- 26 - Henry George School of Social Science Chartered by the University of the State of New York The Anatomy of Financial Destructiveness Dr. Cay Hehner Chapter 4: The Future of the West or Are We Condemned To Repeat History? Abstract: What promises does the 21st century hold for the Western world? Are we heading toward another cycle of instability with dreadful social consequences ultimately leading to the demise of capitalism or are we able to chart a new course to a less tumultuous, more promising future where human needs and planetary limits are reconciled? Throughout the ages the great philosophers of civilization have contemplated history in order to precipitate the Future. From Giambattista Vico, Georg Friedrich Hegel, and Benedetto Croce, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, Henry George, Sri Aurobindo, and Egon Friedell, Robert Musil, via Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Karl Popper to Samuel Huntington, and Francis Fukuyama the future of Western civilization has been painted in hopeful or dire terms. [1] What are our prospects for the 21st century? Santayana (1906) has admonished us repeatedly that if we are not willing to learn from our history we will be forced to repeat it. This admonition is haunting us today with a twist and a vengeance. The Iron Curtain has fallen in 1989, consequently the former Soviet satellites and Russia have been trying “to learn from their history” and not repeat the mistakes of the command economy conundrums of communism; they all have tried to imitate capitalism as best they could, in fact, there seems to be an unspoken internal jousting match among these post-Soviet satellites to outsmart capitalism on the right; have the peoples of these territories been indoctrinated by the penalty of death to despise and defy the unbridled capitalism of the early 19th century Manchester model, now they are being told that nothing works better economically than just this model! As if there were no tomorrow and as if there had never been a Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, and its ensuing Great Depression, and as if there had never been a slew of recessions, 5 West 19th Street 2C, New York, NY 10011 Tel:(212) 889-8020 Fax: (212)-367-0940 e-mail: [email protected] www.henrygeorgeschool.org - 27 - Henry George School of Social Science Chartered by the University of the State of New York Great Recessions, downturns, economic busts, financial delusions roughly every 18 to 20 years in the major capitalist economies and consequently the world markets in the last two centuries. [2] Now the capitalist countries on the other hand - since World War II led as usual by the U.S. - have hailed the “death of communism”, only to forget their own history lesson and begin to nationalize and command-economize their (so-called) free- market economies to the leading financial wizards and gurus’ heart’s content. We have argued in general since the early 1990s, and in particular in 2004, that “capitalism as we know it and have been practicing it” is based on non-sustainable premises and that it consequently is going to have to fall within one generation. If former polit-commissars now doff their red berets and Kalashnikoffs, don pin-striped suits and carry palm pilots and Blackberries instead to continue the game on those unsustainable premises they are now building their financial and economic sandcastles on the quicksand of neoclassical fallacies no less than their Wall Street colleagues, previously. It is as if the respective post-Soviet and post-free-market cultures were struck by reciprocal amnesia regarding the very principles of survival on the planet. Just to recapitulate: The world population of seven billion inhabitants strong, jointly and separately, needs certain hourly, daily, weekly, monthly quantities of natural resources, i.e. sun light, clean air, clean water, unpoisoned foodstuff, a minimum of shelter and a modicum of clothing to survive. In this individual as well as collective need there is no individual choice involved whatsoever as Hayek, Menger, von Mises, and the other pundits of the Austrian School would have us believe and as our Chicago boys from the monetarist persuasion have been hammering home the same message with maddening insistence and fallaciousness for generations now. No human being “has a free choice” to breathe, to drink, to eat, etc. as the non-choice means certain death. These conjoint resources needs are the preconditions of life on this planet itself pretty much for all homo sapiens alive (unfortunately not always as “sapient” as one would wish). Not making these life-sustaining resources available to each and every one of us, indeed “the least amongst us” as the most exalted is a failure of humankind as a whole, not of individual nations, ruling classes, or civilizations themselves. [3] 5 West 19th Street 2C, New York, NY 10011 Tel:(212) 889-8020 Fax: (212)-367-0940 e-mail: [email protected] www.henrygeorgeschool.org - 28 - Henry George School of Social Science Chartered by the University of the State of New York Throughout recorded history thinkers of all classes, castes, strata and stations of society have turned to the study of the past in order to comprehend and elucidate it in order to intuit, project, plan, and precipitate the Future. In this essay we are going to look at some of the more eminent thinkers and savants who have done so in the West, since the end of the Dark Ages and the Dawn of the renaissance. At the outset of Modernity stands a much misunderstood, enigmatic spiritual and intellectual giant who remained virtually unknown outside the pale of his scholastic compadres, who was discovered for the world a century after his death by the irrationalists Hamann, Herder, and Jacobi and the romantic historiographers Jules Michelet and Benedetto Croce. We are talking about the Neapolitan scholastic and legal philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico. He influenced the enlightenment philosophers Rousseau and Diderot, the poet S. T. Coleridge, the labor- economist Karl Marx, the educator Wilhelm Dilthey, and the existentialists Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Heidegger. In fact, in the 20th century it would be easier and shorter to enumerate those Western social thinkers he did not influence than those he did, meaning virtually every civilization philosopher of moment. In the U.S. for our time he was brought to renewed prominence by the conservative post-Hegelian anti-Gnostics Isaiah Berlin and Leo Strauss, as well as for the present generation by Mark Lilla. [4] Vico’s main work Scienza Nuova or The New Science encompasses 1,700-some pages and several volumes, it has been written in an old form of post-Latin Italian, was heavily amended, and entirely rewritten, then republished after the maestro’s death with marginal notes of his more erudite students, in other words the MS. is an absolute, near- undecipherable mess for the general reader an equally near-absolute delight for the ivory tower scholar and specialist! The New Science contains unquieting and unsavory authoritarian tendencies for our democratic age which we need not heed here, but for our purposes it shall suffice to zero in on what has been most universally acknowledged and acclaimed in Vico, namely the center piece of his philosophy of history. Vico encapsulates the essence of his insights in the aphorism: verum (esse) ipsum factum which is usually and roughly translated as “a given thing is true (if and only to the extent to which and) because it is made”. What follows for Vico is that we can only truly know what we have made ourselves or participated in the creation thereof. It the technical terms of the specialist scholar this is called ‘constructivist epistemology’; for those of us not sufficiently fortunate to have an affluent forebear to grant us permission into the haloed halls of elite education one could 5 West 19th Street 2C, New York, NY 10011 Tel:(212) 889-8020 Fax: (212)-367-0940 e-mail: [email protected] www.henrygeorgeschool.org - 29 - Henry George School of Social Science Chartered by the University of the State of New York say it is a way to gain knowledge only by way of fabricating of creating something, as, i.e., one tends to know one’s own spouse and children better than the spouse and children of one’s neighbors. It is no accident that this sanctification or declaring essential of the creative element in human beings – what later came to be called homo habilis or homo faber – emerged in the wake of the Italian renaissance, which, after all, experienced an explosion of creative, constructive and artistic energy (paradigmatized by Leonardo, Raffael, Michelangelo, Duerer, and Grunewald), all of which was codified by Vico in his New Science. It is also not difficult to see that such a teaching would appeal to the young Karl Marx as well as to any social or economic thinker like Henry George who starts their productivity and analysis from the labor theory of value. After having established the imperative of creation in the process of gaining knowledge or Greek episteme Giambattista Vico then makes a further useful distinction between science and consciousness. In approximate analogy to the old Scholastic distinction between the realist and the nominalist school he maintains that the objects of (objective) scientific knowledge be universal eternal therefore true, whereas the objects of (subjective) consciousness be particular and individuated, or as expressed in his language vero/scienza or science be concerned with truth in a restatement of the scholastic realist position certo/coscienza or consciousness (conscience) be concerned with empirical certainty retaking the nominalist position. [5] While Henry George and the classical economists saw economics to be based on natural law, Giambattista Vico and Benedetto Croce saw natural law in all of History.