Reformation 2.0

A post by SDJ at the Pragmatist and the first of many obituaries of the ‘selfish rational individual’ appearing in the Times today prompted a thought on what is needed to start the process of reform. I must admit that I am with Mark Twain on the ability of commentators to call ‘time of death’ with any degree of accuracy – everything from brands in the nineties, cinema, paper in the office etc have been killed off prematurely by those seeking to score a point or two on a competing ideology.

For me that is what this current crisis represents – the end of just one particular competition between ideas, not the end of any ‘reality’. It is a rupture of a dominant ideology, a survivor of a world where our path through this confusing and contradictory place we live in was a choice between ‘the market/individual’ (and our role as rational economic agents seeking our own self interested ‘utility’) and ‘the social’ (where the state provides the capital and means of production for our greater good / happiness). The gap between this successful ideological world and the realities of the myths and speculation that sustained their ‘reality’ – I particularly like the fact that RBS are selling a corporate jet which they initially denied owning during the boom years. While that rupture of ideas is having very real effects on our financial well being it doesn’t mean that we aren’t trying to solve the same problems and resolve the same contradictions in our everyday life.

The example of branding is relevant here. Creating a brand soon makes you realize that the academic division of individual and social is not something which makes sense in the lives of people making decisions and living their life. Individuals can be social minded, societies can be individually empowering without the need for a creation of some new superstructure or institution to make it so.  If we relegate such ideologies to being merely part of the buzz and conversation of the cultural landscape – whereby the underlying reality of a given situation is not in question but the interpretation of that reality - then we can move on from the current debate, and in doing so establish some new insights rather than just replacing one set of discredited ideas with another set (which ironically are being dusted off from their own implosion in 1989).

Reformation 2.0 is a world where the ‘religion’ of economics no longer seeks to impose a rationalist orthodoxy on my comings and goings in the market. Instead I am able to create ‘markets’ that operate on different principles and assumptions. As I have said before, the biggest barrier to creating zopa (and why banks initially didn’t believe it would work) is that represents a heterodoxy to the ‘truth’ about markets.

Likewise, society should no longer seen as competing with ‘the market’ for our attention and energy, nor should it be able to sit and comment on it from some moral high ground – this crisis is a social as well as an economic failure. What is needed for this ‘reformation’ is the translation of ‘economics’ and ‘sociology’ into a form which anyone can use and interpret for their own ends – moving away from the technocratic manifestations of empirical economists and evidence based policy making which has characterized much of the last 2-3 decades of development of the market and the state. Perhaps the internet represents just such an opportunity, giving the tools (although not always without an underlying ideology) for the creation of economically viable communities and communal (or ‘moral’?) markets. 

For me the relevant perspective for the propagation of 'green shoots' is that of an ecologist - how far that analogy can go I am not sure but it sure beats tinkering with the money supply.