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The Soul of Economies

“I do not believe the spiritual law works on a field of its own. On the contrary, it expresses itself only through the ordinary activities of life. It thus affects the economic, the social, and the political fields.”

Foreword

In the 1970s, worried, even terrified, by the oil-energy crisis, humankind gave many poignant expressions of the need for a world view of economic survival, symbolized most graphically and articulately perhaps by the Club of Rome.

But the crisis passed, at least temporarily, and the 1980s saw a huge resurgence of economic lavishness. Now, just in time, we may hope, Denise Breton and Christopher Largent remind us that the crisis of the global economy was not something that passed with the seeming end of the oil shortage of the ’70s but something broader and deeper, which neither the communist nor the capitalist system has even begun to address in a serious global perspective. It is significant that the authors of this study both have a background in philosophy.

Indeed, not since Will and Ariel Durant has a team of philosophers been able to articulate to a broad reading public the practical meaning of philosophical concepts and their application to real life situations, in this case, the economic problems of our real world. Here is what we hope will be the first of several volumes, emulating the Durants, by this new husband-wife team as they endeavor to put the whole field of economics into a framework that addresses the human condition in a world perspective.

This comes at a most opportune time, as we emerge from nearly a half century of cold war between capitalist and communist blocs. he authors insist that it is time and that there is opportunity to move from “billiard-ball” to whole-seeking methods in the economic sphere. Thus, instead of self-centered capitalism and materialistic communism, we may in the 1990s be able to map a whole (and wholesome) approach to economic development.

And it is entirely possible, even probable, that we may discover that scarcity of and conflict for economic resources are not inevitable, but only seem so because of the “billiard-ball assumptions” that have limited our vision up to now (pp. 138–9). Utilizing the teachings of the world’s various religions, the authors show how each of them has revelations—albeit imperfectly understood—as to what an appropriate course for improving economic conditions on a global scale, ultimately meaning our global survival, might be.

The idea that knowledge stemming from insight, genius, even revelation is always imperfect is central to the authors’ analysis. Such knowledge, rather than giving perfect answers, leads toward solutions that may be worked out. But that solutions can be found, given broad enough perspective, is implicit.

The result is that we have here a much broader perspective on the world’s economies than either Wall Street or the Kremlin could produce.

— F. Hilary Conroy, Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania

—France H. Conroy, Professor of Philosophy, Burlington College

Preface

By Denise Breton and Christopher Largent

We’re not economists. Only the smallest fraction of the earth’s population is. Nonetheless, like every other soul on earth, we participate in economies and wrestle daily with economic concerns. Our premise is that, since everyone is involved with economies, everyone takes part in shaping them. Together, “we the people” direct their course.

In turn, economies reflect their creators. They mirror not just our needs but more our aspirations and values: questions of philosophy and religion.

Trained in comparative religion and philosophy, we treat economies from these perspectives. That is, we don’t delve into micro- or macroeconomic theory, nor do we give investment advice or stock tips. Instead, we examine the roots of economies in the deeper questions of life. he bottom line here relates not to numbers but to ideas. In other words, the philosophical yardstick measures neither private assets nor the public GNP but the practicality of the philosophies we live by.

Unfortunately, when experts get near economies, we don’t hear much about religious and philosophical issues. At most, they tie the sticky-fingers epidemic to greed, one of the seven deadly sins, but that’s about it. Listening to them, we end up shaking our heads at how corrupt we’ve become, without thinking more deeply about causes and alternatives.

Yet the deeper issues are timely. The very fact that we’re finally fed up with corruption everywhere, after decades of letting it go, means that we ourselves are changing. That we see scandals on Wall Street or Main Street has a bright side. We realize where corrupt world views lead, and we no longer find their worlds acceptable. We’re ready to tackle the deeper issues: What are our philosophies? Where do they take us? And can we go somewhere else?

The more we look at our philosophies, the more we change them. As they change, we change, and with us, our economies. Gandhi, for instance, insisted on wedding inward AND outward growth. As he put it, only the evolution of “Soul-Force” can bring peace, equity, and justice to the worlds of “brute force.”1 If he was right, then evolving our philosophies isn’t armchair intellectualizing; it holds the mind and life of our future.

How does this book contribute to the job Gandhi described?

First, we’d like to take the religions and philosophies of the world more into the marketplace, so that their insights can help us where we need help. Scholars have done a tremendous job translating the sacred texts that discuss “Soul-Force” and its evolution. But the fruits of their labors often remain cut off from everyday affairs. We do academic or spiritual things, and then we do life. The different spheres don’t talk, even though each has much to give the other.

Second, according to religions and philosophies, we all have a role in shaping economies. Economies aren’t out there happening to us. They are us. Not that each of us is to blame for all the economic messes. How could we be? No one of us makes all the decisions. Rather, we’re simply not helpless before economies. We can do something about them.

Third, doing something about economies starts with our minds. Changing DOING without first changing THINKING doesn’t get us very far. We think the doing has changed, when really it’s the same old theme played over again. Real change starts with our philosophies. We evolve how we conceive of reality and ourselves. As it turns out, evolving our philosophies affects more than our heads. Both we and our economies end up transformed.

Fourth, to evolve our philosophies, we need the philosophical tools to do it:

• The FIRST CHAPTER contrasts two different ways of making tools: a billiard-ball method with a whole-seeking method.

• The SECOND CHAPTER shows how these two different methods give rise to two contrasting models of economies.

• The THIRD CHAPTER looks at what makes up practical philosophies—the tools that form them.

• The FOURTH and FIFTH CHAPTERS discuss the dynamics of spiritual growth—how we go forward and what keeps us going.

• The LAST FOUR CHAPTERS show how the philosophical tools of Chapter 3 evolve our everyday philosophies on a spiritual basis—and keep them evolving. To do this, we’ve enlisted the help of some of the most basic teachings in Western religion: the Bible’s days of creation, Commandments, Beatitudes, and Lord’s Prayer.

In short, the book isn’t about answers, mainly because we don’t know the answers to modern economic problems. Nor do we know which philosophies are right for which people at which stage of development. The book does, however, explore METHODS. If we can get our hands on reliable methods for evolving our philosophies, then we can each work out the answers we need as we go.

Chapter 1: The crises that came to dinner

I. Whose economy is it anyway?

Whether we’re watching television or chatting with friends, we hear about crises. Virgin coasts go black with oil, while the ozone layer shrinks. Tax money goes to arms profiteers and drug runners, as the infrastructures of our cities crumble. Banks reel under bad loans, while entire countries contemplate bankruptcy.

The crises aren’t distant rumors. They’ve moved into our homes like nuisance visitors who won’t leave. The only advantage to having them around is that we’ve discovered what makes them tick: money, or to put it properly, economics—not the academic discipline but the everyday way we arrange who gets what.

Crime—from inner city to organized to white collar—is a thoroughly economic creature. Even so-called crimes of passion—shooting the stray lover or spouse—often have economic roots.1

Poverty and homelessness are equally economic. The gap between rich and poor—that less than one per cent of the population controls more than half the nation’s wealth, or that the maximum wage is roughly 18,000 times the minimum wage—is economic for sure.

Drugs, which visited ancient Persia and Mesopotamia long before they came to New York and L.A., are every bit economic. Today’s drug empire makes the political empires of the past seem paltry by comparison.

Pollution, a newcomer in modern proportions, occurs for economic reasons and is tolerated for the same. How can we afford to clean it up? We went deeply into debt just to create it.

War, a real old-timer, is ragingly economic. As Socrates put it over two millennia ago, “All wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth.”2 In The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, historian Paul Kennedy argues a modern version, namely, that defense systems are necessary for the protection of wealth.3 Somehow money is always lurking behind conflicts.

Political corruption smells economic. Power may corrupt, but it needs cash to make it stick.

Personal, corporate, national, and international debts are up-front economic—and the hardest to get out of the house. Interest compounds faster than we can count and certainly faster than we can pay.

With all these visitors intruding, family life suffers. We can’t afford the time to raise the kids, much less to relax and enjoy the life we’ve worked so hard to establish.

The good news is that we know what brought the visitors through the door. The bad news is that they might be here to stay. So far, the best minds, intentions, and institutions haven’t budged them.

But the bad news overlooks one point: it’s our house. We have a say about who lives with us.

 

Driven by distraction

Not that the intruders pay much attention to our complaining. They have a long list of excuses why they can’t go—a list rehearsed nightly on the news. Uncontrollable, economic forces are at work. Blind laws of economics, like the blind forces of volcanos or hurricanes, created the crises and prevent their resolution.

But the blind-laws view ignores the bottom line: the economic story is about us. We own the house. “We the people” make up economies. For better or worse, economies don’t function apart from our decisions, since without us they don’t exist.

After all, economies aren’t like rock formations. They’re no more determined by blind, faceless forces than architects are determined by gravity. We create economies to be the way they are, just as architects create buildings to look the way they do. If we don’t like the way our economies come out, we can make them work differently.

Which is why we have economies in the first place. We create them to work for us—to feed, clothe, house, and educate us. We build them to channel creativity, to exchange goods and services, and to advance knowledge.

What happens then? How did we get stuck with the crises that came to dinner, since we certainly didn’t invite them?

A famous Hindu image—the metaphor of the chariot and the charioteer4—suggests how the crises sneaked in. In the original metaphor, the chariot represents the body, the horses represent the senses, and the charioteer the mind. If the charioteer falls asleep, the horses run away with the chariot. If we let our minds go to sleep, the metaphor says, we allow the senses to take over. Material desires run our lives.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. As soon as the driver wakes up, the horses go wherever he steers them. Our minds can guide the senses and keep them out of trouble. The more awake we are, the more we’re able to manage the physical side of life wisely.

The message for economies isn’t hard to figure out. Economies become the chariot, economic desires the horses, and we the charioteer. Ideally, we steer our economic desires so that our economies go where we wish.

The trouble is, that’s not happening. Why not? It can’t be because we’re asleep. Clearly, no one gets much sleep in modern economies. We do, however, get sidetracked by the rat race. Raising a family or managing a business keeps us running. We’re awake but distracted.

Unfortunately, distractions can be as dangerous as sleep. Working to keep ahead, we stop steering our economic desires, which gives them a chance to start steering us. The horses take over, carrying the chariot and the charioteer (us) to places we never meant to go. Economic fears and motives call the shots. After a while, we feel helpless to change our course.

Which is precisely what has happened. While we were busy getting busier, the horses—ours or someone else’s—ran us into one crisis after another. Ivan Boesky’s name hit the headlines because he let his insider-trading team run out of control. Defense contractors apparently have herds that no one stops, as do hospitals and insurance companies. Those in charge of national and international debts could have said “Whoa!” several trillion dollars ago.

Fortunately, horses running away with chariots tend to give charioteers a bumpy ride—at least bumpy enough to get their full attention. Crises have the same effect. Whether jolts come from a sharp decrease in the oxygen supply or a sharp decrease on the stock exchange, they focus the mind. Jolts remind us that we have a say in mak-ing economies what they are. We wake up to find that the reins are in our hands.

In a mess, it’s no good blaming the horses (economic desires), the chariot (the economy) or even the charioteer (ourselves). The chariot goes where the horses take it. The horses go where the driver lets them, while we (the driver) do the best we can with barely half an eye on the road. Blame is irrelevant. We don’t need scapegoats; we need to get back on track—to show the nuisance visitors the door.

 

II. Looking for big maps

Recognizing that the crises are economic and that economies are ours to change puts us back in the driver’s seat, this time with our eyes open. But what then? Where do we go with the chariot?

To set a good course, we need maps. Maps show us where we are, good places to go, and safe roads that take us there.

Economic theories, explained on televison by experts using toy houses and play money, provide one set of maps. The theories document the course that economies take. When interest rates go up, economists tell us what happens next. When markets go down, economic theories explain why. Economic maps describe the specifics of the terrain. They’re useful for negotiating the chariot’s short, immediate course.

But we need more. Presumably, we drive the horses and chariot not just for the fun of it but in order to go somewhere—to achieve something. But what? And which direction takes us there?

More than supply-and-demand maps, we need maps about the big questions—maps that sort out our basic conceptions of ourselves and what’s ultimately real. Who are we, and what are we doing here? How we answer these questions sets the aims that our economies then serve. If we’re here to make as much money as possible, we act one way. If we’re here to develop our minds and souls, we act differently and get different results.

Both religion and philosophy design maps around questions of meaning and direction. They sketch big maps that relate us to what’s beyond us (an economy, a universe, God), so that we can find our way.

Drawing on these disciplines, we adapt their maps to our needs. We develop philosophies for everything we do: for running governments, businesses, and schools, raising children, and generally getting along with each other. The maps of religion and philosophy orient us not only in eternity but also day to day. They provide the head tools we need to keep us on track.

If the philosophies are good, we get around just fine. The chariot goes where we intend. When we face challenges, the maps show us how to meet them.

If, however, the maps guide us badly, we run smack into reality’s order; things go wrong not just here and there but all over. Following a bad map can have the same effect as falling asleep at the reins. We wind up in the ditch.

Wherever the maps lead us, though, they set our course through the territory. Whether philosophies guide us well or badly, they shape how we confront reality.

 

Marketplace maps

Since we confront reality every day in the marketplace, we use philosophies there as well. Different maps take us through different economic landscapes. For instance, a subjectivist philosophy (“reality is whatever I think it is”) leads to subjectivist economic attitudes: “Money can be made by whatever means suit me.” Similarly, a materialist philosophy (“reality is the world of material things”) leads to materialist economic attitudes: “All that counts are material possessions; the real is the hoardable.”

Whatever philosophies we use, our economies reflect them. When materialist philosophies shape the actions of millions of people, as they have for most of this century, economies show it. Standards, quality, and competence plummet.

Not that we’ve all become more lazy or irascible. It’s just that materialist maps exclude higher values. It makes no sense, they claim, to exert time, effort, or expense on maintaining standards, if money can be made by ignoring them. The intangibles don’t register. They don’t count.

Unfortunately, the results aren’t intangible. There’s nothing intangible about waiting in long lines, being ill-treated and tricked by salespeople, or having brand new products break down or even explode in our faces. Bad service, inadequately tested products, and unsafe, cheaply made equipment are tangible. Consumers notice and competitors notice—often from the opposite side of the globe. We don’t need more cases of Thalidomide babies or exploding gas tanks to be convinced that intangibles count. It’s our knowledge (or ignorance) of intangibles that determines how we manage the tangibles.

Economies, then, aren’t just us. They’re our maps in action. With every exchange of goods and services goes an underlying, invisible exchange of philosophies. Through the symbols of everyday economic life, we act out exactly what we think about ourselves, human nature, the world, and ultimately, reality or God. For a change, our money is buying more than we thought.

But there’s a catch. As we go about our business in economies, we’re philosophical nudists. Whether we know it or not, we’re parading our philosophies up front. Even when we cover our philosophies with rhetoric, our actions expose us, revealing to everyone precisely the kinds of maps we follow. Economies work like mirrors. When we look into them, we see more than ourselves: we see the philosophies we live by.

Which is encouraging. If blind laws—an economic survival of the fittest, for example—ruled economies, we’d be powerless to change them. If uncontrollable forces were the charioteers, we’d never have a say about where our chariots go.

But if economies are our shared creation, children of our philosophies, then we can do something about them. If our economies are good, we can encourage them to grow. If they’re bad, we can correct them, starting with a long look at our maps.

Right now, economies are being quite bad. Even if markets go through the roof, they’re prospering at our expense—at the expense of our air, earth, and water, our health and well-being, our hopes for world peace, and our rights to choose work freely and to be paid fairly for it. Economies don’t limit their tantrums to investors’ portfolios. They throw fits everywhere.

The question is, what philosophies make economies behave like spoiled children? What maps take us into the surreal world in which the two biggest industries are illegal drugs and weapons? What maps tell industries they can prosper by destroying our planet? We might expect such economies in Bedlam or maybe the Twilight Zone, but what are they doing in our living rooms?

Maps that chart shifting interest rates or fluctuations in the money supply can’t help us negotiate this terrain. Economists’ charts weren’t drawn to do this. The maps we need to examine are philosophical. Economist Zach Willey looked beyond economics to philosophy in an interview with Time Magazine: “We’ve had 100 years of development and the environment’s been kicked around pretty badly. We’re trying to figure out a philosophy to rehabilitate things over the next 100 years.”5

In other words, we need maps that are bigger than charting who sold what to whom for how much. We have plenty of maps of individual trees. We need some maps of the forest.

 

III. Making big maps: Billiard ball vs. Whole-seeking methods

Basically, there are two ways of forming philosophies—two approaches to map-making. The first focuses on specifics, on bits and pieces. We figure out which tree is which, and why willows don’t behave like oaks. If we’re in the tree business, these maps are useful.

But there’s a limit to their usefulness. However valuable the maps are to arborists, they’re not so great when applied to big questions. Mapping forests isn’t their forte. We get lost using them if we think it is.

The second approach, by contrast, investigates forests; it seeks the whole. Not that any map can pin down the whole, whether it be the whole economy, the whole earth, or the whole of reality. Maps can, though, give us a rough idea; they can approximate the whole. They can sketch the big picture, however imperfect their sketch may be.

 

Billiard-ball maps

The first map-making method is atomistic. It forms philosophies by narrowing our view of reality, until we see only a world of things, bits and pieces. If we can’t know everything about everything, at least we can focus on a few single things that we have a better chance of knowing everything about.

The trouble is, since atomistic methods see only a world of separate things, relationships don’t turn up on the maps. Nothing rules the bits but blind chance. Atoms just bounce off each other randomly. Super-micro to super-macro billiard balls become the stuff of the universe—the only real stuff.

Not that billiard-ball maps are limited to atoms and stars. They apply to us as well. According to atomistic maps, we’re all bits in the void, and life is one long series of chance encounters with other bits. We bounce off each other for a lifetime and then disappear. Cynics love this stuff, as do telescientists.

In the interim, we survive as best we can. If, as our maps tell us, we’re isolated billiard balls, we have a problem with security. We don’t feel safe. What if another billiard-ball tries to knock us out? Self-defense becomes top priority.

The best way to defend our billiard-selves, the maps suggest, is to control people and events before they control us. After all, dominating thingish worlds brings thingish rewards—power and wealth. With these, we make sure we’re the predators and not the prey.

To show what it’s like to live by billiard-ball philosophies, psychologist Charles T. Tart has devised a mock credo—a modern version of the Apostles’ Creed:

“I believe in the material universe as the only and ultimate reality, a universe controlled by fixed, physical laws and blind chance.

“I affirm that the universe has no creator, no objective purpose, and no objective meaning or destiny.

“I maintain that all ideas about God or gods, supernatural beings, prophets and saviors, or other nonphysical beings or forces are superstitions and delusions.

“Life and consciousness are totally identical to physical processes, and arise from chance interactions of blind, physical forces. Like the rest of life, my life and consciousness have no objective purpose, meaning, or destiny.

“I believe that all judgments, values, and moralities, whether my own or others’, are subjective, arising solely from biological determinants, personal history, and chance. Free will is an illusion.

“Therefore the most rational values I can personally live by must be based on the knowledge that for me what pleases me is Good, what pains me is Bad.

“Those who please me or help me avoid pain are my friends; those who pain me or keep me from my pleasure are my enemies. Rationality requires that friends and enemies be used in ways that maximize my pleasure and minimize my painÉ

“Virtue for me is getting what I want without being caught and punished by others.É

“I maintain that the death of the body is the death of the mind. There is no afterlife, and all hope for such is nonsense.”6

Tart adds:

“In my workshops I often have people go through an experiential exercise where I ask them to stand with their hands over their hearts and recite [the creed] as if it were a pledge of allegiance. This is a perspective you’ll find in almost any science book, and I wrote it up as a deliberate parody of the Apostles’ Creed.

“By and large, it depresses the hell out of people, especially when they realize that they believe a lot of it, and that these beliefs are culturally reinforced.”7

 

Billiard-ball economies

Played on the stage of economies, billiard-ball methods create a drama that’s even more depressing. Economies exist to satisfy our wants. In the Hindu metaphor, the horses run the show.

What’s wrong with wants running things is that they don’t stay fixed. They have a way of multiplying. Satisfying little desires gives us a taste for something bigger. The chariot race is on, making Ben Hur’s contest look tame by comparison.

If we’re in the race, we need values that help us win it. For instance, we can’t be timid. We can’t worry about those we beat, or how we beat them. Winning the race demands tough values. As Tart’s credo says, whatever puts us ahead is good; whatever frustrates our wants is bad. As bits in the void, our only duty is to minimize personal loss and to maximize personal gain.

What this entails for other bits—people, society, the earth, the future, even the rest of the economy—isn’t a concern, unless of course it costs us as well. The wider consequences of actions as well as the character of actions themselves don’t enter into the equations. To come out on top, we have to play the game no matter what the cost. That’s how the “real world” works.

But the “real worlds” these values create aren’t the kinds of worlds we want to live in. In fact, billiard-ball ethics produce, in law professor Peter Riga’s terms, new though better dressed barbarians:

We are graduating, for all practical purposes, a bunch of legal and financial barbarians. It is no longer the barbarian that wears a leopard skin suit and goes about with a big club. The barbarian is someone who is untutored in the philosophy and ethics of what he does and the dimension of the work he does that affects people. Consequently these barbarians wear Brooks Brothers suits and write with a ballpoint pen, but they are barbarians nonetheless, because they don’t take into account or consideration what these things do to real people.8

If barbarians kept to themselves, they’d simply annoy each other. Unfortunately, fulfilling unlimited desires demands wealth and power—tons of it. Someone must be stolen from; someone must be dominated.

To survive the new barbarian invasions, self-defense isn’t enough. If our competitors are out to take everything we have, then we need to stop them before they even think of making a move. Billiard-ball philosophies turn economies into battlegrounds. The more we have, the more we need to secure ourselves from those who have less. We don’t use the chariot as a vehicle to go somewhere but as a place to hide while we plan our next raid.

In short, billiard-ball philosophies create what 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes feared: a society reduced to a war of each against all, everyone struggling for either gain or self-preservation in a predatory world. Darwinism rules the marketplace—a view of economies championed not by Charles Darwin but by 19th-century sociologist Herbert Spencer, who authored the charming phrase, “survival of the fittest.”

Billiard-ball souls

But the violence done by the billiard-ball outlook isn’t limited to outward worlds. It hurts inward realms as well. Philosopher Thomas I. White offers a case very like the aspiring broker in the movie Wall Street. Suppose, White says, that an intelligent, idealistic young man gets a job at a firm where he runs into the billiard-ball ethic:

“Look, kid, if you want to make it big, you play hard ball. You’ve got to be aggressive but politically savvy. You’ve got to use people, and you’ll have to step on people now and then to get ahead of them. Show no mercy. Be ruthless.É You’ve got talent and promise, but you’re going to have to do some stuff your mother might not be too happy about. But then she didn’t get to be a vice-president by thirty-five, did she? I’m just telling you the rules of the game. This is business, not Sunday School.”9

Suppose further, White continues, that the young man gradually conforms to this ethic:

He gets to be very good at it himself, and he rises quickly in the company. What do you think he’ll feel? Probably considerable pride at his accomplishments and abilities. And what about his initial reservations? I suspect he’ll dismiss them as childish, idealistic, and naive, wondering why he ever seriously thought that way.É“The only people who cry ‘Foul!’ are those who lose,” he says to himself. He sees nothing wrong with what he does. His opponents just look at it from the wrong perspective.10

But, as White asks,

Is his appraisal accurate? No. Is he stronger? No. Did he “overcome his weaknesses?” No. What really happened? He’s been corrupted! His initial reservations were accurate, but his actions since then did two things—they blinded and weakened him.ÉHe’s grown weaker, not stronger.11

White’s story is a modern telling of an ancient truth. Spiritual teachings are unanimous in treating billiard-ball maps as enemies of the soul. But their reason is more than moral. As cartographers of life, billiard-ball philosophies don’t work.

Billiard-ball souls aren’t alone

Ultimately, billiard-ball philosophies don’t fail just because they create conflict (who gets the most? which billiard ball dominates?), though that’s a good reason, too. They fail because they’re not true to reality. Billiard-ball maps cut out pieces of life and line them up in front of our noses, until we can’t see the totality from which they came. As a result, their maps don’t give us the whole picture.

Yet the whole picture is what we need to understand how things work and to manage our lives well. According to one of Einstein’s favorite epigrams, the field generates the object, not vice versa. That is, whole systems give rise to specific things, not the other way around. To know the things, we need to know the whole from which they came.

Which makes sense. Alone and isolated, billiard-ball “things” have no meaning, not even existence. Eastern teachings point out that there’s really “no-thing” there. Philosophies that focus on things miss the relations and whole contexts that make those “things” possible. They depict stuffed squirrels under glass domes, miles from the forest that gave the squirrels life. Without a context, a thing is really nothing.

This logic also applies to the thing we call a self or ego. If we talk to Buddhists, they tell us that a self has no existence. It has no “own being.” We don’t exist as things in isolation. The separate ego is just a map that we fall into the habit of using, but it doesn’t represent who we really are. Ego-maps layer us with ego-perceptions that make us feel cut off and isolated. They make us think we’re off on our own, when in fact we’re embedded in reality’s total order. We’re made up of fields within fields, which ultimately nest within the whole.

If we think about it, that’s just common sense. Egos aren’t the centers they seem. To live in the physical world, we have to adapt ourselves to physical laws; they don’t adapt to our egos. We can’t arrange the laws of nature or physiology according to personal preference or ideology. Regardless of wealth or position, we can’t ignore gravity, the ecosystem, or lunch.

In society as well, no ego occupies the center, though there’s plenty of competition for the spot. We get started in families and then move on to societies. Both are dynamic structures. In them, we accomplish more working together than if we spend our efforts vying for control. In any case, we’re not keen on being dominated. Those who push to dominate get more resentment than respect.

That’s also the way things work in the professions and disciplines. The field itself—music, physics, history or literature—remains central. No matter who we are, if what we claim isn’t true to a discipline, no one pays much attention. True, we’re amused by ego-flexing from time to time. It keeps the conversation going at cocktail parties. But it makes gossip, not history.

In life, reality itself remains at the center. The whole establishes a dynamic system of being, which gives rise to the order of things. Reality’s total order operates like the principles of ecology, which make the earth function as one integrated system. The forest works according to these principles and exists because of them. As do squirrels. To deny dependence on this order, a macho squirrel would have to deny the very grounds (as well as the treetops) of his existence.

Spiritual traditions assume the same about ultimate reality: the whole manifests an order that unifies physical, conscious, moral, and spiritual life. In fact, according to spiritual teachings, reality’s whole order gives us life. Everything we do is bound up with it, because we can’t get outside the whole. Its order permeates everything we do, whether we realize it or not.

Billiard-ball philosophies, by contrast, ignore reality’s order and cut us off from it. If we follow thingish maps, we become oblivious to the whole contexts on which we depend. In particular, we ignore the intangibles that keep us from strangling each other—intangibles such as mutual respect, integrity, honesty, and a shared quest for Truth and the Good. In the end, billiard-ball maps exclude too much of what we need to know, if we want to manage human life well.

Yet managing is what economies are all about.

Whole-seeking maps

Which raises the second map-making method: instead of centering philosophies on things or egos, we can pattern them on whole systems. This, as Einstein reasoned, is the more practical approach. It makes sense, he argued, to assume that reality operates as a unified system—as one coherent whole—whether we have the theories adequate to explain it that way or not. Why?

(a) As the name suggests, a whole-seeking approach looks for maps of forests. It opens us to reality as it is wholly, not just in bits and pieces. It looks beyond this or that tree. Whole-seeking maps point to the realities that transcend us, so that our philosophies confront the wider contexts (the whole forests) in which we exist.

For example, whole-seeking maps in physics—from ancient Indian and Chinese concepts to modern theories—postulate that the universe consists of unified patterns of energy or light. The thing-perspective is really a limited view of these whole fields. According to the maps, we’re more light-beings or energy-flows than hard and fast physical bodies. (Scotty, beam us up?)

In the fields of energy, patterns interrelate. Dissecting the patterns into isolated bits doesn’t give us the best map, because it isn’t how things work. Our patterns move in relation to other patterns. Our lives interact with the lives of other people, of whole communities and nations, as well as with the life of the earth. Like the squirrel in the forest, we function in a network. We’re not alone.

(b) To show us how to work in harmony with these contexts, whole-seeking maps draw in the intangibles. They explore how ideas and qualities unify the networks into systems. By understanding systems of ideas, we’re able to interact with them more constructively. Seeing how the intangibles work, we see how to work with them.

Even on physical levels, ideas of order, balance, and harmony shape processes ranging from the earth’s ecosystem to the creatures living in it. The forest’s ecological order and balance, for instance, give the squirrel a chance. If nuts grew capriciously or if winter came unpredictably, the squirrel couldn’t cope. The intangibles (whether we call them ideas or laws of nature) transform a jumble of bits into a working unity—one that sustains life.

It’s true for us, too. Ideas and values empower us to understand whole systems and to work within them more harmoniously. Given the same set of circumstances, two people react quite differently depending on the ideas and values—the intangibles—each lives by. Their philosophies put them in different worlds.

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl saw the power of intangibles during his experience in four Nazi concentration camps. As he recounted in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning,12 those prisoners who maintained the richness of their intellectual and spiritual lives survived better than those who didn’t, even though many of the survivors were physically weaker than the others in the camp. The intangibles sustained them, in spite of the terrible physical and psychological conditions around them. They were able to go on, even to share their rations and to encourage others, because the prison’s order wasn’t for them the final order.

(c) Ultimately, a whole-seeking approach tackles the biggest question: it develops maps for understanding God, reality as the whole. Seeking God spurs us to go beyond map-imposed limits. We adjust our individual maps more closely to what’s ultimately real. Twentieth-century philosopher Brand Blanshard identifies this as the essence of religion:

Religion is an attempt to adjust one’s nature as a whole to ultimate reality. In a sense all human life is that. But whereas the larger part of such life consists of an adjustment to what is immediately around us, religion seeks to go behind the appearance of things to what is self-subsistent, to something which, intellectually and causally, will explain everything else.13

Such notions aren’t limited to theologians and philosophers. Nobel-prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) talked about the whole-seeking approach similarly. In a discussion with fellow physicist Wolfgang Pauli, he described the method as a striving to find our relatedness to a central order. The clearer we are about the central order, the easier it is for us to put the many partial orders into perspective and not to be misled by them. Heisenberg wrote:

The problem of values is nothing but the problem of our acts, goals, and morals. It concerns the compass by which we must steer our ship if we are to set a true course through life. The compass itself has been given different names by various religions and philosophies: happiness, the will of God, the meaning of life—to mention just a few.ÉAll such formulations try to express man’s relatedness to a central order.

Admittedly, the subjective realm of an individual, no less than a nation, may sometimes be in a state of confusion. Demons can be let loose and do a great deal of mischief, or, to put it more scientifically, partial orders that have split away from the central order, or do not fit into it, may have taken over.

But in the final analysis, the central order, or the “one” as it used to be called and with which we commune in the language of religion, must win out. And when people search for values, they are probably searching for the kind of actions that are in harmony with the central order, and as such are free of the confusions springing from divided, partial orders.14

Heisenberg would be the last to say that one map ever captures the central order or explains it once and for all. The confusions that plague subjective realms (what’s in our heads) are always a problem. That’s true even when we study nature. Our maps about physical systems change as we learn more.

When it comes to ultimate reality, maps continually develop. Gregory of Nyssa (335–394 A.D.), third of the three great Cappadocian Fathers, expressed what teachings East and West affirm:

Even if one has said about [Divinity Itself] all one can, yet one has said nothing worthy of It. For the mind cannot reach that which IS; even if we continue to think ever more sublime thoughts about It, yet no word can express what is meant.15

Final answers—maps to end all maps—aren’t what a whole-seeking approach offers. The approach does, however, point us in constructive directions. By reminding us of the limits of our maps—that reality is more than any map can symbolize—a whole-seeking approach puts us on a quest to understand the big picture. We use maps to discern the harmony of reality, without locking ourselves into one map or another.

IV. Why buy a whole-seeking approach?

In the end, we want maps that work. We want maps that show us the lay of the land, so that we can find our way around. Spiritual teachings claim that whole-seeking methods give us better maps than billiard-ball methods do. Their maps work better, because they cover more of what we need to know. To support their claim, the teachings cite many examples of how whole-seeking maps have transformed people, cultures, and economies.

According to Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade, for instance, the Neolithic cultures flourishing between 7000 and 4000 B.C. were goddess-oriented, meaning that their central, spiritual image was the feminine principle of wholeness and unity as the source of life.

On Eisler’s reading of the archaeological evidence, this whole-seeking premise gave rise to cultures that were egalitarian, peaceful, and without extremes of wealth. They operated on a partnership model—mutual benefit rather than one side exploiting another. Only when the Kurgan invasions began (4000–2500 B.C.), bringing with them a violent, patriarchal, dominator philosophy, did the system of universal peace and prosperity break down.16

But even after the patriarchal, dominator model took over, whole-seekers came along to challenge the system and to restrain its billiard-ball, dominator excesses.

Zarathustra (660–583 B.C.), who may well be the great-grandfather of Western monotheism, radically reformed ancient Persia within his own lifetime. Greedy priests and nobles had all but ruined the economy by demanding costly sacrifices of farmers and by selling the people hallucinogens.

Zarathustra broke the stranglehold of these ruthlessly powerful few by appealing to each person’s innate ability to understand reality and to be guided by it. The people responded. The culture, including the economy, turned around. On the power of Zarathustra’s teaching, Persia went from an impoverished community to a world leader within a few centuries.17

Of course, there’s Joseph in the Bible, who applied a whole-seeking approach to managing everything from his own trials to Pharaoh’s economy. By doing so, he rescued not only himself and his family from famine but the whole of Egypt as well. (Genesis 37–50)

The great Indian King Asoka (270–230 B.C.) converted to Buddhism and transformed India from a war economy to an economy devoted to serving “the welfare of the people”—a novel approach then as now. All actions, he said, must be based on Dharma. “Dharma” is a broad term in both Hinduism and Buddhism that refers to cosmic law. It represents the dynamic spiritual order that stems from the whole and infuses all right action.

In his edicts, King Asoka wrote, “There is no gift that can equal the gift of Dharma, the establishment of human relations on Dharma, the distribution of wealth through Dharma, or kinship in Dharma.”18 For Asoka, Dharma is how the whole comes home to human affairs. Seeing the whole is the gift that the whole gives us, because it’s the means by which we can manage our affairs in peace, prosperity, and harmony.

Muhammad (570–632 A.D.) became the Prophet precisely for his dedication to applying whole-seeking methods to social and economic reform. Wherever Islam went, concepts of economic equality and justice followed—concepts Muhammad himself used in running the city of Yathrib, now known as Medina. One of the five pillars of Islam is to provide for the poor—not to make them depend on charity, but to help them become active again in thecommunity. Islamic scholar Fazlur Rahman explains the link between a vision of the whole and a whole-governed way of life: “The Prophet seems to insist: One God—one humanity.19 Muhammad’s monotheism was, from the very beginning, linked with a humanism and a sense of social and economic justice whose intensity is no less than the intensity of the monotheistic idea.”20

The Qur’an underscores the link in Sura 107: “Have you seen someone who rejects religion? That is the person who pushes the orphan aside and does not promote feeding the needy.”21 Muhammad’s whole-seeking methods worked. Early Muslim economies thrived, enough to revive classical Greek and Roman learning and to advance philosophy and the sciences.

In eleventh- and twelfth-century Europe, the Benedictine, Cluniac, and Cistercian monastic reforms contributed greatly to re-establishing economic prosperity after the barbarian invasions. The Gothic cathedrals that sprang up all over France, Spain, England, and Germany are monuments not only to the spiritual but also to the economic achievements of the reforms. The spires were built on the concrete practicality of Christian, monastic ideals.22

Closer to home, William Penn (1644–1718), one of the leading lights of the Friends, came to America to establish a community governed by whole-seeking methods—a community he called a “holy experiment.” He grounded the experiment on fundamental, immutable laws: “To live honestly, not to hurt another, and to give every one their right.” These laws, he wrote, “are the cornerstones of human structure, the basis of reasonable societies, without which all would run into heaps and confusion.”23 In his view, no economy can last long without them.

But beyond all the historical examples of how the whole-seeking approach works, spiritual teachings appeal to what’s successful every day. Families, for instance, work best when their relations are built on higher values. Treating families like mutual exploitation societies doesn’t make happy homes. It just keeps lawyers, therapists, and realtors busy.

The same applies to how we manage relations with friends and associates. Billiard-ball methods create divisions that lead to conflicts. In no time, it’s us against them—who gets the better of whom. By contrast, whole-seeking methods strengthen relationships by nurturing growth on all sides. Friendships and businesses become mutual-support systems that foster everyone’s creativity.

Why should the methods that work in economies, the teachings argue, be any different from those that build good relations in every other aspect of life?

The real problem with whole-seeking maps isn’t that they don’t work but that they work far too well. They create so much prosperity that others notice. Thieves move in for some easy pickings. If the thieves don’t change their philosophy, wars follow, which even the best economies find hard to survive. Wars make money only if they’re held somewhere else. No economist ever recommends hosting one.

Henry Carey, whose economic theories greatly influenced Abraham Lincoln, made this argument in The Past, the Present, and the Future. Carey used the example of farmers who settle in an area to do honest work, but who become so productive that plunderers move in to steal their earnings. The robbers do this first by force but later by taxes, fees, and rents. In the end, everything the farmers generate by honest, whole-seeking methods is in danger of being consumed by billiard-ball methods.24

If whole-seeking methods work so well, though, why do billiard-ball methods dominate our economies? Why do we think that the “real world” is a billiard-ball world? It’s a question of philosophy. We’re sold the no–philosophy philosophy of economies, namely, that philosophies don’t have a say when it comes to economies. Billiard ballism is just the way economies are. But is it so?

Notes

1. Louis Fischer, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work and Ideas (New York: Random House, 1962, Vintage Books Edition, 1983), 88–91.

1. Aside from watching Murder, She Wrote, we learned about the relation between crime and money from criminal justice consultant Fred Ward, who directs all interested readers to the quarterly, Criminal Justice Abstracts, Richard S. Allinson, ed. (Criminal Justice Press, P. O. Box 249, Monsey, NY 10952). Its index for the last 17 years of issues has recently been published.

2. Plato, Phaedo, 66c. Hugh Tredennick, trans., Plato: The Last Days of Socrates (London: Penguin Books, 1954), 111.

3. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987).

4. Katha Upanishad, Part 3. Juan Mascaro, trans., The Upanishads (London: Penguin Books, 1965), 60–61. “Upanishad,” by the way, means “to sit down near a teacher.” The Upanishads are a vast collection of sacred and revealed Hindu reform teachings, the oldest of which dates to 800 B.C.

5. Richard Conniff, “A Deal That Might Save a Sierra Gem,” Time Magazine (3 April 1989), 10.

6. “Practical Enlightenment, An Interview with Charles T. Tart,” The Sun (Issue 150, May 1988), 7.

7. Ibid.

8. Peter Riga, Interview in “Trouble in the Banking Business,” MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour (WNET/Thirteen, Box 1335, New York, NY 10101, January 6, 1988), transcript p. 11.

9. Thomas I. White, Right and Wrong: A Brief Guide to Understanding Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988), 88.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., 89.

12. Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Pocket Books, Washington Square Press, 1959, 1984). The book was first published in Austria, 1946 under the title Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager.

13. Brand Blanshard, Reason and Belief (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 434.

14. Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 214.

15. St. Gregory of Nyssa, The Lord’s Prayer, The Beatitudes, Hilda C. Graef, trans., Ancient Christian Writers, No. 18, Johannes Quasten and Joseph C. Plumpe, eds. (New York and Ramsey, NJ: Newman Press/Paulist Press, 1954), 87-88.

16. Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade (New York: Harper & Row, 1987). Ashley Montagu calls this work “the most important book since Darwin’s Origin of the Species.”

17. Zarathustra’s life is tricky, since so little is known about it. Nonetheless there are useful books on it, for instance: Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979); A. B. Williams Jackson, Zoroaster, The Prophet of Ancient Iran (New York: Columbia University Press, 1898 and 1926); R. C. Zaehner, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1961); Rustom Masani, Zoroastrianism: The Religion of the Good Life (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968).

18. N. A. Nikam and Richard McKeon, eds. and trans., The Edicts of Asoka (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 44.

19. Fazlur Rahman, Islam (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1966, second edition, 1979), 12.

20. Ibid.

21. T. B. Irving (Al-Hajj Ta‘lim ‘Ali), trans., The Qur’an: The First American Version (Brattleboro, VT: Amana Books, 1985), 393.

22. See John H. Mundy and Peter Riesenberg, The Medieval Town (Huntington, NY: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, 1958, reprint 1979), 28-29; and P. Boissonnade, Life and Work in Medieval Europe: Fifth to Fifteenth Centuries, Eileen Power, trans. (New York: Dorset Press, 1987), 154–158.

23. Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, eds., The Founders’ Constitution (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Vol. I, 429.

24. Henry C. Carey, The Past, the Present and the Future (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, reprint 1967, first ed. 1847), 83–86. Augustus M. Kelley, Publishers, (300 Fairfield Road, Fairfield, NJ 07006; (212) 685-7202) is a great source for economic classics.