14 April 2015
| Daniel Lopez
Guardian reporter Helen Davidson
wrote in January of a massive expansion of “orphanage tourism”
(Westerners going abroad to help or adopt orphans) in Cambodia.
Surely such selfless, Angelina Jolie-style generosity is a beacon
of hope in a bleak world?
Not quite. As it
turns out, Western do-gooders are funding a multi-million dollar
enterprise that creates orphans. Over the last five years,
“orphanage tourism” has led to a 75 percent increase in the number
of orphanages. Children are being sold into what UNICEF’s Rana
Flowers describes as an “incredibly abusive and exploitative”
system.
To the economic
free-marketeers, this is good example of supply meeting demand. To
the rest of us, it is an apparent paradox: an attempt to do good
that ends up achieving the opposite.
How to make sense of
this contradiction? To begin with, the only real power we seem to
have is that over our personal conduct. Although we aspire to
social change, any action begins with a personal moral choice to
take a stand. Of course, when moral outrage drives people to
demonstrate or organise at work, it pushes over into collective
action and towards political thinking. The moral vision isn’t lost,
but provides force for something more powerful.
The individualist
starting point carries a risk. It’s all too common for a moral
gesture or lifestyle choice to masquerade as a solution. In this
way, an apparently ethical stance becomes self-serving. The German
philosopher Friedrich Hegel, keenly aware of this problem,
discussed a number of individual types who embody it.
The “knight of
virtue” was his name for one. These ethical individuals have a
vision that the system can be used to pursue good. So we get
“ethical entrepreneurship”. The ethical entrepreneur’s business
model incorporates those who are seen as needy – “third world”
producers or the homeless, for example. When a normal business pays
its workers or producers, it is called a wage. When an ethical
business does the same, it is called “community
empowerment”.
But an ethical
business is still a business; it still must compete in the market
and pay its “producers” less than the value they create for the
enterprise. But given that its products often are more expensive,
it relies on a related species: the ethical consumer or investor.
These people buy absolution in the form of “fair trade” coffee,
quirky handicrafts and “ethical” stock portfolios.
Notwithstanding that
the Vatican pioneered the sale of such “indulgences” hundreds of
years ago, everyone feels happy – except those who are
trapped as exploited victims. Microfinance is an example of this.
Hailed as “empowering”, microfinance enterprises in India granted
loans of as little as $US100 to ultra-poor slum dwellers otherwise
incapable of qualifying for loans. “India’s microfinance sector was
once touted as a saviour of the poor and a good bet for investors
…”, noted the Economist in 2013. “Things went downhill
fast.” There were scores of suicides of small farmers. “It is
alleged that they were hounded to their deaths by lenders’ coercive
recovery practices.”
Not all ethical
businesses are so disastrous, but none can escape the fact that
inequality and marginalisation are necessary parts of their
business model. In a way, it’s like drug dealers running rehab
centres.
A more radical
individual type is the “virtuous conscience”. In the past, these
advocates of a moral lifestyle could be found leading crusades
against alcohol and obscenity, and preaching salvation through
Jesus. Today, they aren’t so interested in Jesus – but they still
harbour an almost perverse interest in consumption and obscenity.
Thus, you get lifestyle-ism, identity politics and privilege
checking.
Taken to an extreme,
the virtuous conscience can descend into what Hegel called the
“insanity of self-conceit”. For example, an obsession with “calling
out” privilege leads to fragmentation and marginalises the
uninitiated. But this needn’t bother the virtuous conscience. The
more humanity is mired in sin, the more the virtuous conscience can
feel saved.
The final type of
moral individual is the “beautiful soul”. Despairing of changing
the world, the beautiful soul retreats into the conviction of its
own goodness. This isn’t as hard as it sounds. To the beautiful
soul, war is caused by hatred. Inequality is caused by greed. The
problem with politics is negativity and deceit. So, the key is to
embrace the opposite values. This wisdom is all the more compelling
if attributed to a Buddhist monk or a Native American
shaman.
This type of
thinking isn’t marginal – the statement by a young Greens candidate
for Manly in last month’s NSW election bemoaned cynicism and
negativity in politics, and pointed out that idealism and naivety
“can only contribute positively to our political culture”. In many
ways, the beautiful soul is the least serious. For them, morality
is just window-dressing: vacuous exhortations to “be swept away in
the wake, or stand up and be counted” (by voting for yet another
aspiring politician) shows only the beautiful soul’s reconciliation
with the world as it is.
The thread running
through these examples is that they all are stuck on the level of
moral individualism. Taking a moral stand might be a starting
point, but if morality doesn’t rise to an understanding of the
system, it not only fails to change capitalist society – it helps
reinforce it.