them together with people who want to make money and think they can lay off the risk for less than they should pay. If conditions are right (which usually requires a dose of ignorance somewhere in the system but ignorance is never in short supply) it will all work so well that everyone gets carried away and the bubble will swell until it bursts. This is no aberration: this is exactly how markets work. And then the taxpayer will pick up the bill because not to pick it up would be worse than being stiffed. 

This is what "free market capitalism" has become, perhaps always was. It depends on state hand-outs, not incidentally but intrinsically, fundamentally. The “masters of the universe” are not mighty creators of wealth, they have just found a better way to tap welfare funds. Regulation has its role to prevent petty abuses but is useless to prevent major crises because regulators, like generals, tend to fight yesterday’s battles. The very idea of the free market as a wise and benevolent allocator of resources has been shown to be a sham, a confused and inconsistent ideology. But state control or central planning is not an answer, we know that because socialist ideology went the same way when the Berlin Wall came down. Unless we have grown out of ideology, there is a vacancy.

A summer of Buddhism

I have had the privilege this summer of hearing two of the world’s great spiritual teachers, both Buddhists, who obligingly came to Nottingham, only a short distance from where I live. 

First came the Dalai Lama.  He gave general public talks over a weekend and then three days of careful and scholarly exposition of a text. He spoke in the general talks in an engaging variety of English and for the exposition in Tibetan with a fantastically good interpreter. Having heard only general talks before I was quite surprised at the philosophical subtlety and depth of this second phase. I have some training in philosophy which helped me follow the twists and turns of the argument, albeit on the edge of my comprehension as well as my seat. At more than one point I found myself wondering what the rest of the audience might make of it. But several thousand people sat spellbound for three days.

I have a tendency (very superficial, I’m sure) to think of Tibetan Buddhism as the counterpart in the Buddhist world of Roman Catholicism in the Christian world. It’s not the doctrines, of course, although there is certainly an elaboration in Tibetan Buddhism of venerated figures which some other traditions lack. It is more the richness of the rituals, the robes, the images, the chanting and the incense. And for a few days I enjoyed all that. But the abiding impression I took from these few days was the demeanour of the Dalai Lama himself. Here is a man who has been treated most of his long life as a living Buddha, an object of veneration, the centre of rituals and a high degree of pomp. You might excuse a certain formality, a consciousness of status at least. Yet he appears as a man without conceit or pretension, a man who does what is expected of him but is relaxed, utterly and genuinely humble, dignified but not in the least standing on dignity. And this was apparent just in the way he spoke and moved, it was obvious to everyone in that huge arena. I cannot think of a better endorsement of the path of training and meditation which he stands for. This is a man who walks his talk.

I went to Nottingham again to attend a retreat given by Thich Nhat Hanh, a truly great Zen teacher in the Vietnamese tradition. I had heard him on a previous occasion when thanks to him I understood for the first time the critical importance of mindfulness and the relationship between mindfulness and meditation. That was in St. Andrews, also memorable for the funniest confrontation between material and spiritual practices I ever expect to witness, as 500 people inadvertently walked slowly and meditatively in a crocodile across a footpath in front of the first tee at golf’s holiest shrine.

There was teaching and exposition at this gathering too, but much more emphasis on practices of mindful walking, mindful eating and silence. This was silence “lite”, not all day and only for a few days. Still, it was deeply refreshing even if much longer would be needed to allow such silence to fill the mind. 

Like the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh is a monk through and through and a shining example of what years of mindfulness and simplicity can make of a person. The monastic life “gone forth” has of course been a pillar of Buddhism since the very beginning. There is a danger perhaps that we ordinary mortals, especially in the West, will look on monastics as something like priests, interceding if not with deity then with some other spiritual reality closer to their reach than ours. That I think would be a pity and I am sure not intended by these great teachers. If we regard them as masters of their own minds and emotions and masters of the inner skills of living happily that it sufficient status for any mortal. Oddly perhaps, I found the more austere Zen tradition felt more like religion than the smells and bells of Tibet, although I was assured and I accept that this might have been a misunderstanding on my part. But both are refreshingly alike in emphasizing the inner life and taking responsibility for developing our own happiness, something which the monotheistic religions know about too, of course, but sometimes obscure. 

Labels: buddhism