Blood Sacrifice on the Altar of Shareholder Value

The true nature of Consumer Capitalism is becoming clear in these times of crisis. It is a sacrificial cult. Right-wing cranks have openly volunteered to be sacrifices; thrown into the maw of this modern Moloch. But this is only the latest. Moloch has already devoured Tasmanian tigers, Steller’s Sea Cows, Carribean Monk Seals and numerous other species who possessed “no economic value.” This false idol threatens to devour all life on Earth; square miles of forests, vast gyres in the ocean are thrown into that maw and, out the other end, come little gold bricks for the Arch-Bishop and his Church Council.

Thinking of economics in religious terms is frowned upon by the High Priests of the cult. They maintain they are pragmatic statisticians who promote a detached scientific analysis of human greed. Throwing things into the greedy maw of a sacred idol is the farthest thing from their high aspirations; they “assume” any moral or ecological considerations away with hand-waving conjectures. These are mere “externalities.” The Invisible Hand, like the Holy Spirit, is everywhere in its great mystery; interfering with its sacred role is blasphemous.

Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate. — Victor Lebow (1950's)

Sacrifice (from “sacra” — sacred things, and “facere” — to perform) is an integral part of religious rites. Its origins in sacred ritual is a clue to how many are trapped in the cult and are looking at our economy and the “free market,” in the way the “prophet of the free market” Milton Friedman and his Chicago temple did.

The core of sacred Chicago teachings was that the economic forces of supply, demand, inflation and unemployment were like the forces of nature, fixed and unchanging. In the truly free market these forces existed in perfect equilibrium, supply communicating with demand the way the moon pulls the tides. — Naomi Klein

Interfering with these sacred forces is not just policy difference it is sinful. Freedom from “burdensome government regulations” and a return to the pristine forces of the Free Market is High Church sacrament and the cherished message of its prophets and saints, like St. Ronaldus Magnus.

But now we have government not only blasphemously regulating these sacred forces but actually repressing them, shutting them down. So, naturally, there are those, like Glenn Beck, saying “I would rather die than kill the country.” Or Jesse Kelley, “If given the choice between dying and plunging the country I love into a Great Depression, I’d happily die.” And the one that started it all, Dan Patrick,

No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in

This has inspired some curiousity in me about this thing called “The Economy,” what it is for and why it exists. I always assumed that its purpose was to support human life. But it seems that there are many who believe the economy is, instead of something to serve humanity, something humanity should serve— even to the point of being willing to die in order to keep it functioning. Limiting its functioning in the effort to save human lives in the face of a nasty virus is, to these worshippers, not worth it.

And this is of a piece with a similiar attitude towards the Earth itself. The economic Temple is considered primary and the Earth secondary —merely a resource mine and cost free trash heap — with no intrinsic value. The fact that there is a price to pay for treating the Earth this way is ignored, merely an “externality;” the Great Away — a magical place where free market angels disperse all unpleasant consequences with their gossamer wings, into the freedom of the air, like “cost free” CO2. The fact that there is, and will be increasingly, a terrible price to pay for this sacrifice is a diffuse and distant annoyance.

So when the Earth, with the merest flick of her little finger, crashes The World Economy with a tiny virus, the fact — the awesome, unavoidable fact that The Economy is terribly subservient to the Earth and depends utterly upon it for its existence — is made clear. And the fact that we are all terribly dependent upon this economy is also made clear. Except for increasingly marginalized and diminishing indigenous tribes in remote corners of the world, we are all dependent upon this economy and its massive blindness to the primacy of the Earth as it imagines itself the sacrificial altar of modern life. We are trapped within the walls of this cathedral and deeply unsettled about the nature of this God we must worship.

The word “economy” has Greek roots: “oikos” and “nemein”

The oikos was the most basic and fundamental unit of classical Greek civilization; a civilization which arose gradually from the dark ages following the fall of Mycenae. An oikos was a human survival unit consisting of a small landholding (often in the ballpark of 10 acres or so) worked by the family living on it and one or more slaves they may have possessed. “Nemein” means “appropriating” or “distributing” (or even “feeding”).

“Oikonomos” is then the process of production and distribution of the resources of a family farm among all the participants.

This has become much more complicated in modern times. Wikipedia says

An economy consists of the economic system of a country or other area, the labor, capital and land resources, and the economic agents that socially participate in the production, exchange, distribution, and consumption of goods and services of that area.

And in today’s global economy that “area” is basically the entire planet:
if you take the biologically productive land and sea areas of the earth and divide them by the human population you get 1.8 hectares — about 4.5 acres — per person. But this is if the entire earth were a human family farm — no wilderness whatsoever and no place for species that aren’t of use to humans. This number is far too large, since it ignores the vast majority of living beings that aren’t consumed by humans and, thus, are considered to have no “economic value.”

Even if we go with the values of those whose Eden is a global human family farm unconcerned with living beings we can’t consume, we are screwing up. Humanity is massively, unsustainably, hopelessly screwing up. We are presently using the earth’s “ecological services” faster than they can be renewed; our farm is failing. Any farmer knows that if you take more out of the soil than you put back in you will soon have barren land. And they know if you push a system too far there are feedbacks that can be dreadful. Nature’s tools of predation, disease and starvation are unforgiving for out of control populations.

How many new viruses have attacked our out of control population in the last few decades?… How many more will come after Covid-19?

Back in the time of the oikos a family farm didn’t stand a chance unless it was part of a polis. A polis was a city/state consisting of a large number of family farms organized around a town or city and, most often, ruled by an aristocratic oligarchy. (Aristocracy — aristos “excellent,” cratos “power” or “rule of the best.” Oligarchy — oligos “few” archo “rule.”) This oligarchy was a small group of leading families who, because of chance vagaries of population history and migration, happened to end up with the largest amount of productive land and thus the largest amount of wealth, power and influence. They did everything they could possibly do to keep their positions of wealth, power and influence.

Greek oligarchies were able to organize units of family farmers — from those who were wealthy enough to buy armor, a hoplon (large wooden/metal shield) and a spear — into powerful fighting units: the hoplite phalanx. It was these units that provided the necessary defense to protect the polis and surrounding family farms from the attacks of other ruling oligarchies.

What these attacks were all about were over something we call “resources.”

Wikipedia has a wonderfully direct definition of “resource”

A resource is any physical or virtual entity of limited availability that needs to be consumed to obtain a benefit from it.

It is all about consumption. (Which used to mean “wasting disease.”) So an ancient hoplite farmer may have found himself on a prime piece of riverfront farmland able to grow wheat. This meant many of those around him who had fewer resources were anxious for the chance to push him off his land and take over. Oligarchs had the wherewithal not only to protect such valuable properties but to gain control over new ones since they could amass a hoplite phalanx or two and take what they wanted.

Most of the constant and frequent wars in classical Greece were fought over land — mainly at the boundaries between the holdings of two adjacent city/states. And they were fought by phalanges of hoplite farmers. The farmers willingly participated in this system because they knew that their oligarchy could amass phalanges in their defense if they ever needed it.

The system was not terribly kind. The origins of Athenian democracy probably arose from a severe and chronic crisis in debt servitude. If you weren’t a hoplite farmer and were just scraping by on your oikos and you had a bad year you could borrow from other more successful farmers, or the oligarchs. If you couldn’t repay your debts you lost your farm. If that didn’t suffice you sold your children first and then, finally, yourself as a slave to work someone else’s farm.

This had reached crisis proportions when the Athenian oligarchy finally decided to appoint from among themselves Solon as sole archon, in about 600 BC. Solon, it turns out, had democratic tendencies and his laws eventually led (through a long tortuous process) to Athenian democracy under Pericles. Athenian democracy was not the favored form among Classical Greeks; it was under constant assault from aristocratic families. It lasted for almost two hundred years before it was beaten by the Spartan oligarchy (which lasted for more than 400 years) in the Peloponnesian War and an Athenian oligarchy was established in its place.

Democracy is fragile. Oligarchy in some form or other has been standard human practice for millenia. Let’s not forget that in this time of crisis. The idol we worship will devour our fragile democracy happily and greedily.

It was all about controlling resources. The only heat source the Ancient Greeks had was wood, and their technology was based upon physical work done by animals or slaves. All their pottery, armor, tools, etc. required a heat source to manufacture. They cut down trees. Lots of trees. In fact, one of the most reputable theories for the cause of the Athenian debt crisis and the failure of large numbers of family farms was due to ecological changes caused by this massive deforestation

This was deeply annoying to Socrates (as reported by Plato),

There is an explanation that is put in the language of the mysteries, that we men are in a kind of prison, and that one must not free oneself or run away…Only the body and its desires cause war, civil discord and battles, for all wars are due to the desire to acquire wealth, and it is the body and the care of it, to which we are enslaved, which compel us to acquire wealth, and all this makes us too busy to practice philosophy… (Phaedo)

So “the body and the care of it” was the root of all the aggravating squabbling over resources. And producing and distributing resources for the collective care of all the human bodies in a polis was what the economy was all about. And power came from massing enough force of arms to keep other oligarchs from grabbing your resources. “The body and the care of it” was not about human happiness, it was about maintaining a powerful army. Gramps couldn’t fight so he was a waste of resources — except to his family who loved and valued him, but this love had no “economic value,” could burden a struggling family and put them into debt servitude.

And this was when human civilization was a tiny percentage of what it is now. It’s ironic that the discovery and use of fossil fuels may have saved the last remaining forests on the planet. In the time of the oikos Attica had, maybe, a population of 200,000 people and they precipitated an ecological crisis by cutting most of their trees. Today the prefecture of Attica has around 4 million inhabitants. If they were wood-based they would no longer possess any trees whatsoever. Without fossil fuels they would have to rely on animal and human dung-based heat, if they survived at all.

And we now witness the passionate proclamations of willing sacrifical victims to “business as usual.” But this economic “business as usual” is oligarchic, non-democratic and environmentally disastrous; essentially, because it’s really cheap to treat the planet like a warehouse and a trash heap and to treat human life as having only “economic value.” And, since modern economics is all about shareholder value and efficient price signals in a free market, this makes economic sense. That’s what clearly matters to everyone who matters. Economic business as usual is about the struggle to control and consume the earth’s resources as cheaply as possible and protect those resources with power. (Remember G.H.W Bush after the Gulf War at the Earth Summit, “The American way of life is non-negotiable.”)

This should not be surprising when one observes the value systems expressed by those in power at this time of pandemic economic collapse; it is religious dogma that The Economy is more valuable than life itself — as in the life of not just humans, but all living beings, and the life of the planet upon which every last one of us depends.

It is interesting to note that this economic disaster, while being an effective way to fight that viral flick of Mother Earth’s little finger, is also reducing levels of greenhouse gases, reducing the destructive extraction of resources and reducing out of control consumption of those resources. Economic disasters are good for the Earth and life upon it, given the way we humans go about “business as usual.”

So, surely there must be another way out of this predicament; this being trapped within a church devoted to an angry, destructive God who values only shareholder value. Perhaps something more local, neighborly, kind; a human scale economy that humbly respects the planet that gives it life. A steady state economy that doesn’t require cancerous growth every quarter. Perhaps, from the rubble of this pandemic crisis, such an economy might find places to take root and thrive.