Where did we Go Wrong in the west?

Original post here: https://riswey.blogspot.com/2009/09/all-wealth-is-relative.html

So the argument that we can always be more wealthy or less wealthy is developed in this blog into a refutation of the idea of Absolute Progress. Mankind can struggle all the days of its life to improve things and actually while things have improved compared with yesterday they are still worse when compared with tomorrow. What you have depends 100% on what you compare it with. Indeed to feel rich we need do nothing else than think about people poorer than us. How much simpler is this than slaving the best years of our life seeking income and pay rises!

Now the Hippie will say "Turn On, Tune In and Drop Out" but we need be careful. This argument here is not really changing anything, it is just taking a false wind out of our sails.

(ironically in the picture is a company using wind to transport cargo in a Zero Carbon way, a useful wind, but actually not useful if the cargo isn't really needed)

The key issue here is that obsessed with wealth creation, and not understanding that it is an illusion, we waste time and resources.

If the planet is facing crisis it is simply because of this ill conceived race for resource consumption in the name of "getting wealthy."

This Scotsman Adam Smith is the writer of the most famous work on wealth creation "The Wealth of Nations" (1776) which is an analysis of the Industrial Revolution in the UK and published the year of the US Independence I suspect (without evidence) as part of the Ideological foundations of the US. The influential English philosopher John Locke was certainly central to this Ideological movement and Adam Smith was certainly writing in support of it.

So what does Smith say about wealth itself:

"the annual produce of the land and labour of the society". This "produce" is, at its simplest, a good or service which satisfies human needs, and wants of utility. [Book 1, Chapter 3]

So it's desire based. And on desire Smith says:

"the natural desire of every individual is to improve his own condition" [Book 4, Chapter 5]

So we have immediate flaws in his theory. He is referring to a "natural" component of mankind, by which he means an axiom or founding truth. So "improvement" is a founding axiom of Adam Smith. This means he does not supply a reason for "improvement", it is assumed at the outset. It is "natural" and needs no further justification. Really?

So we know he got this idea from Christianity with its emphasis on improvement to cast aside Sin and restore our relationship with God. Although Jesus offers us immediately redemption and forgiveness, rather than slaving to "earn" redemption. However the idea of Good Works and paying off the debt of Sin is inherited by Christianity from much older systems. In the East the idea of "practice" and gradual purification goes back before history.

So the West's Ideology begins with this very unjustified idea of improvement, growth or Progress towards absolution.

And yet as shown here, at least in the context of wealth, it is a myth. Progress with no goal is aimless. Compared with tomorrow we will always be poor, and compared with yesterday we will always be rich.

Progress does not actually create any wealth at all!

Or at least there is no wealth creation as long as the process is open ended. If however we can posit an End Point, then we have something to aim for and we can say how far along the path we have gone. Now if Smith is right about Natural Desires then we can just list the Natural Desires and then set about meeting them. And after we have done this then the job of improvement and progress is finished.

In the East while the process of Enlightenment can seem goalless, we do have the unequivocal words of Buddha saying of his realisation that "there was nothing left to do." 

But Natural Desires for Smith are without end!  Written into the ideology is that they are just "improvement", a relative measure.

And obviously this is false. No human wants to look back on a life of endless and pointless toil with no "real" achievements. Yes we made that a bit bigger or a bit faster but the goal still not attained. What a life wasted!

Yet for some reason the West has been fascinated by this open ended struggle to find a non existing holy grail. We are going no-where and the path there is pointless.

It has been about 300 years we have been doing this and every so often people become disaffected with Capitalism (as it is now called). The Ideologues spend billions pushing the key ideas around the world, whether through Hollywood films, or through NEWS, or through Busy-ness Colleges or in the final resort sanctions against countries that do not accept these ideas and eventually bombing until they do.

But its all a myth! Amazing to think!

What is the real Natural Desire is the desire for Peace and Satisfaction. And this can only be gained by being at ease WHERE YOU ARE. Valuing WHERE YOU ARE and not wanting to be anyone or anywhere else. This is the actual NATURAL DESIRE*. And that means seeing the Value in what Capitalists call poverty.

If we stop for even 1 second and look at the sky. The Sun by itself is already more than we could ever dream of. A daily bringer of light and warmth. A miraculous entity that comes to us every day. What more could we ever want! And if that was not enough how about our eyes that enable us to see it! With no doubt at all there is nothing more miraculous and extraordinary than what we already have!

Adam Smith is not a completely cold pusher of faceless industrial progress. He has much to say about emotions and Love too. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) he writes:

 

"Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love. He naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be hateful; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred. He desires, not only praise, but praiseworthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be praised by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of praise. He dreads, not only blame, but blameworthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be blamed by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of blame." [ibid. Ch 2]

"What so great happiness as to be beloved, and to know that we deserve to be beloved? What so great misery as to be hated, and to know that we deserve to be hated?" [ibid. Ch 1]

And yet at the heart of this lies an appreciation of the value of what we have and what we are. This rather flies in the face of his belief in "improvement." How can we be fully lovely if we have yet to be Improved?!

Like so much of Adam Smith it is all misunderstood and the West has for whatever reasons sailed off in completely the wrong direction.

As the planet faced irreparable damage under the crazy unlovable belief system of Capitalism it is worth reflecting on the fact that we have it all wrong, and it is time to go back to the start of the Industrial Age and rethink what we originally had in mind because it is nothing like what we have now.

Also worth nothing that Adam Smith clearly didn't read his Christianity properly because being Loved is what God offers us already before we even get our boots on to go to work**. And being forgiven is a part of that infinite Love. If the "Natural Desire" is for Love then we already always had that!

What a disastrous philosophy!

* So what proof can we supply that the true Natural Desire is peace and satisfaction rather than indefinite improvement. Well one problem with the idea of "indefinite improvement" is the question of how you can improve it? We can use SRH here. Adam Smith's intention with "indefinite improvement" is to declare some unchanging truth. Did Adam Smith write "Wealth of Nations" as the first page of an infinite book which would improve indefinitely? What would happen to this idea of "improve indefinitely" if it really did improve indefinitely? It rather says that at some stage it would cease to be "improve indefinitely" and would become something better. Now this is rather Kantian Moral Imperative. What is better than "improve indefinitely"? Surely it is "best." And what is the key nature of "Best." It can't be improved or bettered. Now that is interesting if we realise that the only thing that can't be "bettered" is the "best". It means that the only thing that can't change is already the best. Now this almost overlaps with the key alternative to Adam Smith, which is the realisation that the world is already Best and there is nothing to do.

“Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows, by itself.” [Matsuo Bashō, Japan 1644]

It's a very inclusive idea. If the universe isn't already perfect then how can we make it perfect, given that we and all our resources and tools are from the universe? If we or our tools are not already perfect then what chance of doing anything perfect to improve things. This is a massive subject, but enough to draw attention to a better idea from Adam Smith's "indefinite improvement".

Perhaps worth putting a note on Buddhist theory here. So the key observation is Dukkha or dissatisfaction. Faced with this we are forced into action to seek satisfaction. But whatever we do and whatever peace we find is always broken by new Dukkha eventually and we are forced into action again. This is Adam Smith's "indefinite improvement." Its not really a desire or goal its an unfortunate fact that mankind will never be happy. Except Buddha realises something. Dissatisfaction always turns up, it is created. And his question was why does it happen? Rather than just trying to bat it out of the park, Buddha looks at Dukkha and asks how it happens. And his answer was not what Adam Smith would expect. It's the belief in a Self that gives Dukkha a target. Drop this belief and Dukkha ends. That is not an "indefinite improvement" that is the extinction of suffering, permanently.  

** for those without belief in God this maps onto the nature of the NOW. As Robert Pirsig tries to describe in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance the inception of awareness right NOW predates all our thoughts about it. By the time we are thinking about things (like Near and Far in recent posts) its already happened. When we say that God loves us, it is because we are birthed brand new in every moment. The only thing that disguises this constant creation is our desires and evil which cloud our thinking and drag us deep down into the creation process. For those deeply attached to themselves and the world they will not notice the process of being born anew in every instant. And being born from What? It is at this point that we get into quite extraordinary places. 

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And actually the UK spawned a whole raft of pointless philosophies into what was called the European Enlightenment. The founding father of all this Anglo (and soon to become Anglo-American) nonsense is John Locke (1632 – 1704). Like with Adam Smith and his unfounded "improvement" John Locke's whole philosophy fails because of its reductionist belief in discrete physical entities. He would have done well to read his immediate predecessor John Donne (1571 - 1631)

No man is an island entire of itself; every man 

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; 

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe 

is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as 

well as any manner of thy friends or of thine 

own were; any man's death diminishes me, 

because I am involved in mankind. 

And therefore never send to know for whom 

the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. 

[MEDITATION XVII]

But instead Locke was the first to define the self through a "continuity of consciousness". What a horned rabbit is this! We are to define a discrete entity like "self" in terms of joining up of something like consciousness which doesn't come in parts anyway. I mean who has ever lived in a past consciousness or a future consciousness? We live ONLY in this consciousness NOW. If there was a Past or a Future these are just vague memories or anticipations that we sometimes become conscious off, we never actually live there.

Donne not famous as the founding father of American Ideology notes from the outset that the "self" is not self-contained anyway and belongs to a part of the main. For Donne there is no need to stamp an imaginary entity upon a mythological stream of consciousness. Far more advanced already, but seemingly lost to Locke and his followers. And from that mis-seeing things in the dusk of the European Enlightenment we now have the full darkness of the modern 21st Century world.