The Things That Drive Us: The separation of economy and society is disadvantageous to both.
I’m currently reading Thomas Sedlacek’s “Economics of Good and Evil.” The Czech economist takes his readers back to the early days of human trading. His narrative follows a long arc that begins by examining the role the economy played during the time of the Mesopotamians or in ancient Greece. Sedlacek looks at the past through the prism of today. Our entrenched economic paradigms - the “invisible hand” of the market, the teachings of Keynes - seem at once too towering and too inadequate to address the challenges we face. Against the narrowing of economic imagination, Sedlacek raises the fundamental question of good and evil - not in a moralistic sense, but as a grand narrative of economic history.
For those who wrote (and listened to) the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, forests were places of danger while cities provided security. The periphery of the city constituted the border between good and evil. At the beginning of the story, the hero Gilgamesh builds a wall to fortify the city and protect its inhabitants. The forest is seen as evil, and applause erupts when Gilgamesh begins to cut down the trees. He’s logging not just for economic gain but to defeat the evil spirits that reside in the forest. Permeating through the epic is a mythical, divine conception of nature that, as Sedlacek tells it, only vanished with the advent of Judaism. To the Abrahamic forefathers, nature was constituted in the physical and visible environment. It was a part of God’s creation, but not divine in itself. It offered the resources that man needed to survive - another piece in the economic puzzle.
At this point in the narrative, the question of good and evil entered the economic realm. With the advent of economic thinking, man suddenly became the center of the debate. Responsibility for actions, and for the consequences of these actions, was’t outsourced to a divine authority anymore, but rested with each individual. The contest between good and evil thus manifests itself as convulsions of our inner conscience as we grapple with the burden of responsibility. It’s interesting to note that the Garden of Eden is always a well-tended garden in the Jewish tradition. Work is required to maintain its perfection, and thus becomes an intrinsic element of human self-awareness.
The Greek philosophers subsequently examined what constituted the Good Life. Was it the maximization of utility or the adherence to established norms? A permissive interpretation of hedonism posits the pursuit of personal utility as the highest goal, and equates it with the Good.