The Capitalist Mind, The Socialist Heart

On September 23rd, Arthur Brooks, a social scientist who joined the faculty at Harvard Business School in July, visited Dartmouth College and gave a speech titled, “Abundance without Attachment.” Brooks is an unconventional academic. He was on the Left. He lived in Seattle. He was a professional French horn player. However, he later became the President of the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank, and recently made a pro-capitalism documentary, “The Pursuit.” What happened? 

It was an airplane emergency that allowed Brooks to understand the marvels of capitalism. After unexpectedly landing in India, Brooks saw poverty up-close for the first time. Shocked and moved, he vowed to make a change and dug deeper. Reading simple statistics, Brooks realized that 2 billion people have been pulled out of poverty in his lifetime, and he attributes that to the system of free enterprise. “I thought that capitalism was bad for poor people. And that’s because I didn’t have any background in economics.” Now, he goes so far to say that “capitalism is the best single thing that has ever happened in the world’s development.” As a self-described warrior for the poor, he feels that his duty is to defend capitalism. The deep concern for people living in poverty has led Brooks to alter his entire economic epistemology. 

In regard to morality, however, Brooks is still dissatisfied with the status quo. Although, according to Brooks, capitalism as a system is amoral and only people are moral, or immoral; he still represents a deeper impulse of the Left that disdains the profit-driven ideology and materialism. Greed, selfishness, and exogenous goals are dangerous products that a capitalistic society imposes on people. Speaking at Dartmouth, Brooks encouraged the audience to fight against the “tyranny” of material needs and forfeit the attachment to money so that they can live truly meaningful lives, hence the title “Abundance without Attachment.” Brooks declared that “Capitalism is good for the poor and dangerous for the rest.” In other words, we need to preserve capitalism because it is necessary for people around the world to transcend poverty, but we have to be careful to save our moral sentiments from being corrupted by the profit-maximizing machinery. Brooks’s justification for capitalism reflects a realistic compromise rather than a priori values. 

He goes so far as to claim that “capitalism can’t hurt us, if we care about what matters the most,” implying that capitalism is morally corrupting. This conflicts with his earlier claim that capitalism, being a system, can only be amoral, but what is more important than the contradiction itself is the uncovering of Brooks’s beating socialist heart. 

Brooks does not believe that there is a necessary correspondence between capitalism and morality. “There are people who think that if you start with capitalism, you are going to bring out the best in people and a thousand flowers are going to bloom. I just don’t buy it. I also don’t think that if you start with socialism, you’re going to bring out the best in people. That’s why you have to start with values.” He continues to say: “That said, which is actually better in bringing out the best in people…it depends on scale,” and gives the example of his own family in which his three kids are complete “takers,” inactive in the “economy of the family.” “Socialism is awesome in my family. It just doesn’t scale up very well.” When asked about whether or not the involuntary nature of socialism makes it immoral, Brooks stuck with this practicality-theory of why we should reject socialism: dissatisfaction among citizens would accumulate and make things hard for the bureaucrats. 

There is an important and obvious logical error in Brooks’s arguments. He started off as though he was going to talk about the moral effects of different systems but derailed in a worrying way: what he in fact discussed was only the practicalities of the systems. According to his explanation, socialism “brings out the best in people” on a small scale, e.g. within a family unit, and fails to do so on a societal scale, because it is impractical to direct people from all across the nation in the same way that you direct your children. Furthermore, Brooks actually neglects to explain how exactly socialism brings out the “best” in anyone on a smaller scale. Rather, he merely argues that it works on a smaller scale.

The good news is that Brooks acknowledges that the market mechanism is a more practical economic and political tool. In his epistemology, socialism is ruled out on realistic—instead of moral or normative—grounds. The bad news is that, to Brooks, there is no categorical moral difference between socialism and capitalism. The involuntary nature of socialism is not a subject of interest as far as Brooks is concerned, let alone whether or not it is moral; morality only becomes relevant when socialism creates realistic problems such as disobedience and public unrest. 

Brooks’s defense of capitalism, however passionate and effective, reveals an exceedingly sad reality: the moral heritage of classical liberals is virtually non-existent in colleges. Nobody ever talks about the morality of capitalism. Brooks argues that capitalism is amoral, then implies that it is in fact dangerous for those who live affluent lives, while it is also paradoxically beneficial for the poor. But capitalism is moral. Arguments against that claim are self-defying, and here is why: “values” can only arise in a free society, where everyone has the freedom to develop their own moral systems, i.e., where the state has minimal moral prescriptions. A socialist country with a centralized economy necessarily has a centralized system of morality that greatly infringes upon people’s freedom of thought, which necessarily destroys any possibility for “values” to arise. The development of morality to its fullest extent can only occur in a capitalistic country, because morality’s development is, in essence, voluntary. Indeed, the very question that Brooks cites to indicate the ruthlessness of capitalism, where is my soul, is a question that can only arise in a free society. 

Aside from the economic benefits of capitalism, Brooks does notice the effect of employment on an individual. However, his understanding is unfortunately limited, and doubly reveals his socialist heart. Brooks favors the implementation of universal job guarantee programs based on his observations of the positive effects of working on people. “There were good aspects to the Soviet Union,” Brooks argued, and one of them was a universal job guarantee. Brooks correctly identifies a source of human dignity — one’s job — but falls short in discovering the ultimate source of human dignity — one’s self. A job is only meaningful if it serves as a venue for the construction of the self: that is, self-esteem, self-love, and self-consciousness. In favoring a universal job guarantee, Brooks fails to understand both the source of a genuine sense of purpose and fulfillment and the fact that state compulsion inevitably contradicts the development of the self. As Alexandre Kojève writes, “The man who works recognizes his own product in the World that has actually been transformed by his work: he recognizes himself in it, he sees in it his own human reality, in it he discovers and reveals to others the objective reality of his humanity, of the originally abstract and purely subjective idea he has of himself.” Having a job should not be treated as an end in itself, because it is only of significance as a medium for human consciousness. To use the state to ensure that everyone has a job would be an attempt made at the expense of the fundamental source of dignity, i.e., individual consciousness, and would only result in the opposite of what is intended — as many Left-minded policies tend to do. It would at best create a numbing illusion of purpose that blinds people from seeing the hollowness of life under an anti-individual regime.

I admire Brooks’s tenacity to see the truth about poverty and capitalism. However, Brooks is a socialist by heart who is strong and intelligent enough to confront the reality that capitalism actually works, and it is for the poor that it works best. Sadly, the problem that Brooks represents is not uncommon. Philosophers such as Elizabeth Anderson and Christopher Essert also make the mistake of considering the state as having a positive role in helping people obtain a sense of dignity. To me, that is a blatant contradiction; the state can never provide the individual a self. The only way for the state to help the individual in that regard is to leave the individual alone, i.e., give the individual the freedom to actually develop a self. The Left is finally starting to abandon their treatment of humans as matter, recognizing the spiritual side of things. They are on the right track. Let’s hope that they take the final step before it is too late — that is, see the true nature of the state and its inherent tension with the individual. If Brooks is offering the best case for capitalism, it is clear that the Right has been extremely ineffective on the moral battlefield. It really is time for the Right to take up the task of presenting the moral story of capitalism seriously.