Wednesday 10 December 2008

Competition

Competition in the market puts people under great pressure to break the ordinary rules of decent conduct and then to produce good reasons for doing so. It is these rationalizations - the endless self-deception necessary to meet the bottom line and still feel okay about it - that corrode moral character. But this isn't in itself an argument against the free market. Think about the ways that democratic politics also corrodes moral character. Competition for political power puts people under great pressure - to shout lies at public meetings, to make promises they can't keep, to take money from shady characters, to compromise principles that shouldn't be compromised. All this has to be defended somehow, and moral character doesn't survive the defense - at least, it doesn't survive intact. But these obvious flaws don't constitute an argument against democracy.To be sure, economic and political competition also produce cooperative projects of many different sorts - partnerships, companies, parties, unions. Within these projects, empathy, mutual respect, friendship, and solidarity are developed and reinforced. People learn the give-and-take of collective deliberation. They stake out positions, take risks, and forge alliances. All these processes build character. But because the stakes are so high, participants in these activities also learn to watch and distrust one another, to conceal their plans, to betray their friends, and - we know the rest, from Watergate to Enron. They become "characters" in familiar stories of corporate corruption, political scandal, defrauded stockholders, and deceived voters. Let the buyer beware! Let the voter beware!Is there a way of making political and economic competition safe for moral men and women? It certainly can't be made entirely safe. Free markets and free elections are inherently dangerous for all participants, not only because the wrong people, products, and policies may win out, but also because the cost of winning for the right people, products, and policies may be too high. We don't, however, treat the dangers of markets and elections in the same way. We work hard to set limits on political competition and to open politics to the participation of more or less moral mortals. Politicians aren't widely recognized as moral exemplars these days, in part because they live so much in the media eye, and every sin, every foible, is broadcast to the world.Nevertheless, constitutional democracies have succeeded in stopping the worst forms of political corruption. We are free from the whims of tyrants, from aristocratic arrogance, from repression, arbitrary arrest, censorship, fixed courtrooms, and show trials - not so free that we don't need vigilantly to defend our freedom, but free enough to organize the defense. Politicians who lie too often or break too many promises tend to lose elections. No, the worst corruptions of our public life come not from politics but from the economy, and they come because we don't have similar constitutional limits on market behavior.Perhaps the most important achievement of constitutional democracy has been to take the desperation out of politics. Losing power doesn't mean getting shot. Supporters of the losing side are not enslaved or exiled. The stakes in the power struggle are lower than they used to be, which greatly improves the options for moral conduct. The modern welfare state is supposed to do the same thing for the economy: it constitutionalizes the market by setting limits on what can be lost. But in fact, in the United States at least, we don't have much in the way of market constitutionalism. For too many people, the competitive struggle is pretty close to desperate. What is at risk is the survival of a family, healthcare for the children, a decent education, dignity in old age. And risks like those don't leave a lot of room for morality. Decent people will act decently, and most people are decent when they can be. Still, the effects of the struggle are steadily corrosive.Another achievement of constitutionalism has been to set limits on the political power of the most powerful men and women. They must live with countervailing powers, opposition parties and movements,periodic elections, a free and sometimes critical press. The primary point of these restraints is to minimize the harm that already corroded characters can do. But some of our politicians actually internalize the restraints, and that is an important character-building process.Market constitutionalism would set similar limits on the economic power of the wealthiest men and women. But again, obviously, we don't have much of a market constitution. Restraints on economic power are very weak; the countervailing power of labor unions has been greatly reduced; the tax system is increasingly regressive; the regulation of banking, investment, pricing policies, and pension funds is virtually nonexistent. The arrogance of the economic elite these last few decades has been astonishing. And it stems from a clear-eyed view that they can do just about anything they want to do. That kind of power, as Lord Acton wrote years ago, is deeply corrupting. The corruption extends to politics, where the influence of money, earned without restraint in an unrestrained market, undermines the political constitution. You need money, let's say, to run a political campaign (for a good candidate or a good cause), and here is someone - a banker, a corporate giant - who has a lot of money and is offering it for a price, for policies or legislation that will improve his market position. The other side is taking money like that, as much as it can get. Whose character will resist corrosion now?Some might argue: isn't this the way character is tested? If market constitutionalism limits the power of wealth and the welfare state reduces the fear of poverty, don't we make virtue too easy? Easier, maybe, but never very easy. Consider again the political analogy: do we make virtue too easy when we deny Presidents tyrannical power and when we protect the powerless from persecution? The corrosive pressures of electoral competition don't go away. We set limits on those pressures out of respect for human frailty. And if we need to do that with regard to governments, we surely need to do it with regard to markets.
Michael Walzer is professor emeritus in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He is a contributing editor of the New Republic, co-editor of Dissent, and the author, most recently, of Thinking Politically.

Critics rightfully grasp that the free market undermines the traditional, local arrangements that people depend on to teach and sustain morality. Consider especially the experience of children. They first learn morality from their families, with whom they are most emotionally bonded. Love attaches children to moral conventions and arouses essential moral emotions like sympathy and guilt. In a preindustrial society, these moral habits are further reinforced by the tribe or the village, as well as by religious institutions and folk tales. The developing child is surrounded by a kind of conspiracy of moral teachers, demonstrating lessons of character by word and (less reliably) by deed.Market economies weaken this cultural conspiracy in three powerful ways. First, they introduce novelty, which challenges established cultural habits and moral verities. Second, they stir up individual desire in ways that can easily weaken the self-discipline and moral obligations that make free markets flourish. (As the sociologist Daniel Bell famously argued, markets can end up cannibalizing their own moral infrastructure.) And third, as they advance, market economies become more likely to treat the yet-to-be-socialized child as an autonomous, adult-like actor rather than as an immature dependent. They often turn the pliant student of moral obligations into a skeptical, even resistant peer.Two of the most influential new products of the 20th century, the automobile and the television, perfectly illustrate the market's potential to dilute moral consensus and personal loyalties. By exporting insiders and importing outsiders, the car reduced the sway of the local community and its moral requirements. By taking fathers to jobs far from home, it accelerated the separation of work from family life. Indeed, market evolution was the direct cause of the "separate spheres" that placed mothers at the helm of domestic life and fathers at a distant workplace.The car also scattered family members (uncles and aunts to California, grandparents to Florida) who previously might have buttressed the child's developing moral sense. It increased opportunities for anonymity, which made it easier to escape shame and embarrassment over violations of moral behavior, and allowed individuals, especially teenagers, to avoid the judgmental eyes of adults. In the early 20th century, a juvenile court judge, noting the unexpected use to which young people were putting the new invention, grumbled that the horseless carriage was nothing more than a "brothel on wheels."The cultural disruption wrought by television, and particularly by advertising, has been even more troubling than that of the car. Before the advent of the small screen, families could expect to do most of their moralizing work safe from commercial intrusions. Family life could be imagined as a "haven in a heartless world," in the words of the sociologist Christopher Lasch. Salesmen may have come to River City, but they had to knock on doors and ply their band uniforms and instruments to domestic gatekeepers, usually mothers. Television allowed the salesmen to push past parents and sit down right next to the unmoralized child, tempting him with pleasures against which he had few defenses. More generally, television uses fantasies of revenge, violent mayhem, sexual license, and material excess to lure viewers, young and old.Of course, today the Internet is usurping television's long-held status as the chief sponsor of hedonism, materialism, and anarchic egotism. If broadcast television had censors who clumsily expressed a cultural consensus about acceptable public speech, the World Wide Web knows no bounds. Moreover, just as the automobile gave provincial people new opportunities for anonymity, the Internet allows children to escape the limitations of their status. Nothing better symbolizes the market's penchant for turning the child into a pseudo-adult, for undermining parental authority, and for fostering shame-escaping anonymity, than the 13-year-old girl arranging a rendezvous with a 40-year-old man on an Internet chat room while her parents assume she is doing her homework.But all the news is not bad. Even though the market has undermined the power of community norms and loaded sole responsibility for moral teaching onto the shoulders of individual parents, all the while bombarding kids with the likes of Grand Theft Auto and Paris Hilton, it has yet to bring us Gomorrah. In the United States, indicators of juvenile moral health, like rates of violence and promiscuity and rebellious attitudes toward adults, have declined in recent decades even as the electronic media have increased the market's reach.Why? One reason is that middle-class parents have reacted to the market's siren calls by intensifying their watchfulness. Their efforts have sometimes been ridiculed, and for good reason. But hyper-parenting is an understandable response to the dislocations that come with free-market innovation and actually attests to the resilience, at least among the middle class, of the bourgeois family, which evolved in response to capitalism. In communities where mothers have gone to work, extended families have moved away, and strangers and cars roam, parents continue to supervise their children through the use of cell phones, extracurricular programs, surrogates like tutors and coaches, and, alas, Internet spying programs and even GPS devices.The relative moral health of the young has also been bolstered, it must be said, by the free market's relentless encouragement of self-discipline. To succeed in today's knowledge economy, young people understand that they must excel at school. Despite the temptations of consumerism, middle-class and aspiring immigrant children grow up knowing that education is crucial to maintaining or improving their status and that competition in the knowledge economy is keen. In an earlier day, children imbued with the Protestant ethic did their chores and minded their p's and q's. Today's kids go to cram schools and carry 40-pound backpacks.So does this mean that critics of the market have been proved wrong? Not exactly. The free market's celebration of hedonism and autonomy has had its predicted effect on those with less cultural capital - the poor and, more recently, the working class. In low-income communities, the assault on norms of self-restraint and fidelity in personal relations has undermined both the extended and the nuclear family. In many such communities, divorce and out-of-wedlock births are becoming the norm. The work of moralizing the next generation in an advanced market economy is difficult under the best conditions. For single mothers in low-income communities, where schools are chaotic and responsible males are few and far between, it may be close to impossible.
Kay S. Hymowitz is the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal. Her most recent book is Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age.Read more Download PDF Back to top Email
Critics rightfully grasp that the free market undermines the traditional, local arrangements that people depend on to teach and sustain morality. Consider especially the experience of children. They first learn morality from their families, with whom they are most emotionally bonded. Love attaches children to moral conventions and arouses essential moral emotions like sympathy and guilt. In a preindustrial society, these moral habits are further reinforced by the tribe or the village, as well as by religious institutions and folk tales. The developing child is surrounded by a kind of conspiracy of moral teachers, demonstrating lessons of character by word and (less reliably) by deed.Market economies weaken this cultural conspiracy in three powerful ways. First, they introduce novelty, which challenges established cultural habits and moral verities. Second, they stir up individual desire in ways that can easily weaken the self-discipline and moral obligations that make free markets flourish. (As the sociologist Daniel Bell famously argued, markets can end up cannibalizing their own moral infrastructure.) And third, as they advance, market economies become more likely to treat the yet-to-be-socialized child as an autonomous, adult-like actor rather than as an immature dependent. They often turn the pliant student of moral obligations into a skeptical, even resistant peer.Two of the most influential new products of the 20th century, the automobile and the television, perfectly illustrate the market's potential to dilute moral consensus and personal loyalties. By exporting insiders and importing outsiders, the car reduced the sway of the local community and its moral requirements. By taking fathers to jobs far from home, it accelerated the separation of work from family life. Indeed, market evolution was the direct cause of the "separate spheres" that placed mothers at the helm of domestic life and fathers at a distant workplace.The car also scattered family members (uncles and aunts to California, grandparents to Florida) who previously might have buttressed the child's developing moral sense. It increased opportunities for anonymity, which made it easier to escape shame and embarrassment over violations of moral behavior, and allowed individuals, especially teenagers, to avoid the judgmental eyes of adults. In the early 20th century, a juvenile court judge, noting the unexpected use to which young people were putting the new invention, grumbled that the horseless carriage was nothing more than a "brothel on wheels."The cultural disruption wrought by television, and particularly by advertising, has been even more troubling than that of the car. Before the advent of the small screen, families could expect to do most of their moralizing work safe from commercial intrusions. Family life could be imagined as a "haven in a heartless world," in the words of the sociologist Christopher Lasch. Salesmen may have come to River City, but they had to knock on doors and ply their band uniforms and instruments to domestic gatekeepers, usually mothers. Television allowed the salesmen to push past parents and sit down right next to the unmoralized child, tempting him with pleasures against which he had few defenses. More generally, television uses fantasies of revenge, violent mayhem, sexual license, and material excess to lure viewers, young and old.Of course, today the Internet is usurping television's long-held status as the chief sponsor of hedonism, materialism, and anarchic egotism. If broadcast television had censors who clumsily expressed a cultural consensus about acceptable public speech, the World Wide Web knows no bounds. Moreover, just as the automobile gave provincial people new opportunities for anonymity, the Internet allows children to escape the limitations of their status. Nothing better symbolizes the market's penchant for turning the child into a pseudo-adult, for undermining parental authority, and for fostering shame-escaping anonymity, than the 13-year-old girl arranging a rendezvous with a 40-year-old man on an Internet chat room while her parents assume she is doing her homework.But all the news is not bad. Even though the market has undermined the power of community norms and loaded sole responsibility for moral teaching onto the shoulders of individual parents, all the while bombarding kids with the likes of Grand Theft Auto and Paris Hilton, it has yet to bring us Gomorrah. In the United States, indicators of juvenile moral health, like rates of violence and promiscuity and rebellious attitudes toward adults, have declined in recent decades even as the electronic media have increased the market's reach.Why? One reason is that middle-class parents have reacted to the market's siren calls by intensifying their watchfulness. Their efforts have sometimes been ridiculed, and for good reason. But hyper-parenting is an understandable response to the dislocations that come with free-market innovation and actually attests to the resilience, at least among the middle class, of the bourgeois family, which evolved in response to capitalism. In communities where mothers have gone to work, extended families have moved away, and strangers and cars roam, parents continue to supervise their children through the use of cell phones, extracurricular programs, surrogates like tutors and coaches, and, alas, Internet spying programs and even GPS devices.The relative moral health of the young has also been bolstered, it must be said, by the free market's relentless encouragement of self-discipline. To succeed in today's knowledge economy, young people understand that they must excel at school. Despite the temptations of consumerism, middle-class and aspiring immigrant children grow up knowing that education is crucial to maintaining or improving their status and that competition in the knowledge economy is keen. In an earlier day, children imbued with the Protestant ethic did their chores and minded their p's and q's. Today's kids go to cram schools and carry 40-pound backpacks.So does this mean that critics of the market have been proved wrong? Not exactly. The free market's celebration of hedonism and autonomy has had its predicted effect on those with less cultural capital - the poor and, more recently, the working class. In low-income communities, the assault on norms of self-restraint and fidelity in personal relations has undermined both the extended and the nuclear family. In many such communities, divorce and out-of-wedlock births are becoming the norm. The work of moralizing the next generation in an advanced market economy is difficult under the best conditions. For single mothers in low-income communities, where schools are chaotic and responsible males are few and far between, it may be close to impossible.

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