Читать книгу Homo Empathicus - Alexander Görlach - Страница 9

SHORTLY BEFORE HIS SUDDEN DEATH in June 2009, the sociologist and liberal thinker Ralf Dahrendorf wrote a short essay in which he brought together his thoughts about the financial crisis. Under the title “After the Crisis: Back to the Protestant Ethic?” he presented six theses on the state of the world economy. That the text, composed with a sense of urgency, was already titled “After the Crisis” in summer 2009 shows that at that moment, the full scope, severity, and duration of the crisis had not yet become apparent. The systemic causes for the collapse of Lehman Brothers were nonetheless already coming to light. For the sociologist Dahrendorf, the root of the troubles, which began to widen into a crisis of capitalism while he was writing his essay, is that entire industrial societies had decoupled themselves from the values of capitalism. The sociologist recalled the roots of economic thought, which lie in moral philosophy. Economic activity was once regarded, even by Adam Smith, as one element of a human-centered, well-led life. The economy did not in itself represent a value to which others were to be subordinated. In this school of thought, economic activity is understood rather as an expression of human existence and, simultaneously, as an expression of one’s existence as a person. The economically active human being makes certain values the basis of their action, values that must then also apply to the systems that this person creates. This idea is fundamental, because the “why?” and “to what purpose?” of economic activity are found in the place where individuals come together under conditions of binding rules. The central issue of moral philosophy is the human being, not the market, not capital, not profit. Adam Smith thus wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments about sympathy, the ability to take into consideration another person and their motivations.

Sympathy is therefore a gauge for assessing moral action.

To regard economics as a moral parameter seems almost grotesque in the post-2008 world. This reveals how far the economy and the human being have distanced themselves from each other. Most who hear the claim of a link between morality and economics will have no response to the thesis but incomprehension and dismissive laughter. Dahrendorf presses down on this sore point.

In his essay, he links the time when economic activity was still governed by norms and rules—which were in turn bound by moral philosophy—to the Protestant work ethic. Max Weber summarized what this phrase means. In a work whose complete title is The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the author sees in Protestantism the basis of a willingness to sacrifice temporarily for the sake of a later gain. This sacrifice is required to obtain a bountiful capitalist harvest. Following this Christian economic worldview, the principles of work and thrift constitute paired concepts for rational action. The term “Protestant ethic” has thus become a familiar expression. It combines virtues such as diligence and a love of order as the basis for a good and successful life. In a Christian (in this sense) worldview, economic striving has no inherent value in itself. Rather, it is one aspect that must face the demands of an integral and holistic view of a human life. Put simply, it is not the monetary gain from economic activity that is significant, but how this profit was generated—and for what purpose. Here too, the difference between happiness on the one hand and success on the other also shines through: the ephemeral nature of the moment of happiness cannot pass the critical review of the Protestant work ethic if it was achieved through improper means and does not have any lasting effect.

In this sense, the Protestant ethic can also be a guiding principle for non-Protestants. At the same time—and Dahrendorf points this out—this is also the greatest weakness of the concept, as it can be shown that the virtues Weber speaks of are also applied and valued in Catholic regions. In addition, success stories about entrepreneurship and economic activity, such as the rise of Turkey and the People’s Republic of China, are associated with precisely those principles that the Protestant ethic refers to. Willingness to sacrifice for the sake of a promise and a higher goal is not a unique characteristic of Reformation Christianity.

In addition to sacrifice, hard work, and thrift, virtues such as diligence and orderliness are fundamental for an external manner of conduct that is no longer automatically implied today when someone refers to the workplace and earning a living. Decoupling the spheres of life from each other, combined with the rise of different values or “ethics,” if you will, for each social role one takes on (worker, family man, girlfriend) leads to shortsighted action, as could be seen during the financial crisis: when the metric for an action is determined by a performance indicator, for example, the maximization of profit, paradoxes that Dahrendorf describes may emerge. It is important to draw attention to this connection in order to see that the financial crisis was the result of a drifting apart that had begun long before.

Ultimately, this event also falls under the heading of the “disenchantment of the world.” This too is a term from Max Weber. It refers not only to deserted churches but to all aspects of human life that are no longer seen from an overarching, integral vantage point. Intellectually and morally, the sense for interrelatedness is thus lost. How often did we read that banks had sold toxic products whose contents neither the issuers nor the buyers could even vaguely describe, let alone understand?

Against the backdrop of the perception of an “enchanted world,” many earlier generations would have interpreted the catastrophic collapse of the global finance system as God’s punishment for immoral action. Only, the point of course cannot be to lapse back into a premodern form of religiosity. It is important, however, to draw attention to the connection between virtue and fulfillment. More simply stated, value-driven actions lead to valuable results. Achieving a goal does not stand on its own, but is rather embedded in and fused with answers to questions about the purpose, the “to what end?” and “why?” of human community.

It therefore becomes clear already in the first lines of Dahrendorf’s essay that our present crisis, as already indicated in the introduction, is a moral one: People’s flawed—in religious terminology, guilt-laden—actions led to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the devastations of the financial crisis. It was not an invisible hand that really botched things up—no, it was flesh-and-blood people. What gave the crisis such force was that the active participants in the system granted their preferences absolute priority without permitting any corrective measures or checks and balances. Thus systemic and structural corruption arises from the misconduct of individuals and groups. Consequently, this means that the crisis will not be resolved even when market trends point upward again, but only when the wrongs that led to the crisis have been completely eliminated. So far, this has happened neither on the individual level of personal culpability nor in sufficient manner on the systematic level in the financial industry, at the credit rating agencies or within the banks. For this, politicians are responsible, and so the banking, finance, and sovereign debt crisis turned into a fundamental crisis of democracy. The electoral success of Donald Trump in 2016 is ultimately explained by the fact that while Barack Obama stimulated the economy and provided jobs after 2008 (his stimulus package was worth around $830 billion), legal actions against those who had caused the crisis were pursued neither rigorously nor zealously.

That this connection actually exists will become clearer over the course of this book as I examine the crisis. Participants in liberal democracy ended up in this crisis due to their lack of initiative and insufficient willingness to set the economy aright as a massive corrective measure and to consistently emphasize the values that characterize a true market economy in a holistic economic and financial system oriented around the human being. These values do in fact significantly overlap with those that characterize the Protestant ethic. Already in 2009, Dahrendorf presaged the consequence: the assignment of responsibility entirely to an elite that is altogether rejected by the people and whose actions are met with skepticism. Rules must be negotiated and followed. But rules also live through the evidence of actions, for otherwise they come to be regarded as stale, weak, unreliable, and unworthy of imitation. Here Dahrendorf proves to be a clairvoyant contemporary observer when he presents the following forecast:

Rules do not arise from the non-hierarchical discourse of all concerned. On the contrary, they demand a guarantor that stands behind sanctioning mechanisms. Here lies the great weakness of the Eurozone in its present form, that is, as a bank that is not embedded in a political process (as the German Bundesbank always was). Globally, this means that there will be no “new global economic system” if the United States withdraws from the role of guarantor. The world of Bretton Woods, with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (and at least indirectly the World Trade Organization as well) was in any case an American world. It was not a global rulebook, but rather a rulebook guaranteed by the USA worldwide.

Such rules must be anchored in and have feedback from a value system. The financial crisis was perceived by the Obama administration as a systemic crisis, but not as the crisis of a value system and thus as a moral crisis, and so the demands of the virtues of honesty and integrity were not satisfied. The economic system and the world of finance can be “fixed”; a dishonest and deceitful person, however, must come to a moment of recognition, feel regret, and make amends. To put it in somewhat less religious terms: People, not systems, bear responsibility. Human beings embody ethics and morality; the systems they create reflect their ideological horizons, not the other way around.

The concept of morality has been discredited because it is often equated with preachy “moralizing.” But making reference to morality does not take the place of deeds! And that is just what is omitted when people moralize: concrete action. This concrete action must be directed toward those values essential for the existence of any human community. The members of a community of values constantly and mutually reinforce these values through an ongoing discourse that confronts proven measures with the challenge of expanding and reacting to new questions. A society’s ethos is never finished or complete. It continues to evolve. For a foundation, society then asks the decisive questions: What is just? What is a fair distribution of wealth? What about participation for everyone? What do we as a community want to do with the wealth that is generated? To these questions, the Obama administration would not or could not provide the expected answers.

In this, Barack Obama had company. No politician, no government, no supranational entity in the year 2008 was able to understand and confront the magnitude of the crisis because they looked only at its material aspect without also, and with equivalent care, looking at the spiritual cause of the crisis, which can be found in voracity and greed: avaritia in Latin, one of the seven capital vices, often known as the deadly sins.

According to Christian moral teaching, the capital vices lead to the deadly sins by creating a breeding ground for them. For me, translated into a secular context, deadly sins mean transgressions that make future coexistence between people impossible. No society can survive when arrogance, greed, lust, vindictiveness, excess, envy, and slothfulness of heart seize hold of its members and determine their actions. Looking only at the material aspect of the crisis led to significantly upsetting and offending people’s sense of justice. For although the values of the Protestant ethic may sound old-fashioned, there can be no just economic system without them.

An abridged and—if you will—popular variant of the Protestant work ethic is a veiled Calvinism. It does not make it any easier for all concerned to understand the crisis as a moral crisis. According to this folk Calvinism, if you are successful, then God loves you. Today, material prosperity is the manifestation of success. Achieving prosperity is elevated to a value in itself. And as a consequence, the so-inclined contemporary observer may think that the end in this case justifies all means.

A Protestant ethic understood in this way, however, is not compatible with the biblical witness or with Calvin’s teachings. In my view, there is no theological school that is practically in love with frugality like this folk Calvinism is. Heaven holds treasures—but only for the elect.

God knows the elect. Human beings do not. The roots of the popular sophistry that attempts to discover who will be among the elect reach back to Calvin’s own time. Its secular successor today is the vulgar “the-end-justifies-the-means” posturing that has had such a devastating effect on the world.

The spirit of a Protestant ethic can (again) become a guiding principle for people even in a post-Christian, secular society. After all, the connection between the individual and the group, between the market and society, already exists. To adopt a Protestant ethic does not require embracing a religious confession of faith, but only a dispassionate view of the fragility of human communities. Communities are held together only through the overlaying of each ethos by numerous anecdotes, rhymes, and aphorisms that together form a narrative. Narratives are guides to action in narrative format. They explain, summarize, and amplify the “why?” “to what purpose?” and “to what end?” of a community. It follows almost automatically from what has been said so far that narratives are nothing but smithies where values are hammered out. Swords have already been forged for all participants in a community. It was the “to what end?” that people had lost sight of and that drove the financial sector to the brink of collapse. Or, as Dahrendorf expresses in his essay,

In other words, fully developed capitalism requires elements of the Protestant ethic from people in the workplace, but the exact opposite beyond work, in the world of consumption. The economic system destroys, so to speak, the mentality it requires for itself.

Capitalism, as it has evolved since the Manchester period, requires workers to live according to the very virtues and values that we have described. After the end of the shift, however, other “values” apply: At that point, workers are supposed to consume and spend money. In its final stage, capitalism no longer merely invited people to forsake thrift, but also discredited hard work and sacrifice in favor of an orgy of indebtedness through credit cards on favorable terms and zero-interest consumer credit. “Payment by installment as the Fall of Man,” as Dahrendorf calls it in his essay. The road there led from “savings-based capitalism” to “consumer capitalism.” Pumpkapitalismus (capitalism based on easy credit) is the nadir in this sad progression.

Dahrendorf is not alone in his observation. Contemporaries who shared his brilliance, such as Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno, came to the same conclusion. These two political philosophers of the previous century criticized the rampant consumer society of the 1960s. In this regard it is notable that these two thinkers interpreted societal developments in comparison to the intellectual blueprint of World War II and the Holocaust: consumer society, mass society, totalitarian society. Let it be noted, if only as an aside, that for some interpreters, the digital economy bears the hallmarks of totalitarianism. Opportunities to influence consumers in their various social roles have increased immensely in this new economy. This is illustrated by such spectacular cases as the Cambridge Analytica scandal in the wake of the election of Donald Trump as US president.

The intellectual path of Arendt, Adorno, and Dahrendorf proceeds from mass society, which became a topic of discussion in the nineteenth century in the context of industrialization, to postwar consumer society, to the present-day society of easy credit whose bell tolled on that September day in 2008. In this 150-year process, the perception of the individual shifted from their primary role as a citizen to their role as a consumer. A person’s position has thus been increasingly decoupled from the agora and the res publica. Human beings no longer find themselves in a marketplace of political interaction, but rather in the parking lot of a gigantic shopping mall. That, of course, does something to their self-image. You become a consumer through the power of your wallet, while you are a citizen by birth. In this context, Dahrendorf shows that the concept of the citizen, the idea of citizenship, is among the central hallmarks of political modernity and the great achievements of Western philosophy. Citizens can never lose their citizenship. Access to the world of consumption, however, is granted only as long as you remain willing to buy something—that is, willing to buy, not able to buy. Anyone who wants to go into debt for the sake of participating in consumer society is cordially invited to do so. The financial crisis ruthlessly laid bare how much willingness there was to be drawn in by this message.

Dahrendorf refrained from speaking of the crisis as a moral crisis. This is astonishing, because the Protestant ethic he promotes consists of ideas and imperatives of action that place it in the canon of moral philosophy. At the same time, the framework of Dahrendorf’s thought is a secular one. He does state correctly that sacrifice for the sake of a greater good ultimately can only be perfectly proclaimed by religion. For in this case, the sacrifice may last an entire earthly lifetime in order to obtain a life in Heaven. Therefore, in response to the question he posed to himself as to whether the Protestant ethic, which may have inspired the origins of capitalism, would now, due to the crisis, return and enjoy a starring role, Dahrendorf answered in the negative. His vision is of a values-based capitalism, which he terms the “new social market economy.”

Instead of speaking of narratives that express societies’ moral ideas, Ralf Dahrendorf speaks of “mentalities” in his essay:

The old term is meant to indicate that there are prevailing values, attitudes that set the tone for people.… In fact, these are guiding, behavior-forming cultures that begin among minorities but then take hold of entire societies.

Here, too, the sociologist looks to the relevant guidelines for action. In his view, narratives that are also perceived as “old” and derive from the field of religious or national mythology actually provide what is required to complete the image in order to comprehensively illuminate all the reasons that led to the crisis. But the social scientist Dahrendorf looks first to the quantitative aspect, to what people implement and make measurable through their actions. Complementary to this, narratives provide the qualitative aspect, everything that leads to sentences like “Capitalism is …,” “To be German means …,” “We …,” or “We’ve always done it like that.” No such statements, whether they be quantitative or qualitative, can stand on their own. Together, the empirical and the normative have the necessary force to explain phenomena and formulate solutions and answers to puzzles and questions.

Dahrendorf anticipated the negative long-term effects that the 2008 crisis would have not only on the global economy and the world of finance but also on politics. It would not be so simple to mend the breach between elites and their society. If the checks and balances that had been put in place were insufficient to prevent the crisis; if politics and the judicial system ultimately fail to bring the culprits to justice; if the banks’ malaise is nationalized while simultaneously, to deal with the crisis, pensions are reduced and schools go unrenovated, then, as Dahrendorf expresses in his essay, a fury erupts among the people that can take the form of a vote for radical candidates at the ballot box or violence in the streets:

Behind such eruptions, there is the diffuse anger of numerous people confronting a largely incomprehensible worsening of their living conditions and expectations. Usually this includes a dose of fear as well; but this is always accompanied by a feeling of powerlessness. At that point, the search for culprits is not far off. The bankers should be pilloried, if they cannot be tarred and feathered or broken on the wheel! And preferably the politicians along with them! How can it be that the culprits slip off to Italy with a pension of 20 million euros, while the number of unemployed rises every month and many people have to do without things that have become dear to them? Classical party politics are replaced by a diffuse popular anger.

Today, ten years later, we can only nod vigorously. Lord Ralf Dahrendorf, proved right. However, neither he nor others in the ten years since his sudden death have ultimately had an answer to how people’s fears of an uncertain future could be rationally addressed.