Instead of a traditional holiday card, I have written three examples of what the late great Lezek Kowlakowski called “semiphilosophical sermons.” I shall be publishing one after another in the coming weeks, as a kind of tryptic.
In Kowlakowski’s own semi-philosophical sermons, collected in Modernity on Endless Trial, he traced the “unpleasant and insoluble dilemmas” that ran through liberalism, Marxism, and Christianity. He hoped that by identifying real dilemmas he could keep himself from getting too carried away by any one train of thought, and thereby protect himself from the sort of mad reasonableness that is the hallmark of the ideologue. Instead, he aimed for “moderation in consistency.”
For my own semi-philosophical sermons, I have selected short texts that open vistas onto larger systems of thought. They are all thematically concerned with winter, or at least the cold. For liberalism I have chosen A Christmas Carol. Instead of Marxism, I will read Beowulf for insight into conservative vitalism. For Christianity, I will read early chapters from the Gospels according to Luke and Matthew. If I have little hope of solving the dilemmas I uncover, I at least hope to show them (and therefore myself) more clearly.
Speak comfort to me, Jacob!
I have none to give.
A Christmas Carol (1843)
If you are like me, and have a weakness for schadenfreude, then you have been following the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried with avidity. He was a crypto-currency boy genius, a son of Stanford professors and a darling of Oxford dons, a twenty-something multi-billionaire who was “heralded as a modern J.P. Morgan,” until it turned out that he was nothing more than a common embezzler, and his only genius was his ability to spot an over-educated mark a mile off.
Besides the tech and finance worlds, his main mark was the effective altruism movement. Drawing on the utilitarianism of 19th-century English liberals like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, effective altruists argue that one should contribute as much money as possible to the charities that do the maximum amount of good. So don’t donate money to your church. Give it to an NGO distributing malaria nets instead, as that will save more lives.
A few years ago the Oxford philosopher William MacAskill, effective altruism’s de facto spokesman, recruited Bankman-Fried to the cause as part of his [MacAskill’s] larger campaign to turn high-earners into high-givers. Bankman-Fried pledged untold billions to the greater good of humankind. Most of it never materialized. When the news of his protege's fraudulence broke, MacAskill was naturally livid. “If those involved deceived others or engaged in fraud,” he fumed, “they entirely abandoned the principles of the effective altruism community.”
True, and yet. Although MacAskill’s movement has championed worthy causes, and effectively too (for instance, it inspired me to donate to Oxfam), Bankman-Fried’s deception points to a deeper issue, which haunts not only effective altruism but also liberalism as a whole. And as it is a haunting, there is no better way to explain it than with a ghost story.
The Janus-Face of Liberalism
George Orwell pegged the moral vision in Charles Dickens’ novels as that of a “nineteenth-century liberal.” This is certainly the case in A Christmas Carol, where consciously or not, Dickens is trying to relieve one of liberalism's most enduring tensions. To wit: liberalism is a coin with two very different sides. On the one side is moral liberalism; on the other, market liberalism.
Nineteenth-century moral liberalism was a broad church. It included everything from individual political rights, such as freedom of conscience and assembly, to moral theories like utilitarianism, which aims to produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Its foundation was a belief in the individual, who had both equal rights and an equal claim to moral worth. Nobody gets more political rights because they are the smartest or strongest; similarly, in a utilitarian calculation, nobody’s suffering or happiness has more weight than anybody else’s. The moral liberal’s default emotional setting is benevolence, charity, and good will to all.
As for market liberalism, its sentiments could hardly be more different. A liberal market economy (ie, capitalism) depends not only on certain legal arrangements–private property law, free trade, and a state willing and able to protect both by force–but also on particular attitudes. These include self-interest, a competitive spirit, and most controversially, greed. A more colorful way to describe the ideal market liberal would be as follows: “Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone. Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!”
This covetous old sinner never lets human need interfere with his pursuit of profits. He keeps his counting house frosty because coal is expensive, and whenever his shivering clerk Bob Chratchit asks for more, “the master [Scrooge] predicted that it would be necessary for them to part.” Because the cold saves his master money, the clerk must keep on freezing, otherwise the poor man will have no money for food, or medical care for his sickly son, Tiny Tim.
Dickens gives Scrooge the quintessential capitalist’s profession: money lending. All of his money comes from financial speculation and the accumulation of interest, which is to say he reaps where he does not sow. Why can he do this? As a lender, he can depend on the extra-market institutions of the state and its legal system to enforce his contracts. (See: bankruptcy law and the debtors’ prison.) Given the enormous importance of money-lending to a capitalist economy, it is fair to say that Scrooge represents the whole economic order of 19th-century England. It would be impossible without men like him, and men like him would be impossible without it.
Scrooge represents market liberalism not only in his profession, but also in his sentiments. Namely, he hates charity. When he is asked to give donations to the poor, Scrooge famously asks: are there no prisons? No workhouses?
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die” [said the gentlemen soliciting charitable donations].
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge,” they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Dickens dislikes market liberalism (if you couldn’t tell), probably because of his own experiences with counting houses and the debtors’ prison. The “surplus population” line, though, also suggests Dickens’ familiarity with, and criticism of, the works of liberal political economists such as Thomas Malthus, who insisted that efforts to relieve famine were counterproductive, as they only led to unsustainable population growth.
Market liberals generally claimed, and still claim, that while greed and avarice may look ugly up close, they are ultimately beneficial. In fact, money lenders like Scrooge perform a public good! With their single-minded pursuit of profit, they reroute capital from less to more efficient uses, and since efficiency means “making more of what people want to pay for,” capitalism is a system for satisfying peoples’ preferences and thus is conducive to human happiness. This is how liberal economics satisfies the demands of liberal morality, in theory. The history of liberal economics in the 19th century, however, suggests that its consequences can be terrible beyond belief.
Perennial Problems of Market Liberalism
Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1846. At the time, England’s “dark Satanic mills” had been humming for decades. Poverty wages, black lungs, and child labor, though, were nothing compared to what would happen when English market liberalism went global.
Starting in the 1870s, famines decimated the population of present-day China and the Indian subcontinent, both under English colonial rule. The death toll was something between 30 and 60 million. In India, an estimated 20 million starved to death between 1876 and 1879 alone, despite the fact that more than 40,000 tons of grain were exported from India to England during roughly the same period. How could that be? Simple. The grain was the property of English merchants, and inalienable property rights are the foundation of market liberalism. In the words of the late historian Mike Davis, the poor of the third world “died during the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed, many were murdered … by the theological application of the sacred principles of [Adam] Smith, [Jeremy] Bentham, and [John Stuart] Mill.”
For instance, during the height of the famine in India, Lord Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton refused to interfere with skyrocketing grain prices, which of course made grain unaffordable for the poor of India, but very efficient (read: lucrative) on the Manchester exchange. After all, as he had read in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, “famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting, by improper means [ie, price controls], to remedy the inconvenience of dearth.” If these words were true when Smith published them in 1776, they were no longer true after his disciple put them into practice a century later.
For any but the most hard-hearted market liberals, this was an unacceptable state of affairs. The trouble is that it points to a basic problem with market liberalism: it satisfies preferences in a way that makes no distinction between wants, like bubblegum, and needs, like housing and grain. They are both distributed by the price system, and if you are an Indian peasant–or anyone else priced out of the food market–then you starve.
Why did the Indian peasants have no grain? The famines in India and China happened in large part because the English government and its market-friendly laws displaced traditional forms of agriculture, which made more provisions for a bad year. This should be no surprise. All but the most ideologically blinkered market liberals must admit that even though capitalism generates terrific wealth, it routinely has devastating local effects as it liquifies existing economic and social orders. That is what happened when agrarian India and China were integrated into the European industrial economy in the 19th century. It still happens today, though thankfully on a less catastrophic scale.
Those who, unlike Indian subsistence farmers, can make a living from market liberalism are subject to its laws. Bob Cratchit cannot force Scrooge to heat his office. It is naive to think that he could simply find another employer who would. As Marx pointed out, capitalists didn’t pay low wages because they were wicked; they paid low wages because otherwise they would face irate shareholders or be undercut by competitors who were willing to suppress wages in order to lower prices. Propaganda to the contrary, life in the market is usually not a matter of freedom but, far more often, takes place under intense and pervasive surveillance and discipline.
Finally, the money-lenders’ speculation on grain, currency, and commodities may make some very rich, but it bankrupts others when the asset bubble pops. No asset is safe from a market collapse. Creative destruction may clear away inefficient firms and even entire industries, but it also assures that few fortunes will last long, disaster is only a bad quarterly earning report away, and one’s economic security can never be taken for granted.
Whether they are acknowledged or not, these common problems of free market economies suggest that market liberalism requires something more to provide for human needs. Within liberalism, that something is exactly what Scrooge hates most: charity.
The Palliative of Charity
A Christmas Carol is the story of how Scrooge becomes charitable. That is, he converts from market to moral liberalism, as Marley tells him he must:
“But you were always a good man of business, Jacob” faltered Scrooge.
“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing his hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
Like any market liberal, Scrooge is trying to equate two senses of being good: 1) skillful in business matters, and 2) morally praiseworthy. Marley demurs. Being good at business requires clear-eyed self-interest, hard-headedness (if not hard-heartedness), and ruthless cunning; whereas being morally good, says Marley, requires the exact opposite virtues, like charity and mercy.
Through his encounters with the three ghosts of Christmas, Scrooge takes this lesson to heart and changes his behavior. He stops pursuing profits above all else; he gives his poor clerk a big raise, saving Tiny Tim’s life; and he also seeks out a second chance to be charitable. He finds the soliciting gentleman and whispers something in his ear:
“Lord bless me!” cried the gentleman, as if his breath were taken away. “My dear Mr. Scrooge, are you serious?”
“If you please,” said Scrooge. “Not a farthing less. A great many back-payments are included in it, I assure you.”
Overall, then, Dickens resolves the conflict between market and moral liberalism through a change of heart. Market liberalism allows for the accumulation of vast sums, but then the rich man changes his ways, and distributes his former gains with liberality. Charity is the answer.
It’s heart-warming. I always cry, especially at the end when Tiny Tim lives.
It also strikes me, though, that Scrooge’s present and future liberality would not have been possible without his rapacious past. The same could be said of market and moral liberalism as a whole. Greed makes charity possible, and necessary. To go a step further, not only does market liberalism fund moral liberalism, but the latter also returns the favor by providing the former with an ethical fig leaf to hide its shame. (Just think of the way that various corporate and private foundations are established to address the very problems that their founders created.) Even the welfare state, finally, is a system of charity: the market system creates wealth, and then the state redirects some of that to the poor and needy. Unfortunately, the welfare state is always at risk of being rolled back in the name of (what else?) market efficiency.
This vexed relationship between market and moral liberalism remains with us today. Like Jacob Marley, William MacAskill tried to convert Sam Bankman-Fried into a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge, which is interesting precisely because the unreformed Scrooge and his effects on society are a little harder to get rid of than Dickens leads us to believe.
Effective Altruism Redux
The movement began with Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” (1972). He pointed out that people were, at the time of his writing, starving to death in East Bengal. All of us would rush into a pond to save a drowning child, even if it meant ruining our nice shoes, but why weren’t we donating money to famine relief in East Bengal, where for the cost of a pair of shoes we could save 10 or 20 lives? We certainly should, and in fact we should keep giving until the famine was over or we had beggared ourselves. If we put his theory into practice “even in its qualified form, our lives, our society, and our world would be fundamentally changed.”
For decades, the world remained pretty much the same. Singer’s paper remained a thought experiment, something I enjoyed teaching in seminar because of how badly it disturbed my students. In recent years, however, the movement has taken off. I attribute its success to two crucial new ideas, both of which made the movement a much better fit with market liberalism, especially its finance and tech sectors.
First, doing good by doing well. If it’s good to give as much as you can, then isn’t it also good if you can give much more, say by accumulating lots and lots of money? Don’t be a social worker in some Dickensian slum. If you’ve got the mathematical aptitude, become a city-boy banker like Scrooge instead. Then you’ll have more money to give away!
Except, to paraphrase Augustine, the prayer of many an effective altruist might be: Lord make me charitable, but not yet. That’s because the second development is “longtermism,” coined by MacAskill himself. People in the future matter just as much as people now. Consequently, one shouldn’t relieve present-day famines. One should instead figure out what threatens humanity’s future prospects, as human extinction would mean a terrible loss of utility. Maybe the existential threat is climate change. But it also might be an asteroid hurtling toward the planet or evil artificial intelligence or something else out of a science fiction movie that will just so happen to require massive investments in the tech industry–even if there’s no money left over for malaria nets or Tiny Tim’s life-saving medical care.
Come to think of it, if we promised to spend money on malaria nets eventually, we would certainly want to buy as many as possible, which would mean making as much money as possible by continually reinvesting all of our capital gains so as to make even more money. Purchasing even a single net today would reduce our principal, thereby decreasing our long-term earnings. As a result, the actual purchase of nets would keep getting pushed into the future, indefinitely. And why let the government tax our nuggets? They’ll spend the money on immediate rather than long-term needs. Better to move our fortune to the Bahamas, like Sam Bankman-Fried did.
I trust you see the irony. What starts as a radical call to charity–a secular version of “sell all you own and then distribute the money to the poor”--can become a justification of capital accumulation with no end in sight, funding for scientific moonshot projects, and tax dodging. It’s pretty much what rich people like to do anyway. Is it really a surprise when they get on board? Or when they enjoy sci-fi prognostication at fancy conferences but renege on promises to buy malaria nets and remove lead paint?
Coda: Bah! Humbug!
Yes, I am proceeding by the hermeneutics of suspicion here, reading a movement and its documents to mean the exact opposite of what they say. It’s always uncharitable but it isn’t always untrue. Better yet, the hermeneutics of suspicion have a way of alerting us to dangers latent in seemingly benign systems of thought, as when Freud points out that God the benevolent and loving father can easily become a petty tyrant, rewarding and punishing His children for their every deed and thought. In a similar way, I hope I have shown how effective altruism, and moral liberalism on the whole, can inadvertently cover for, and even exacerbate, the defects of market liberalism.
To be sure, effective altruism has saved an untold number of lives. Maybe it is indeed the most good we can do, within a liberal framework. The trouble is that in trying to harness the forces of market liberalism for its own ends, it risks the relationship going the other way round, offering new justifications for investments in the finance and tech sectors when so many peoples’ basic needs still go unmet. At the very least, one would hope that the Sam Bankman-Fried scandal, plus the long history of tech and finance bubbles and crashes, will lead proponents of effective altruism to re-price those sectors in their utilitarian calculations.
Are “doing good by doing well” and “longtermism” poor maxims? Maybe not. If we follow a strictly utilitarian line of reasoning, it really might be better to ignore suffering today and worry about what the AI will do tomorrow. Even so, I would still say, with Kowlakowski, that this seems like a perfect time to practice “moderation in consistency.”