In the face of an endless onslaught of news and change in the world, I’ve been doing my best to balance an awareness of what is happening in my country with actually productive reading, writing, and research. On top of my everyday family and community responsibilities, I’m trying to find more ways to prepare for the coming years where our democratic institutions and social systems are unable to provide for the least well off in our society. The current dismantling of the US federal government and the ripple effects of those actions are going to have very real and very painful consequences for our entire society.
While currently my family is in a position to weather these repercussions safely and with a good deal of stability, that is not guaranteed. And while reading Pierre Bourdieu I was reminded why I can’t rely on that. Why none of us can.
Pierre Bourdieu is a twentieth-century French sociologist. He was incredibly critical of a shifting focus on our understanding of the world to a purely global economic mindset, and the dangers it held for all but the most well-off in society. He argued that sociologists and social scientists were going to be needed more urgently than ever before as more of our political institutions embraced a purely economic and political mindset. The tyranny of the market, the idea that impersonal forces of economics and profit were going to propel us to anything but the degradation of the least well off and the dissolution of the social safety nets provided by government was obvious to him.
Apparently, the rest of us missed the memo.
I’m reading a collection of essays he published thirty years ago under the title Acts of Resistance:Against the Tyranny of the Market , and he could literally be writing them about today. Everything he warned about as the creation of the European Union is coming true across the Western world, in part because our institutions ignored voices like his. They were wooed by the idea that a global community united by common economic goals would naturally attend to the ills created by that system. That the market would provide. That economic and social goals could be dealt with equally by the invisible hand, instead of a studied and focused intent on building and sustaining a system that supported our social needs as well as our economic or purely profit-focused goals.
I’ll be honest, my toxic trait is that I was wooed by all of those free market ideas early on in my academic career. Before I became a science fiction and fantasy author, I studied political philosophy and worked in politics. I worked for organizations funded by the Koch Brothers (yes, those Koch Brothers) focused on supporting and promoting ideas of free market economics, of the classically liberal approach to social services, of the concept that a well-ordered society existed best with the smallest possible government and the biggest possible private sector. (I did say it was toxic.)
After living in the world and diving deeper into the actual practice of politics, of non-profits and for-profit business, I realized the need for collective societies to provide services and fulfill needs that we would otherwise go without. While charities and philanthropy can fill gaps where people are in need, those are failures of society and a symptom of a society sick with the focus on economics and market evaluations over people and what they actually need from and can contribute to society.
So, reading Bourdieu has been a nice revisit to my philosophical roots and a reminder of what has been and is still at stake. When Bourdieu wrote most of these essays and warned France against the abandonment of social services in the face of globalization and the tyranny of the market, he was writing in the context of the formation of the European Union. He cautioned against a purely economic stance, and reminded people that people experience real costs even if they aren’t always quantifiable in profit and loss statements. Human suffering and human happiness are not as easily measured, but it doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t enter into our rational decision-making.
Of course, as we know in the thirty years since he wrote about these matters, a great deal of our political moves both in Europe and in the Americas have completely ignored his advice. We’ve focused on maximizing profits, granting more and more power to the wealthiest among us, and allowed the human suffering of the least well off to compound, with interest. My fear is that it might not be possible to remedy the situation without a complete overhaul of our increasingly autocratic capitalist system. But if that’s what it is going to take to save our society, then I’m willing to start having the conversations needed to make sure that the system that emerges from the ashes attends to the things we ignored the last time around.
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