Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [5]
And what became known as the “mechanistic world view” began to take shape, developed by Western thinkers from the 17th century onward. Dazzling, uninterrupted breakthroughs in technological innovation—from the spinning ginny to steel mills, from bull dozers to dishwashers—permeated ever more aspects of our lives: the ubiquitous presence of machines confirming our sense that indeed the world can best be understood in mechanical terms.
Once absorbing this mechanistic world view, it was easy to assume that parallel laws governed economic life. Our challenge was to identify them, let them freely function and, voilá, an economic order would fall neatly into place! Human beings are handily off the hook. No moral reasoning required; the job would be done for us.
Critically important, in the mechanistic world view, everything can best be understood by examining its parts. Human beings become distinct “atoms”—insular beings trapped inside our separate egos. Our radical individualism thus does not result from any moral failing; it derives from our atomistic nature. We’re constitutionally unable to put ourselves in each others’ shoes. We can identify only our own distinct interests. But that’s not really so bad after all—for private interests serve, conveniently, to drive the giant social machine. No one put it better than Helvetius in the 18th century:
As the physical world is ruled by the laws of movement, so is the moral universe ruled by the laws of interest.3
This view of ourselves has defined the meaning of our most basic social values. Freedom, for example. Freedom is “elbow room”: our capacity for self-defense, our success in fending off the intrusion of others. And what better defense than material accumulation? After all, the more we have, the freer we are from dependence upon others. To challenge the unlimited accumulation of material wealth is therefore to challenge the individual’s free development. And fairness, what is it? Whatever distribution of rewards follows from each “social atom’s” pursuit of its private interests, operating within the “neutral laws” of economic life.
This view of ourselves, driven by narrow self-interest, began to take shape in the 17th century and was picked up in the 18th by many of our nation’s founders, including John Adams. He wrote:
… whoever would found a state, and make proper laws for the government of it, must presume that all men are bad by nature.4
This combination of notions—social atomism, materialism, and the rule of human affairs by discoverable laws—has had profound implications for the social order we have created. For if indeed we are isolated social atoms, any conscious process of group decision making based on identifying common needs—usually called politics—is suspect. We must let absolute laws determine our fate, for self-seeking egos may well twist any other method to their private gain. Any genuine deliberative process is therefore impossible.
Instead of trusting our capacities for common problem solving, we sought desperately, and believed we had found, laws governing the social world—governing life and death matters of economics—laws that determine who eats and who doesn’t. The more choices we can leave to these laws, the better off we are.
And what are these absolute laws? In much of the West we have established at least two such laws as almost sacrosanct, and adhered to them in varying degrees of faithfulness. They are:
the market distribution of goods and services;
not private property per se but a particular variant of this institution: the unlimited private accumulation