It's now come out (via Sol Stern in City Journal, reprising his exposé of two years ago -- MUST READ) that while back in the '60s, Weather Undergrounder William Ayers only bombed buildings, now he blows minds. That is to say, he's a prominent education professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, who teaches budding K-12 teachers to “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a
teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher
teaching for social justice and liberation.” Writes Stern:
One of Ayers’s major themes is that the American public school system
is nothing but a reflection of capitalist hegemony. Thus, the mission
of all progressive teachers is to take back the classrooms and turn
them into laboratories of revolutionary change. [...]
(Screaming irony alert: Ayers' dad was the CEO of Commonwealth Edison, Chicagoland's massive electric utility. Dedicating your life to destroying the hand that fed you is, you see, the ultimate luxury. It enfolds a certain hidden assumption that you're not going to succeed -- and that even if you did, you'd still be one of the Nomenklatura, so your quality of life would not suffer. Quite the contrary.)
(More screaming irony: Wikipedia, which I do not trust, reports that "Frank Clark, a registered Federal Lobbyist working on behalf of
Commonwealth Edison, is registered with the Barack Obama campaign as a
bundler." Meanwhile, the ComEd website states that Frank M. Clark, who started out in ComEd's mailroom, has gone from being the company's first African American president to being its chairman and CEO. Evidently this is the same Frank Clark, and Obama has done oblique legislative favors for ComEd. Should be reassuring to those who fear that Obama hates capitalism -- unless, of course, he's one of those feeding-hand-biting favorite sons, too.)
But I digress.
Ayers’s influence on what is taught in the nation’s public schools
is likely to grow in the future. Last month, he was elected vice
president for curriculum of the 25,000-member American Educational
Research Association (AERA), the nation’s largest organization of
education-school professors and researchers. [...]
AERA already does a great deal to advance the social-justice
teaching agenda in the nation’s schools and has established a Social
Justice Division with its own executive director. With Bill Ayers now
part of the organization’s national leadership, you can be sure that it
will encourage even more funding and support for research on how
teachers can promote left-wing ideology in the nation’s classrooms.
I find this extremely sinister (pun not intended, but welcomed), and it bears discussion, but it's not what I want to discuss, because its creepiness seems self-evident to me. What I want to hold up side by side are the Weatherrads' insistence that CAPITALISM IS EVIL, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the conservative counterassertion that CAPITALISM IS GOOD. Here's Dr. Sanity last year, newly linked by Sisu:
[S]ocialism's "social justice" advocates have taken over our k-12 education system and are determinedly undermining capitalism [...]
This is yet another example of a pervasive intellectual trend in the
West to continually bash capitalism, private property, business, and
free trade; while simultaneously enjoying the benefits of all of them. [Hear, hear to that last part.] [...]
One very harmful result of this sorry educational situation is that
there are few people--even among those who stalwartly defend the free
market, who understand and appreciate the essential morality of capitalism. [...]
Capitalism's incredible production of wealth is the economic
side-effect that occurs when political freedom is present. It has been
argued, and I agree, that both economic and political freedom are absolute prerequisites for moral behavior.
So my question is: granted that capitalism is a tremendous engine of wealth and, for people of bold entrepreneurial temperament, of opportunity; is "the essential morality of capitalism" going too far?
Isn't it a little like saying "the essential morality of natural selection"? It's so Calvinist: success is somehow taken as proof of virtue, rather than simply as proof of triumphant adaptation. You can think of capitalism as a particularly bracing kind of ecosystem that selects for a particular type of person. Bold, headstrong, creative, autonomous, driving -- you'll be in your element, an eagle in Alaska. If you're a softer sort, more introverted, less competitive (or competitive but losing the competition), you may feel yourself an endangered species. Which is why artistic types have always been so susceptible to imagining a less rough-and-tumble Utopia for themselves (little realizing that if they think they're miserable under capitalism, wait'll they taste socialism -- they are the ones who end up in the insane asylums, concentration camps, and gulags for daring to "Think Different").
So obviously, I agree with Dr. Sanity up to a point. But let's read more:
The moral case for capitalism is not taught in our schools, nor is it
argued much in our culture. In fact it has been more or less
universally accepted by the intellectual elites that systems such as
communism and socialism are "morally superior" to capitalism (hence
more "socially just")--even though in practice such systems have led to
the death and enslavement of millions, and to those unlucky enough not
to die from them, they have led to the most horrible shrinking and wasting of the human soul.
The truth is that neither socialism nor communism nor any kind of religious fundamentalism [emphasis added] is compatible with morality at all. [...]
Morality [...] must always be a matter of choice, not mandate. [...]
In essence,
capitalism is actually good for the soul. It is the only system where
the soul and the self can flourish, where individuals have a right to
their own life and liberty, and can make the specific choices in the
pursuit [of] their own particular happiness.
Ah, this is the libertarian brand of conservatism, and we can already see the straining seams between it and the religious/social brand of conservatism, which worries so much about people's penchant for abusing freedom and choice, and certain of their weaker brethren. In fact, in many insufficiently examined ways, Christianity and capitalism -- both so characteristic of the United States -- are at odds. Nonetheless, they have shacked up and produced a disreputable offspring, the "prosperity gospel." Papa Capitalism rewards the bastard, Mama Church calls it heretical, and still they don't split up. Shameless offspring notwithstanding, their yoking of opposites may be necessary in the American mix to guard against the excesses of both. "The pursuit of happiness" would otherwise not be conducive to "family values," unless people had a very far-sighted conception of their own happiness; and the excesses of other-cheek-turning would not be conducive to worldly success or a vigorous self-defense.
I digress again. It's late and I'm losing my focus. What I wanted to say is that I don't think capitalism is intrinsically "good" or "moral" any more than, say, nuclear energy is. In itself it's morally neutral, a power source that can be used and/or abused. The very fact that even a libertarian like Dr. Sanity admits we need laws to limit people's freedom to do harm -- and even more than that, the fact that government has to intervene to keep the cornucopia pumping by bailing out a Bear Stearns from the consequences of its hypercapitalism -- all goes to show that capitalism may well be necessary, but it's not sufficient. Declaring it intrinsically virtuous is a bold move, but wrong.
On the contrary, people need another, prior source of morality in order to handle the freedom of capitalism responsibly, and not go off the deep end of corruption, ruthlessness, and greed. "The
pursuit of their own particular happiness" isn't morality -- which is based in concern for others "as thyself" -- it's utilitarianism. Capitalism doesn't restrict choice, and that's good, but it sometimes rewards immoral, amoral, or just plain trashy choices.
As a god, I guess you'd say, it's an idol.
UPDATE: Thinking about the law of consequences, an analogy from physics comes to mind. Individuals are subject to Newtonian morality: what goes up must come down, what goes around comes around, if you live beyond your means you lose your home. On the vast scale of corporations and the subatomic scale of finance, this no longer applies. Space is warped and time annihilated in a way that renders classical morality unrecognizable. Living beyond your means and the infinite deferral of consequences are what keeps the economic universe infintely expanding for all. So let no one say a corporation is a person. A quasar, perhaps, with a ledger of quarks.
