[Previous posts: I. Economics and the Political Imagination; II. Economics and the Vocational Imagination; III. Economics and the Educational Imagination]
In previous posts I have described three places where we find a similar—if not the same—inversion of the order between money or capital and the human person: politics, work, and education. If I had been more careful I would have presented these example in a slightly different order (politics, education, then work). Nonetheless, my point is not only that these description are true, but, furthermore, that they are relatively new.
In other words, it is my belief that what many have called “neo-liberalism” describes this move that radicalizes the liberal autonomous individual from seeking reason to one seeking material and social wealth as an end in itself.
The ego cogito of Descartes has now been replaced the homo economicus of Wall Street. We have moved from the rational man of liberalism to the economic man of neo-liberalism.
This puts a genealogical distance between the person that Jean-Luc Marion describes as the “ego amans,” the person as lover that begets reason. Charles Taylor also describes the move as one from a “porous self” to a “buffered self.” What Taylor and Marion both miss is the next genealogical and anthropological step in the alienation and dis-enchantment of the person after modernity: the homo economicus.
This is not to say that money or capital are historically recent, but it is to say that the order between the human person and money or capital—not to mention God—is particularly and disturbingly disordered.
As a final example, take the idea of a ‘profession.’ There was once a time when a profession was ordered by some good. Medicine served the good of health; Law the good of justice; Academics the good of truth; Art the good of beauty, and so on. This was the norm for most of human history, including most of modernity.
Liberalism itself was conceived out of the desire for goods that came from the development of human rationality. Nowadays, however, we have “professionals” who serve the (non)good of self-interest. People whose profession is to oversee professionals and make sure they are held accountable to the (non)good of economic self-interest.
This self is not the same as the autonomous individual; it is individualism on economic steroids. The effects these drugs have is to monopolize the existential imagination to the point where we begin to think of ourselves as just such an economic man.
Even as most people mistakenly think of themselves as autonomous individuals, there is a more nefarious self-to-be that has captured the imagination of our times. This economic self that is born from the womb of modern, secular liberalism inverts the meaning of existence into a corpse of living that is really dying—the life of The Death of Ivan Illych.
Facing such a thorough colonization of the existential imaginary, the Church offers a way out—perhaps, the only way out. When we look closely, we can hear and see the tragic Catholic insight as one that not only sees the person as a sacred end, but looks beyond that so-called “individual” and calls us to communio. To love.
In these relations we find powerful antidotes to the economic enslavement of our times: the embrace of poverty, the love of enemy, and death to self.
The question becomes whether or not we have ears and eyes—and hearts.
(In the epilogue to follow, I will try to articulate the Catholic antidote more clearly.)
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In