The personal sentiments contending for primacy within economic science oppose one another in two major philosophical stances:
1. Human beings strive for personal advantage, as in the primal causality of Austrian economics and the normative imposts of Objectivist philosophy.
2. Human beings are altruistic for the sake of overall harmony in their larger cultural groupings, as is the overwhelming finding of behavioral psychology and the normative imposts of Christianity.In asserting these contradictory truths, evangelical conservatism assures that it always has daemons to cast out.
Having been denounced by partisans of both sides of conservatism’s impasse over the nature of humankind’s moral sentiments, SFEcon achieves irrelevance for both discussants. We therefore have nothing to lose by asserting the second grouping of sentiments above as properly descriptive of the human personality while rejecting the first.
One solid basis for this stand would consult literary portraits of purely materialistic personalities, e.g.: Shakespeare’s Shylock, Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, and the popular Star Trek saga’s Ferengi.1 We note first that these figures are portrayed as congenitally unhappy and disfigured by ugliness (which is only contrasted by outward beauty in the case of Mme Bovary). These characters cause nothing but trouble in their social surroundings; and, at least in literature, their schemes fail and they are cast out from society. Where history has seen materialism incarnate achieve power (e.g. Bonaparte) the end has usually been quick and always disastrous on a spectacular scale. Those who must have scientific confirmation for these generalities are of course welcome to consult the psychologists; and those requiring moral justification will find ample support among the clergy.
The altruistic model for human sentiment is problematic for economists because it eliminates an obvious basis upon which to account for stability and order in the economic whole. If civilized people are essentially communistic in their interpersonal and business dealings, how is it that they can achieve the relentless efficiency of an inhumane, natural system in their macroeconomic affairs?
While it is altogether proper that evangelical materialism should include a detailed examination of
altruism, this will never be sufficient to what we think of as a science of value. The microeconomic
point of view does not take in the totality of material interactions needed to determine the set of
prices we must all accommodate for the sake of simple justice and social order. Microeconomic verities,
human/moral or animal/instinctive, true or false, will never add up to an understanding of what
Mises called . . .
something operative which power and force are unable to alter and to which [people] must adjust themselves if [we] hope to achieve success, in precisely the same way as [we] must take into account the laws of nature.SFEcon has proposed a resolution of this matter by 1) restricting formal economic science to interpretations on the entirety of materialism’s macro realm; while 2) confining materialism’s moral implications to the familiar, micro realm of individual and business relations. To accomplish our separation between the micro and that macro, we posit all the causality of macroeconomics as occurring among all the economic actors that are visible in a ‘whole system’ view of materialism, viz.: industrial sectors composed of all the firms producing essentially the same commodity, or household sectors composed of individuals expressing essentially the same social characteristics.
Please recall that this separation was prepared by our earlier musings on the scientific mood of inquiry. Here we noted that hard sciences have become comfortable with the notion that different levels of focus on the material world reveal different phenomena; and that the metaphors that work in one view of reality must be discarded in order to create metaphors that operate on the reality revealed at some other length of focus.
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