The word has become a rhetorical weapon and an ideological political meme, but it properly names the reigning ideology of our era – one that venerates the logic of the market and strips away the things that make us human. And its most recent admirer Liz Truss our much-reviled former PM became a celebrated maleficent proponent of this ideological myth. So, what are its origins and how did it become a manifestly disturbing party-political echo chamber in the 1980’s and 90’s? Set out below are a few chosen quotable sections from a Guardian piece in 2017 which opened my eyes to its seemingly appealing narrative along with some comparable but much more appealing thoughts on humanism as reflected in the life and writings of Gandhi:
In a world torn apart owing to ruthless domination and violence, the Gandhian principle of Ahimsa is ever more relevant. Some 20 million lives have been lost in war and insurrections since Gandhi’s passing. In a dismaying number of countries including his own, governments spend more for military purposes than for education and health care combined. Gandhi believed that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
His Ahimsa is not an isolated concept. It is very much intertwined with Satya or truth. No dictionary imbues ‘truth’ with the depth of meaning Gandhi gave it. His truth emerged from his convictions: it meant not only what was accurate but what was just and therefore, right. The truth could not be obtained by untruthful or unjust means, which included inflicting violence upon one’s opponent. The power of Gandhian non-violence rests in being able to say,“ to show you that you are wrong, I punish myself.”
To describe this method, Gandhi coined the expression of Satyagraha, literally meaning “to hold on to the truth.” He disliked the English term ‘passive resistance’ because Satyagraha required activism, not passivity. If you believed in truth and cared enough to obtain it, Gandhi felt, you could not afford to be passive; you had to be prepared actively to suffer.
Gandhian philosophy does not restrain itself from state and statecraft. He also stipulated his thoughts on the economy. The 21st-century world is a world of consumerism and market capitalism. Capitals are concentrated in a few hands; laborers lack works and industries are capital intensive. He predicted such a scenario long ago and formulated a solution. He believed in the equality of every human being and an equal share of work and resources. He firmly vouched for small scale cottage and khadi industries so that everybody can work and contribute in his own way. The Gandhian economy is more of a self-reliant village-based economy. This model could solve most of the world’s problem of economy.
Gandhi’s idea on environment precedes the concept of Sustainable Development defined by the United Nations Environment Program in 1992. His idea that “nature has enough to satisfy everyone’s need, but not satisfy anybody’s greed” can be a guiding light to modern environmental activism. He famously said, “the earth, the air, the land, and the water are not an inheritance from our forefathers but on loan from our children. So, we must hand over to them at least as it was handed over to us.” The concept of Sustainability is very much in tune with this assertion of Gandhi.
“Peer through the lens of neoliberalism and you see more clearly how the political thinkers most admired by Thatcher and Reagan helped shape the ideal of society as a kind of universal market (and not, for example, a polis, a civil sphere, or a kind of family) and of human beings as profit-and-loss calculators (and not bearers of grace, or of inalienable rights and duties). Of course, the goal was to weaken the welfare state and any commitment to full employment, and – always – to cut taxes and deregulate. But “neoliberalism” indicates something more than a standard right-wing wish list. It was a way of reordering social reality, and of rethinking our status as individuals.”
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-the-idea-that-changed-the-world
Still peering through the lens, you see how, no less than the welfare state, the free market is a human invention. You see how pervasively we are now urged to think of ourselves as proprietors of our own talents and initiative, how glibly we are told to compete and adapt. You see the extent to which a language formerly confined to chalkboard simplifications describing commodity markets (competition, perfect information, rational behaviour) has been applied to all of society, until it has invaded the grit of our personal lives, and how the attitude of the salesman has become enmeshed in all modes of self-expression.
In short, “neoliberalism” is not simply a name for pro-market policies, or for the compromises with finance capitalism made by failing social democratic parties. It is a name for a premise that, quietly, has come to regulate all we practise and believe that competition is the only legitimate organising principle for human activity.
The American journalist Walter Lippmann wrote to the originator Friedrich Hayek(he set out the idea in 1936) of what we now call neoliberalism , saying: “No human mind has ever understood the whole scheme of a society … At best a mind can understand its own version of the scheme, something much thinner, which bears to reality some such relation as a silhouette to a man.”
It is a grand epistemological claim – that the market is a way of knowing, one that radically exceeds the capacity of any individual mind. Such a market is less a human contrivance, to be manipulated like any other, than a force to be studied and placated. Economics ceases to be a technique – as Keynes believed it to be – for achieving desirable social ends, such as growth or stable money. The only social end is the maintenance of the market itself. In its omniscience, the market constitutes the only legitimate form of knowledge, next to which all other modes of reflection are partial, in both senses of the word: they comprehend only a fragment of a whole and they plead on behalf of a special interest. Individually, our values are personal ones, or mere opinions; collectively, the market converts them into prices, or objective facts.
Markets may be human facsimiles of natural systems, and like the universe itself, they may be authorless and valueless. But the application of Hayek’s Big Idea to every aspect of our lives negates what is most distinctive about us. That is, it assigns what is most human about human beings – our minds and our volition – to algorithms and markets, leaving us to mimic, zombie-like, the shrunken idealisations of economic models. Supersizing Hayek’s idea and radically upgrading the price system into a kind of social omniscience means radically downgrading the importance of our individual capacity to reason – our ability to provide and evaluate justifications for our actions and beliefs.
As a result, the public sphere – the space where we offer up reasons and contest the reasons of others – ceases to be a space for deliberation, and becomes a market in clicks, likes and retweets. The internet is personal preference magnified by algorithm; a pseudo-public space that echoes the voice already inside our head. Rather than a space of debate in which we make our way, as a society, toward consensus, now there is a mutual-affirmation apparatus banally referred to as a “marketplace of ideas”. What looks like something public and lucid is only an extension of our own pre-existing opinions, prejudices, and beliefs, while the authority of institutions and experts has been displaced by the aggregative logic of big data. When we access the world through a search engine, its results are ranked, as the founder of Google puts it, “recursively” – by an infinity of individual users functioning as a market, continuously and in real time.
The awesome utilities of digital technology aside, an earlier and more humanist tradition, which was dominant for centuries, had always distinguished between our tastes and preferences – the desires that find expression in the market – and our capacity for reflection on those preferences, which allows us to form and express values.
Hayek was Barry Goldwater’s favourite political philosopher and was said to be Ronald Reagan’s, too. Then there was Margaret Thatcher. To anyone who would listen, Thatcher lionised Hayek, promising to bring together his free-market philosophy with a revival of Victorian values: family, community, hard work.
Hayek met privately with Thatcher in 1975, at the very moment that she, having been named leader of the opposition in the UK, was preparing to bring his Big Idea off the shelf and into history. They huddled for 30 minutes on Lord North Street in London, at the Institute for Economic Affairs. Afterwards, Thatcher’s staff anxiously asked Hayek what he had thought. What could he say? For the first time in 40 years, power was mirroring back to Friedrich von Hayek his own cherished self-image, a man who might vanquish Keynes and remake the world.”
He replied: “She’s so beautiful.”
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