My Yahoo!Page 3 of 4 from A Virtuous Cycle
As it happens, the impersonality of capitalism is usually seen as one of its unfortunate, if inescapable, costs. In place of relationships founded on blood or affection, capitalism creates relationships founded solely on what Marx called the money nexus. But from a certain angle this impersonality should instead be seen as a virtue, because it advocates the fair treatment of people not on the basis of consanguinity or proximity, but just because they're, well, people. Capitalism, ultimately, widens horizons, because it makes the idea of trusting only people within your particular ethnic or geographic group seem outmoded. At its core, the system is cosmopolitan, since you should be willing to trade with anyone who can offer a good deal.
But it's possible that capitalism's impact was not limited just to making merchants treat one another fairly. The historian Thomas Haskell has argued convincingly that the rise of modern capitalism was instrumental in the emergence of what you might call the humanitarian sensibility, as exemplified by the campaign to abolish slavery in the British colonies. Historians have always noted that the key figures in the abolitionist movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were Quakers and that the Quakers were also, as we've seen, key figures in business at the time. Traditionally, this connection has been seen either as a historical curiosity or as an anomaly that had to be explained away via theories of "ideological hegemony" and "class interest." Haskell, though, suggests that the connection is not an anomaly and that it was logical that the people most enmeshed in the capitalist system would also be the people most likely to act to alter the lives of people living thousands of miles away, even though they had no personal relationship to them.
Haskell's point is not that being good capitalists made the Quakers saints. (Their religious convictions were clearly at the root of their abolitionist sentiments.) Instead he argues that being good capitalists made the Quakers more able to think about the long-term and long-distance consequences of their actions, and gave them what he calls "recipes for intervention." Humanitarianism depends on the idea that we are connected to--and, in some sense, responsible for--people who live a long way away from us and who have no familial or national connection to us. More than that, though, humanitarianism also requires a long-term perspective--you act now in the hope of achieving something in the distant future--and a faith that successful change is possible. Today we take all of these things pretty much for granted. But in the 18th century they were relatively new concepts, and the people who understood them best were businessmen.
Capitalism, after all, encouraged universalism over provincialism. It demanded a willingness to make and keep promises--often to strangers and foreigners--deep into the future. It fostered a sense of individual, rather than group, responsibility, and encouraged a more strict accounting of the relationship between action and consequence. And it also, as Haskell argues, widened the sense of possibility by demonstrating that people were able to rationally judge risk and reward and deal intelligently with problems that were thousands of miles away or years into the future. In the case of slavery this meant that instead of simply dismissing it as something irrelevant or unchangeable, the Quakers were able to see it as their problem and as a problem they could do something about.
The relationship between capitalism and humanitarianism is essentially invisible now:The ideas it depends on have become part of the background of everyday life. The same is true of the commonplace workings of a healthy capitalist system. I can walk into a store nearly anywhere in America and be guaranteed that I'm going to get pretty good service and that whatever product I buy--a product that, in all likelihood, will have been made in a country 9,000 miles away--will probably work pretty well. And this is true even though I may never walk into that store again. At this point we take both the reliability of the store and my trust in that reliability for granted. But in fact they're remarkable achievements. And without them the kind of economic growth and standard of living that Americans have grown accustomed to would not be possible. In the end a successful capitalist system succeeds because it makes people more trusting. It encourages people to believe that most transactions will go off without a hitch, not because of the law or possible sanctions, but because that's the way for everyone to prosper. When the system is working right, it creates a virtuous cycle, in which an everyday level of trustworthiness breeds an everyday level of trust.
Of course, we're still confronted with the reality of recent business crimes. If capitalism is actually a system that fosters trust and rewards good behavior, what went wrong?
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