The siren song of financial realism

Ulysses and the sirens by Draper Herbert James (c.1909).Wikicommons/Bridegman Art Library. Some rights reserved.Ulysses’ encounter with the Sirens
speaks of the fatal attraction humanity has towards enticing enchantments. I am
going to try and convince you that we too are being seduced towards our own destruction
by an enticing yet predatory enchantment. I call this enchantment “financial
realism.”

This song, intoning the iron
mechanics of global financial reality, now seems hypnotically embedded in the assumptions
and practices of high power. High power – global finance, trade and military
force – increasingly defines the limits of political deliberation at the level
of communities and polities across the world.

The Sirens who sing to high power
masquerade as manifestations of naked and necessary truth. High power loves
their song, but we also – rowers of the global boat – are being seduced. In
fact, the Sirens are not what they seem, they do not proclaim disinterested truth.
They are handmaids of a very distinctive conception of amoral and practical knowledge
and their song promotes a very particular power agenda which subtly, but most
effectively, obfuscates the very logic of democratic politics.

Tracing the patterns in the
evolution of post-1945 globalization it is not hard to see where high power is
trending. When the globe is entirely embedded in the laws of politically unimpeded
financial realism, this will destroy the very meaning of democratic politics,
crippling the human spirit and leaving horrifying exploitation and destruction
in its wake.

Greek case an archetype

Let us momentarily put our
fingers in our ears to the orthodoxies of enchantment. Let us question the
Sirens, their song and the destination that high power is taking us to. Let us
ask: is nation-state democratic politics under threat from the financialization
of power at an international level?

Relations between Syriza and the Troika
from January 25 to July 8 of 2015 give us a very dramatic illustration of what can
happen when nation-state democratic politics seeks to negotiate terms with
international financial power. One could not fail to notice how fruitless Greece’s
attempts to negotiate more realistic repayment terms with the Troika were, and
how meaningless a national anti-austerity referendum result proved to be, both to
the Troika and to Greece’s own parliament. It seems reasonable to conclude that
in this case, the prerogatives of representative democratic politics were
effectively expunged by international financial power. If the Greek case is in some
sense archetypal of how power now works between nation-states and high finance,
then the very idea of democratic politics at a national level is becoming
meaningless. If that is indeed the case, then people committed to the values of
democratic politics have a big problem on their hands.

Greece has particular and extreme
financial vulnerabilities, and these, combined with the unique architecture of
the eurozone, make it possible to think that there are no global lessons to be
learnt from this case.  But,
unfortunately, that is not so. Wherever one cares to look, the manner in which
global financial and international business forces are displacing national
political prerogatives is apparent. Even so, this process is not disconnected
from all nation-states. Financially powerful states are big players in the
global arena.

Any more than cursory examination
of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership makes it clear that a key objective of these bilateral trade
agreements is that the nationally situated regulation of business activities
and conditions – for small nations – is being made subservient to the interests
of powerful American corporations. International corporate interests are
rapidly escaping political accountability to the citizens of all states who are
not big global players, and states that are big global players increasingly act
to advance their international financial interests, not to advance the
interests of their own citizens. The irrelevance of the Greek polity to the
conditions under which international financial power dictates they shall live
and do business is a stark illustration of a pervasive global trend.

Financial Realism is the dominant
ideology of international financial power. Here, financial power is its own
justification. Because this ideology governs the operational logic and accepted
norms of high finance, and because this ideology is believed to be necessary
and reasonable by those who implement it (and, sadly, to many who are caught up
in its implementation), we can see that ideas rule the world. Let us see if we
can understand the ruling ideology of our times better.

Financial realism is a mutation of political realism

In modern political philosophy,
those approaches to power that are typically termed realist hold that the
observable evidence indicates that political actors always try and act in such
a way as to advance their own power interests. Hence, every realistic political
actor should act in such a way that
advances their own power interests, and by whatever means works. In the final
analysis, political realism is a pragmatic outlook which assumes that power is
its own justification. In other words, might is right.

There is a metaphysical
assumption underlying modern political realism, and it is this: politics is an
amoral forum of action. There is a cosmological assumption underlying modern
political realism, and it is this: power relations are contests for survival
and domination, which is, after all, only natural.

The Siren that we hear
proclaiming the truth of financial realism has a name. She is the
Neoconservative TINA. Given than power is its own justification, that victory
in contest is what power aims at, that power is amoral, and that it is rational
for the powerful to protect and pursue their own interest, There Is No
Alternative to fitting in with whatever the most powerful wish to do. But is
TINA really true?

In philosophy there are always at
least two sides to every argument, and this is as true in relation to views
about the nature of power as it is to views about the nature of everything
else. So let us look at an alternative view on the nature of power.

Traditionally, the opposite
stance to political realism is called moral realism. Dante and Shakespeare
provide us with good examples of moral realist perspectives on power. Here,
human affairs are not determined by the survivalist mechanics of Social
Darwinism. Here indeterminacy, moral truths, transcendent mystery and reasoned
debate (freedom) are as important in power as are natural drives and limits and
essential needs (necessity). Here, power does not operate in an amoral manner.

To Dante and Shakespeare unscrupulous
pragmatic pursuers of power may indeed be ‘successful’ in achieving their
objectives – and political actors indeed are free to choose evil – yet the
ruthless pursuit of power for its own sake is never amoral because we live in a
moral universe. Power freaks might hope to ignore or violate moral realities, but
the truth is, you cannot escape moral reality just as you cannot escape the
laws of physics. To the moral realist, history illustrates that immoral political
‘success’ inevitably generates dynamics of exploitation, evil and dysfunction
which must take their destructive course once they are set in motion. The oft
repeated lesson of political history is that sustainable power cannot be built
against the moral grain of the universe.

The metaphysical assumption
underlying moral realism is that moral truths are, in some manner, features of
reality. The cosmological assumption underlying both Dante and Shakespeare’s
moral realism is that even though deception, oppression and evil are normal
features of politics, these are – at an ontological level – aberrations.
Reality, at its most basic level, is a harmony of differences undergirded by
the love and goodness of God.

So why is this alternative to
TINA’s political realism not being advocated today?

Western political theory

For interesting reasons, the west’s
political heritage in moral realism has had sporadic traction on modern western
political theory, and almost no traction over the past 30 years.

Because western moral realism has
roots in Christian theology, after Feuerbach, the new social and political
sciences largely rejected the west’s Christian heritage in political thought,
including its moral realism.

Of course, the process of
rejection was well under way before the 1840s as the origins narrative of
secular liberal politics – theologically driven as much of it was – is embedded
in a profound backlash against the horrifying sectarian violence that wracked
Europe after the Reformation. Of course, modern secular politics was greatly
influenced by its rejection of religious examples of political realism too,
such as those practised in the Spanish Inquisition. Reasoning about moral truth
without theological warrants has a long tradition in western modernity, but the
historical connections between the Christian religion and western moral realism
has been something of a hindrance to its acceptability in the academy for the
past 180 years.

Another problem with moral
realism in western modernity is that not many people seem to have noticed that it
has disappeared from our high culture. To the student of political philosophy,
that which separates political realism from moral realism is pretty obvious. In
practice, it is by no means obvious. There are three reasons for
this.

Firstly the dominant discourse of
secular ethics in the modern west is now pragmatic, relativistic, utilitarian
and formally legalistic. That is, it is increasingly normal that we understand
morality itself in non-moral-realist terms. Non-realist moral consciousness
does not deny the subjective existence of moral convictions and sentiments in
individuals, nor does it claim that classical moral realist prohibitions and
injunctions are to be ignored, nor does it deny that our legal codes are
historically embedded in moral realist assumptions. Indeed, political realism
holds that the existence of people’s moral sentiments and beliefs are
significant factors in any power context which the political actor ignores at
great peril. Machiavelli, no less, was very sensitive to this.

Likewise, law is here understood as a
construction that is of profound political significance. Thus the formal
requirements of law are typically taken very seriously by political realists.
For these reasons there often appears to be no inner tension at play when a
law-abiding political actor who personally adheres to moral realist convictions
is required to toe the party line and function in a politically realist manner.

Secondly, liberal secularism privatizes
moral conviction. Within the life-form of liberal secularism, demarcations
between personal beliefs on the one hand and objective truths and legal actions
on the other hand, makes it common for people who hold moral realist convictions
to accept that those convictions do not apply to the realm of objective truth
and practical action.

Thirdly, political realism is –
ironically – typically understood as a normative outlook itself. That is, the
idea that the advancement and use of power is,
in point of fact, the first objective of political action is often understood
as implying that the advancement and use of power should be the first objective of rational political action.

Fascinatingly, this collapse of ‘is’ to
‘ought’ is embedded in the acceptance of Hume’s account of the naturalistic
fallacy. If there is no objective ‘ought,’ then instrumental amoral power is
the only rational understanding of power, and hence all serious power actors
who are rational and scientific should
be political realists. Here, ironically, any political actor who does not accept
political realism is readily seen as being morally defective for being
hopelessly unrealistic.

For these three reasons we tend to
think we are decent moral people while acting according to the necessary
requirements of amoral pragmatic reality. At the level of political slogans and
popular public consciousness, then, the underlying opposition between a moral
realist understanding of right and wrong and a utilitarian understanding of
political success and failure goes almost entirely unnoticed.

Moral realism
since Marx

Interestingly, different forms of moral realism have still been with us
since Marx famously crossed the fiery brook into the materialist paradigm of
the social sciences. British Idealism in the late nineteenth century and
Universal Human Rights after World War Two are two good examples of this. Both
were secularized versions of Christian moral realism. These two examples,
however, failed to shape the world of ideas and practice since the 1910s and
the 1980s respectively. British Idealism was disposed of by pragmatic
positivism in the early decades of the twentieth century – a “realist” friendly
philosophical stance if ever there was one. After the horrors of World War Two
faded from memory, a genuinely universal approach to human rights shifted from
being a substantive moral commitment to being a formal legal construct. If one
has a good legal mind law can be used as a structure to advance the realist
demand for the pursuit of rational self-interest, without any regard for
substantive moral concerns.

Both these attempts to put moral realist boundaries on power failed to
slow the ever expanding impact of political realist commitments governing
global power. This is no great surprise, for political realism was nascent in
the manner in which the USA set up the post-war architecture of the global
economy. Yet after the demise of the US surplus economy from around 1971 on, political
realism has evolved beyond an international state-concerned context and into a
global financial context. Here nation-states are no longer the central players
on the anarchic field of international power. Now a single global empire of
financial power has become the new Pax Romana. Within this global empire,
rewards are freely dispensed to winners, and destruction is callously handed
out to losers, with scarcely a thought for such non-financial concerns as
national politics, human rights or any humane compassion for the weak.

The enemy of
democratic politics

Moral realism of some form and a serious commitment to indeterminacy
rather than pure necessity, is necessary for democratic politics. The very idea
of representative political deliberation requires that power is a function of
publically reasoned agreement which results in us constructing laws and implementing public projects that advance the
common good of the polity.

Democratic political power only has the authority of being a product of
a justice concerned polity if the majority of those ruled freely agree to its
moral validity. Justice, after all, is a moral term situated within a community
context. A realist understanding of power, where validity is a function of the
mere force of a powerful elite in the advancement of their own interests, can
never be seen as politically valid. A realist understanding of power is also
bereft of the capacity to even see humanly concerned non-quantifiables such
that it is functionally deterministic, treating human affairs as if they are
governed by objective laws of necessity. This makes the unpredictable outcomes
of political deliberation a hindrance to the rational management of power.
Political and financial realism are in fact the mortal enemies of democratic
politics.

Modern
science

The recovery of moral realism in our times is necessary if we are to
revive a near dead commitment to making power morally accountable to the people
who are ruled. But how did political realism come to
have such a powerful ideological grip on post-war western polities and, via
that avenue, on global financial power?

This is a complex matter, but when you dig down deep,
it has a lot to do with the cultural power and distinctive belief and practice structures
of the modern scientific outlook on truth. Here French and German hermeneutic
philosophers and the French critique of knowledge loosely called postmodernism
are very insightful.

To Dante and Shakespeare, facts and values are always
integral. After the scientific revolution, the separation of objective facts
and logic on the one hand, from subjective values and meanings, on the other
hand, produced a distinctly instrumental and amoral understanding of objective
truth.

There are many wonderful fruits of modernity, but in
the area of politics, the idea that you could structure the use and ordering of
power around purely factual and logical (which is to say, deterministic)
accounts of reality has deeply influenced the way we try and do power.
Modernity has given us astonishing instrumental power – and power has a way of
amassing once you get a critical quantity, and it is certainly addictive – and
this power does have many wonderful applications.

And yet, historically, western modernity is a life-form
where power has an unprecedented autonomy from value and meaning. Frighteningly,
an intellectual culture that assumes that truth is amoral and valid because it
is useful, has no way of thinking about politics where political realism could
be anything other than true. But the truth of political realism, situated
within a modern philosophical context, is anything but certain.

Philosophically, the modern approach to truth has
always been problematic. Whilst modern truth works like a charm pragmatically,
its attempt to dispose of belief via indubitable empirical and rational proof
has never actually been achieved. But those interested in the pragmatic power
that the modern approach to knowledge has given us have never been terribly
concerned about philosophy.

Now that we are deeply embedded in the life-world of
modern power, we have the bizarre situation where people intellectually believe
things they existentially know are not true. In terms of what we take to be
economic and political reality, we are prepared to believe that the
self-interest of the rich and powerful, which exploits and destroys the weak
and vulnerable, is a mere fact of how power does and must work. This reality
might be unpleasant for the weak, but …too bad, that is just how things are. If
you don’t like it, get rich.

But existentially we know this is not true. We are
actually embedded in moral relations and responsibilities, whatever our outlook
on objective truth might be. But here is the sad truth. The way we think about
objective instrumental truth makes it hard for us to listen to our hearts, to
touch the moral realities in which we actually live and on which we actually
depend. It is now hard for us to speak about the truth of value and meaning in
a public context. We have a big problem here that is deeply embedded in the
modern western approach to knowledge and instrumental power.

Here is the conclusion of the matter. Unless we can vote in politicians
of genuine moral power – to use Ghandi’s term – and unless we can vote out politicians
who are committed to the pragmatics of merely winning power, and to the ‘realism’
of amoral instrumental determinism, then democratic politics will remain a tool
of the international domination of our polities by the high end of global
financial power.

Our acceptance of financial and political realism in
our politicians is the key link in the chain of our slavery. Our ideological slavery to amoral
realism upholds a global political arena in which the horrible exploitation of
the poor and indebted by the rich controllers of global finance is the
shockingly immoral norm. This is a morally repugnant global world order where the
senseless ransacking of labourers and nature in the global South for the accumulation
of wealth and power by a tiny global minority has far more power than democratic
politics.

Thinking as a moral realist it seems clear that the operational norms of
global financial power violate the most basic moral truths and thus this global
financial order will not last. Yet, unless we change things now, the
destruction resulting from the fall of the present order will be great and
terrible indeed.

There are moral realities to how societies work which any student of
history can identify. Exploitation and oppression has its natural limits,
though, via technological aids such as drones and supercomputers, our elites
have been able to extend a global environment of artificially produced social,
economic and political instability well beyond its natural implosion limits.
But there are post-natural limits too, such as ISIS and global warming. Surely
it is not beyond us to turn from the brink of global destruction before we hit
those limits? Surely the revival of morally meaningful politics is our only way
forward.

A political
NO

I would like to end this short essay where I began – in Greece. The
endeavour of Syriza to assert a moral, a reasoned and a political NO to the
demands of mere financial power has been genuinely inspiring, even though – as
I write – it has had no impact on the inhumane and irrational actions of
international financial power over the Greek state. But here is the reality of
the matter: there is nothing fixed about the way an economy works because it is
embedded in human choice, belief and action. We can make an economy work not simply for the advancement and
perpetuation of those who have the most dominant power interests over it, as if
society has to work that way.

Syriza has pointed out that the ideological power of financial realism is
now structuring money, law, society and humanity in such deep and corrupting
ways that it is destroying the very possibility of democratic politics and
humane economics. This makes the amoral logic of financial realism the greatest
peril to the well-being of humanity in our times. Further, the impossibility of
Troika demands points out that financial realism is
profoundly unrealistic about what is
even possible. By unrealistic I do not mean that it doesn’t ‘work’, but I mean
that when it works power becomes nothing other than mute force, which is the
displacement of politics with violence. Thus, financial realism is politically unrealistic.

If we want to live in a global context where human
affairs are governed by reasoned debate, where laws are transparently
determined by representative democracies, and where power is directed towards
humane ends that uphold the common good, we must abandon both political realism
and its now global imperial mutation, financial realism. Here, Pope Francis,
the political philosophies of both Plato and Aristotle, French cultural
critiques like Paul Virilio and the Radical Left of Syriza all stand together.
People committed to morally governed politics, no matter where they come from
philosophically or theologically, have the same basic foe – those who believe in
amoral power.

The Siren song of financial realism has
enchanted European politicians and our polities. It is a song the powerful love
to hear. But it is a song that will destroy all that is good and humane about
Europe. This is what Syriza shows us. And the resistance which Syriza has given
is the only sign of hope for the political future of Europe

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