Article

Culture

Economics

Ethics

Sustainability

3 January 2025

9 min read

Acquisitiveness is the key modern vice

When it comes to consumption, we keep our ethics on a lead.

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

a hand hold a black payment card that reads 'buy'.

Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.

“Sell-out!” When I arrived in Seattle around the turn of the century, I was too tardy and too scrupulously Christian to make much of what was left of the fading grunge scene. Still, I had arrived in time to fumble my way through various university dorm room arguments with more musically astute peers about when this or that band had sold out, when they abandoned the authentic homemade purity of their sound for the greater financial rewards of mainstream pop. These bands still traded on their image as rebels and outsiders, but we all knew it was a pose. Even so, we sympathised. Who wouldn’t be tempted by selling-out if the alternative was poverty and virtuous obscurity?

I have been thinking about those conversations recently, not just because Nirvana T-shirts suddenly seem to be everywhere again, but because the other form of ambient idealism circulating in Seattle at that time, techno-utopianism, seems to have reached the end of its own version of selling out. In my decade in Seattle, I learned to scoff at those who didn’t embrace new technologies, dutifully parroting the slogan, “Information wants to be free!” The hackers of my generation had founded companies which were going to remake the corporate world. Many of my friends from university went to work for them. They were excited about building exciting new tools at lower costs, while doing it all with a social conscience. The bosses of these companies were rock stars in T-shirts and jeans, changing the world.

Two decades later, few of us are happy with the world they’ve built. The professions threatened by their innovations started with music and journalism and have now moved on to just about anything that an AI can imitate. Many of those bosses are still in T-shirts and jeans, still pretending to be outsiders, even as their wealth has piled into unimaginable sums. Their continual need for more has led many of them to decide that a social conscience is too expensive a liability to retain. They prioritise profits and share prices above employee well-being and social cohesion. Some demur from taking stands against authoritarian politicians, pretending that such neutrality is a matter of principle and not economic self-interest. Others openly egg on our broken politics, eager to snatch still more spoils from their demise.

What has gone wrong? As an ethicist, my temptation always is to say that if only these bosses were better advised, reminded of the responsibilities of their power, things could change. What is a skilled ethicist if not someone whose rhetoric and erudition can move the hearts of the mighty?

There is one immovable object that all his ethical demolition work could not shift. His king had palaces to build, heretic German princes to bring to heel, and an ancestral homeland to recapture.

At the advent of European colonialism, there was perhaps no more skilled or erudite moral theologian than Francisco de Vitoria. After taking the premiere professorship at the best university in Spain, what was becoming the richest state in Europe, he pioneered legal and ethical theories which reverberate in international and human rights law today. There were few more incisive critics of the self-deceptive rationalisations of his contemporaries and few better placed to have the ear of one of the most powerful rulers of the age, the king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V.

Today Vitoria is often pointed to as a prophet, someone who drew on his theological expertise and rhetorical acumen to tear apart Spanish justifications for their growing overseas empire. This reputation largely rests on his On the American Indians, a speech he gave in response to the horrific reports of “bloody massacres and of innocent individuals pillaged of their possessions and dominions” which were filtering back to Spain. In it Vitoria does indeed dismantle dozens of quasi-legal entitlements to which the Spanish appealed to justify these actions. By the time he reaches the end of the speech he even seems to be contemplating Spain abandoning the Americas. He says, “The conclusion of this whole dispute appears to be this: that if all these titles were inapplicable…the whole Indian expedition and trade would cease”.

However, when he turns to acknowledging the financial implications of this, he allows that it “would mean a huge loss to the royal exchequer, which would be intolerable.” Here Vitoria concedes that there is one immovable object that all his ethical demolition work could not shift. His king had palaces to build, heretic German princes to bring to heel, and an ancestral homeland to recapture from the French. Money was needed for Charles to play his role as a king among kings, and no ethical quibbles about evil deeds carried out far away could be allowed to impede its flow. After this admission Vitoria sputters to a conclusion with a few unworkable and naive suggestions about how to at least make colonialism marginally less terrible.

If there is a historical parable calculated to drive an ethicist to despair this is it. It shows ethical reflection for what it all too often is, an ineffectual expression of moral anxieties we air and then largely ignore. Our institutions, whether nation-states or companies, make a show of acting ethically, but few of us are fooled. It is a pose. The sorts of ‘ethics’ practised by countries and corporations are strictly those which aren’t a serious threat to the appetites of their leaders for more wealth, power, and security. Like Charles V, they too have peers among whom it is intolerable to contemplate losing status.

These priorities are reflected even among those of us with less stratospheric power or wealth. Many of us worry about the origins of our food, our clothes, and our cheap electronics, having heard stories of labourers spending long hours in fields or cramped sweatshops. We may even buy Fairtrade as a response, but only if the price isn’t too high and if this ‘ethical consumption’ doesn’t mean giving up our middle-class lifestyle.

The ‘ethics’ of our consumption are kept on a convenient lead. They are allowed to nibble around the edges of our consciences, but never to tear into the heart of the way we inhabit the world.

In his work, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that the sorts of goods we pursue can be lumped into two broad categories, goods of effectiveness and goods of excellence. The former are the things like wealth, power, and fame, which can be conferred and even sometimes transferred and which bear little relation to the characters of the people involved. The latter are the sorts of skills and performances, the virtues and virtuosities, which people attain through long and disciplined development.

For MacIntyre, both kinds of goods are necessary, but it matters a great deal which one gets priority. In a society which prioritises goods of effectiveness – such as Vitoria’s, but also, for MacIntyre, most modern societies as well –procedural justice reigns supreme. As long as we didn’t break any rules in getting our money and status or, for that matter, our exciting new clothes or smart speakers, we are in the clear. The problem, as Vitoria’s case demonstrates, is that in such societies even this minimal kind of justice cannot be allowed to block the flow of wealth. So procedural justice winds up being a tamed tiger in the service of the powerful. It is let out of its cage only when convenient – typically to demonise the failings of others. This is not just true of billionaires and politicians. Those of us who are western, middle-class consumers play this game too. The ‘ethics’ of our consumption are kept on a convenient lead. They are allowed to nibble around the edges of our consciences, but never to tear into the heart of the way we inhabit the world.

What would it mean to prioritise goods of excellence? This is one of those questions MacIntyre poses, but does not answer, because he is convinced that in each society it would look different. Each community would need to begin by wrestling with what kinds of people they should be, what excellences they can and should pursue within their communities, and what virtues should be emphasised. Only then should they move on to think about what sorts of wealth or power are necessary to achieve these. Still, it can be frustrating that MacIntyre does not lay out his preferred programme. He offers no ready-made blueprint for a just society.

Of course, neither did Jesus when he counseled his disciples to seek first the kingdom of God, telling them that if they did so the necessities of life, food, drink, and clothes, would be provided. What Jesus meant by the kingdom of God is elusive, now and not yet, hidden and revealed in parable and aphorism. What it was not, however, is clear. It was not a kingdom founded on acquiring earthly power and wealth. In fact, much of the teaching of the gospels can be boiled down to Jesus’ warning about the dangers of prioritising the goods of effectiveness (“Where your treasure is there your heart will be also”, “One thing you lack. Go sell everything you have and give to the poor”, “The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them. Not so with you”, “Man does not live on bread alone”, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?”) and urging his disciples to embrace the goods of excellence that constitute the kingdom of God.

Understood this way, the reason it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom is that the hunger for riches, wealth, and fame pulls those enamoured with goods of effectiveness away from true fulfillment. There are always more houses to own, new neighbours to impress, and new areas to conquer. Acquisitiveness, MacIntyre reminds his readers, is the characteristic vice of modernity. That many of us, from billionaires down to underpaid academics, habitually think that what is missing from our life is a little more money or fame, is evidence that he’s right.

For Jesus, virtuous obscurity and poverty were preferable to fame. We remember this at every nativity play when we acknowledge that the best God could manage for witnesses to the divine arrival was a hard scrabble group of animal herders and a few foreign astrologers. It is not that Jesus refused to use his abilities or hid away from public notice. However, the public he chose to act among was nestled in a corner of a corner of the empire, far from the rewards offered by the cultured salons of Roman power and privilege. In two of the gospels, Jesus is tempted to sell out. He is offered unimaginable fame and power at the outset of his ministry. He forcefully rejects it. For Jesus, an itinerant life spent ministering to fishermen and farmers was enough.

What would it look like for us to embrace Jesus’s priorities? A place to start would be actually listening to Jesus about practices such as fasting, praying, and the almsgiving. Each of these is an act of resistance against the continual appetite for more and a testimony to an economy of grace that exists beyond all human economies. We also could try preaching in a way that takes seriously the admonitions of Jesus. I have heard numerous sermons about the rich young ruler which include an extended caveat on how maybe it was important for him to sell his possessions, but that doesn’t mean we have to. Maybe not, but shouldn’t those of us who call ourselves Christians, at least be open to God having that radical a call on our life? If our ethics and our faith are not allowed to ask these questions of us, if we have sold out in such a way that the real possibility of them radically disrupting our lives is intolerable to our imagination, what good are they?

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Review

Culture

Economics

Politics

5 July 2024

10 min read

The book Keir Starmer says you must read

Will Hutton’s This Time No Mistakes surveys the thinking that could solve Britain’s ills.

John Milbank

John Milbank is a theologian, philosopher and poet. A co-founder of the Radical Orthodoxy movement, he is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Nottingham.

Kier Starmer sits on a sofa, leaning forward and holding papers he is reading. Rachel Reaves sits and looks on.

Starmer and Reeves.

Labour Party

In the aftermath of a historic election, one could do worse than read Will Hutton’s second big ‘state of the nation book’, recently published. This Time No Mistakes is worth reading just for the succinctness and clarity of its politic-economic history of the United Kingdom since the industrial revolution, which it provides in its central chapters. Indeed, Keir Starmer says it is a ‘brilliant book... read it if you haven't already ’ It may well take a sophisticated journalist to be able to do this so well: too often, even the best of academics cannot see the public wood for their private-obsessional trees.

But it is doubly and mainly worth reading for Hutton’s prognosis of our ills and his recommendations for solving them. The new Labour government could do far worse than try to carry through Hutton’s proposals, which almost anyone of common sense and goodwill (including all Tories) ought readily to endorse. Indeed, if the next government managed to initiate even a half of what he suggests, this country could be placed back upon the right tracks.

As to the history, which is crucial to the ultimate diagnosis: Hutton contends quite simply that Britain has been self-deceived by the peculiar nature of its industrial revolution, which was the first in history. It was largely a matter of private enterprise, partly enabled and later cushioned by empire, whose possession encouraged us to support an unqualified doctrine of free trade.

However, all other nations, including the United States, both when they sought to catch up with the steam and rail revolution, and when they later co-pioneered the ones based on gas and electricity, and ultimately on nuclear and digital, from the outset depended much more upon state intervention to promote needed expertise, education and investment. The United Kingdom, by contrast, remained captivated by the mythical glory of its initial take-off.

As a result, not just Conservative governments, but also Labour ones, right up to the New Labour one, and including the catastrophically misguided work of Margaret Thatcher (Hutton is admirably unqualified here) remained far too captivated by the norms of economic laissez-faire, ‘balancing the books’, a primacy of finance over production and obsessive Treasury concern with money, rather than productive wealth.

The exceptions to this were the pre-World War one Liberal government and the post World War Two Labour one. Yet all the strong ideas implemented by the latter came from ‘New Liberal’ thinkers and not Labour ones: notably from Keynes and Beveridge. Labour on its own, by comparison, has tragically and disastrously oscillated between a desire to replace capitalism with some sort of command economy on the one hand, and simply leaving capitalism as it is, with a bit of welfare tinkering, on the other. More recently this has been seen in the contrast between Corbyn and Blair.

It is at this juncture that Hutton proceeds to complement his political-economic diagnosis with a more purely political one. The split on the ‘progressive left’ is a catastrophe that has kept the Tories unfairly in power for much of a century. This split is both caused by and has prevented any reform of the first past the post voting system, which urgently needs to go.

For this reason then, political economy and constitutional reform go together.

As to the latter, we need proportional representation which would allow more reasoned debate instead of the inter-party squabble, alongside legally guaranteed local government and a different kind of informed, rather than overweening executive.

As to the former, we need flexible planning, public-private partnership in investment, a national wealth fund, sectional trade union bargaining, the breaking up of cartels and monopolies and required social purpose and stakeholding, for every business and financial enterprise.

One is tempted just to say hurray! But there are some historical and theoretical questions to be posed that may have hidden practical consequences.

Better than trying to ‘balance’ the private and the collective, as if the self and society were in rivalry, is to take the more Continental (and early Blairite!) course of stressing that we are always ‘persons in relation’.

Hutton now backs Tawney besides Keynes. But do they say the same thing? For the latter, capitalism is a wild, amoral and dynamic beast that can nonetheless be politically tamed. In certain phases of the capitalist cycle only (as Hutton rightly sees) this will be about boosting demand, but in others it can mean lessening it and temporarily hurting workers.

But Tawney, and Hutton clearly agrees with him, wanted a market economy permitting only useful and not merely acquisitive wealth. Given this ethical purpose it was for him possible for the market, aa a socialist market, to reach equilibrium, beyond extrinsic and always precarious state ‘management’.

Just how precarious was seen in the 1970s. For Hutton, the lapse of Keynesianism in this decade was simply a matter of the triumph of the wrong ideas. To a large degree this is surely right, and yet it is not the whole story. Were it the latter, then neoliberalism might not have spread beyond Anglo-Saxon lands to Europe and South America.

The other aspect is surely the reality that capitalism of its nature, as driven by the amoral search for profit, resists any prospect of a stable, social market. Achieving that and extending the corporatist order of negotiation between state, business and unions would have been the alternative way, instead of Hayekianism, to deal with ‘stagflation’. Rather than a competition between capital, labour and consumer for money that wasn’t there at the time, a fair division of spoils could have been consistently instituted by legally and culturally re-framing the firm and the market, something that would have immediately favoured a renewed degree of growth.

Really, almost everything that Hutton writes indicates agreement with this sort of thing, including the recognition that of itself, capitalism is not actually dynamic (that comes from technology and culture) but tends to build up sterile finance in the interests of the few, rather than productive growth in the interests of the many. But in that case ‘ethical socialism’ is not just a set of ideals, as he tends to imply, but a mode of achievable practice.

Similarly, a general mutualist national insurance approach to welfare, which he rightly favours, was not just a New Liberal advocacy as he claims, but deeply rooted in co-operative socialism and in Christian (especially Anglican) social thinking whose influence -- except silently in the case of Tawney -- goes unmentioned. Yet the very phrase ‘welfare state’ is Archbishop William Temple’s and Tawney’s social analysis, intended for the general public, concluded with an unabashed High Church ecclesiology!

It is relevant here that Hutton speaks of the need to combine the ‘I’ with the ‘We’ and yet he clearly does not endorse just any old exercise of ‘individual agency’, even if he sometimes appears to do so, when defining the operation of the price mechanism as necessarily ‘wild’, after Adam Smith’s exclusion of commercial transactions from the immediate operation of social sympathy. Better than trying to ‘balance’ the private and the collective, as if the self and society were in rivalry, is to take the more Continental (and early Blairite!) course of stressing that we are always ‘persons in relation’ – at once within and outside each other, in a constant creative weave.

Nothing could be further from Keynes’ despising of the proletariat and favouring of learned leisure, that John Ruskin’s revolutionary mystique of the artisanal.

There are two deeper questions about Hutton’s approach. First, his excessive ‘idealism’, as with his analysis of the Seventies switch, may still underrate the difficulty of overcoming the power of entrenched interests – the need indeed not so much for class, as for popular warfare against plutocracy.

Secondly, he tends to underplay a theoretical tension between secular and materialist thinkers, including New Liberals, on the one hand, and religious and Idealist thinkers like the first ‘New Liberal’, T.H Green on the other.

The latter was much more like Alasdair Macintyre or Michael Sandel than like John Rawls, as Hutton claims: for by human ‘self-realisation’ he meant the ‘positive liberty’ of pursuing the objectively true ends of human flourishing: religious contemplation, artistic creation of genuine beauty, active citizen participation.

By contrast, the secular New Liberals, including Keynes, tended to reduce the ethical good to the negative liberty of rights, private friendship and utility – often leading them to favour eugenics and to indulge in racism. Nothing could be further from Keynes’ despising of the proletariat and favouring of learned leisure, that John Ruskin’s revolutionary mystique of the artisanal.

Hutton tends to express surprise that a Tory like Ruskin, or a reactionary like Carlyle, should have favoured the cause of the worker – and indeed in Ruskin’s case also espoused ‘communism’, as Hutton elides from the picture. But this is to fail to see how Tory Radicalism and even paternalism is actually a third strand in the kind of transformative thinking that we continue to need, was always a crucial influence on Labour and was a crucial element of the postwar settlement.

If these thinkers indeed favoured ‘hierarchy’, then that was in part because they wanted more interpersonal and mediated chains of command, rather than brutally centralised and mechanical ones. Surely Hutton wants that also, as his excellent reservations about the use of Artificial Intelligence would indicate?

There is a recognition that economic individualism usually ‘on the right’ is actually matched and encouraged by a cultural individualism usually ‘on the left’.

This is perhaps the limit of talking in terms of ‘progressive’ versus ‘conservative’. Hutton harks back to the norms of the Enlightenment. Yet, as Richard Whatmore has shown, all the great British enlightenment thinkers came to think that pure enlightenment was failing.

They saw its anti-religious fanaticism stance as challenged by the rise of new secular, nationalist and direct democratic fanaticisms, as supremely with the French Revolution. By ‘populism’, as we might now say!

But they also already recognised that the breakdown of a rational peace had been encouraged by excessive consumer greed and by the over-implication of commerce in state borrowing (whose pre-enabling of industry in Britain, Hutton does not mention) and so also in war and empire.

It was exactly in this context that the enlightenment thinker Edmund Burke began to consider the virtues of the longer-term embedding of enlightenment in Christianity and the importance of the medieval ‘gothic’ legacy of a corporate order binding social body to social body, rather than individual to individual via contract, mediated by the market and backed up by the state.

In Burke’s wake, for example with the radical William Cobbett, much of the Nineteenth Century critique of economism, to which Hutton is the heir, was of a ‘Romantic’ and often ‘neo-medieval’ rather than purely enlightenment cast. (Hutton at times wrongly reads medieval ‘feudalism’ as ‘absolutist’ – a specifically early modern phenomenon.) This matters, because this tradition contains a stronger recognition that the centralising state (which the Enlightenment favoured as a substitute for the Church) can be just as alienating and anti-social as the uprooting market – even if, as Karl Polanyi later saw, one needs the power of the state today in order to restore the primacy of the social and of inter-human fellowship.

Within the same current, there is a recognition that economic individualism usually ‘on the right’ is actually matched and encouraged by a cultural individualism usually ‘on the left’. And here Hutton is perhaps inconsistent – he definitely sees this, mentioning the dubious overriding of the universal by identitarian concerns, and yet also recognises it somewhat uneasily, as it challenges certain ‘progressivist’ assumptions.

As a result, he rather disallows the validity of some populist concerns – ironically rather like the incomprehension of the older enlightenment in the face of the new revolutionary era. For example, concerns with the normative primacy of the heterosexual family and the enabling of family and children, with regional and national identity, with the academic ‘woke’ trashing of the entire Western legacy, with the exploitation and cultural disruption of excessive immigration, with ecological policies that simply override current human needs while doing little to assist the future of nature.

The danger of these partial blind spots could be a continued failure of the roughly ‘communitarian’ Left, or the sensible Right, to win over the mass of the people to their cause. For they must be won over if not just the United Kingdom, but humanity as a whole, is to have a decent future.

Towards building that future, no one has contributed more, or more valiantly, than Will Hutton.