Book Review: Supercapitalism
Posted: February 3, 2008
Robert Reich has written an unusually insightful book about the co-evolution of US corporations and the American government in the last sixty years. Its subtitle encapsulates this story as “The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life.” His last chapter starts with a reprise of his argument: Supercapitalism has triumphed as power has shifted to consumers and investors. They now have more choice than ever before, and can switch ever more easily to better deals. And competition among companies to lure and keep them continues to intensify. This means better and cheaper products, and higher returns. Yet as supercapitalism has triumphed, its negative social consequences have also loomed larger. These include widening inequality as most gains from economic growth go to the very top, reduced job security, instability of or loss of community, environmental degradation, violations of human rights abroad, and a plethora of products and services pandering to our basest desires. These consequences are larger in the United States than in other advanced economies because Americas has moved deeper into supercapitalism. Other economies, following closely behind, have begun to experience many of the same things.
Democracy is the appropriate vehicle for responding to such social consequences. That’s where citizen values are supposed to be expressed, where choices are supposed to be made between what we want for ourselves as consumers and investors, and what we want to achieve together. But the same competition that has fueled supercapitalism has spilled over into the political process. Large companies have hired platoons of lobbyists, lawyers, experts, and public relations specialists, and devoted more and more money to electoral campaigns. The result has been to drown out voices and values of citizens. As all of this has transpired, the old institutions through which citizen values had been expressed in the Not Quite Golden Past [roughly from 1945 to 1970] –industry-wide labor unions, local citizen-based groups, “corporate statesmen” responding to all stakeholders, and regulatory agencies– have been largely blown away by the gusts of supercapitalism.
Reich argues that the trend toward supercapitalism started with technological changes that lowered the cost of global transportation, such as cargo containers on container ships, super railways and highways, and the cost of global communication, the Internet that connected low-cost computers. The globalization that followed led to hyper-competition within industries and even between them, as industry boundaries fell, products proliferated and the bigger firms reached for international supply chains and worldwide customers. This has been great for the consumer and the investor part of us, but is has not been good for the citizen part of us that wants social justice, quality education, affordable healthcare and clean environments for all. He does not blame corporate leaders for putting enough money into the Washington scene to dominate the political process. They feel forced to do it to maintain their competitive position in a game where, if one is not a big winner, one will be a big loser. In RD terms, this game puts so much pressure on one’s drives to acquire and defend that it overrides one’s drive to bond with the wider community.
Reich has done a better job of describing these events than he has in prescribing cures. He provides a sample of promising reform policies for federal legislation but he despairs of getting them enacted. He wishes there was a way to get corporate money out of Washington but sees only hopelessly weak efforts to date. He seems totally unaware of the method we described in Chapter 11 of Being Human for the public funding of all federal elections to a fully-competitive level, the ‘Just $6’ approach. He does make it very clear, however, what a great blessing some such system would be for the public. It could restore the balance in Washington between all four drives that the founders intended (see Chapter 8 of Being Human). He does see that even corporate leaders could welcome regulations that gave all competitors a level playing field, so they could save all the money they now feel forced to send in Washington’s direction. With ‘Just $6” in place regulators could be expected to establish the general rule the all corporations would be expected, as the economists say, to ‘internalize’ all the costs they generate instead of ‘externalizing’ them, as they do now, to their human and natural environment. Such rules would not need to stop economic progress, but the pace would be moderated to enable comparable progress on our widely-shared goals.
Tags: Book Review, Drive to Acquire, Drive to Defend | 1 Comment »Book Review: Art and Intimacy: How The Arts Began
Posted: January 21, 2008
Art and Intimacy: How The Arts Began by Ellen Dissanayake was published in 2000, and, like Constant Battles reviewed below, I can only wish I had come across it earlier. It is an amazing and wondrous book. It is repetitious but the points it makes are so important and difficult for our modern minds to grasp that I, for one, am thankful for its redundancies.
If any readers of RD theory have doubts about the fundamental nature of the human drive to bond (dB) in mutually caring relationships, they only have to read the first two chapters, Mutuality and Belonging. She makes the process of bonding come alive in her descriptions and pictures of the emotion-laden exchanges between mothers and their infants throughout the world.
If any readers of RD theory have doubts about the fundamental nature of the drive of humans to comprehend (dC) and learn how to make sense of the world, they only have to read Chapter 3, Finding and Making Meaning. As the book’s title indicates, it emphasizes art as a mode for making meaning, but it does not belittle religion and science as other modes.
Chapter 4, ‘Hands-on’ Competence, puts a fresh perspective on the drive to acquire (dD). It humanizes this drive as a search for a sense of competence in our dealing with the essentials of the material world with respect, as well as with skill. It shows how the industrial/informational revolutions have distorted and diminished our sense of this competence. The only fault I have with this point is that the author understates, I believe, the potential for people to build a sense of competence from mastering complex machinery, including computers.
The book’s last two chapters unify its message around art by showing how all art forms have served to evoke and increase our sensibilities to our most basic human emotions by Elaborating (the title of Chapter 5) art objects to help humans take seriously the fundamentals of human existence. It’s contribution in this regard will enable me to rewrite the portions of Chapter 9 of Being Human that cover the contributions of the arts to making meaning. I have always felt that this part of the RD theory was inadequately expressed.
I am tempted to quote many parts of this remarkable book but I will limit myself to its last paragraph that is, surprisingly, a quotation from another person.
Tags: Book Review, Drive to Comprehend, Drive to Bond, Drive to Defend | 0 Comments »I cannot do better than to end this chapter with some impassioned words from Robert Hughes, which come from a quite different approach to the arts but echo uncannily the message of this book:
One of the ways you measure the character—indeed, the greatness—of a country is by its public commitment to the arts. Not as a luxury; not as a diplomatic device; not as a social placebo. But as a commitment arising from the belief that the desire to make and experience art is an organic part of human nature, without which our natures are coarsened, impoverished, and denied, and our sense of community with other citizens is weakened. This may sound like rhetoric, but after twenty-six hears of writing in America I know it to be true—I know it in my heart, my sometimes mean and irritable writer’s heart. The arts are the field on which we place our own dreams, thoughts, and desires alongside those of others, so that solitudes can meet, to their joy sometimes, or to their surprise, and sometimes to their disgust. When you boil it all down, that is the social purpose of art: the creation of mutuality, the passage from feeling into shared meaning.
The Humans Who Are ‘Too Nice’: No Drive to Defend?
Posted: October 13, 2007
In the October, 2007 issue of The Atlantic an article by Olivia Judson entitled “The Selfless Gene” caught my eye. No surprise, given my interest in the drive to bond (dB). The lead-in was even better. “It’s easy to see how evolution can account for the dark streaks in human nature—the violence, treachery, and cruelty. But how does it produce kindness, generosity, and heroism?”
The article proceeds to present a tidy summary of how the drive to bond could have evolved in humans. It moves through Darwin’s natural selection, Hamilton’s kin selection and on to Darwin’s disputed ideas about group selection in humans. All very gratifying in its support for the evolution of bonding in humans as spelled out in RD Theory. But then in the last few paragraphs it drops a bombshell as regards what I have written up in Being Human. I will quote some key sentences:
“If the evolutionary scenario I’ve outlined is even half right, then we should expect to find that there are genes involved in mediating friendly behavior. And there are. Consider Williams syndrome. People who have Williams syndrome tend to have poor cardiovascular function and a small, pointed, ”elfin” face. They are typically terrible with numbers but good with words. And they are weirdly, incautiously friendly and nice—and unafraid of strangers.
“They are also missing a small segment of chromosome 7… In Williams syndrome, one copy of chromosome 7 is normal; the other is missing a small piece. The missing piece contains about 20 genes, some of which make proteins that are important in the workings of the brain. Since one chromosome is intact, the problem isn’t a complete absence of the proteins that the genes encode, but an insufficiency. Somehow, this insufficiency results in people who are too nice. What’s more, they can’t learn not to be nice. Which is to say, someone with Williams syndrome can learn the phrase “Don’t talk to strangers” but can’t translate it into action…“Williams syndrome shows that friendliness has a genetic underpinning—that it is indeed as primal as ferocity. Indirectly, it shows something else as well. Most of us are able to apply brakes to friendly behavior, picking and choosing the people we are friendly to; those with Williams syndrome aren’t. They cannot modulate their behavior. This is even odder than being too friendly. And it throws into sharp relief one of the chief features of ordinary human nature: its flexibility. One of the most important, and least remarked upon, consequences of social living is that individual behavior must be highly flexible and tailored to circumstance.”
This fascinating story about Williams syndrome is all news to me. It not only reinforces our confidence in the genetic basis of the human drive to bond, but also, more importantly, shows us how humans behave when they are missing that code for defending, those 20 missing genes on chromosome 7. Being too nice for one’s own good means that one has been short-changed on the genetic underpinnings of their drive to defend (dD). It is a condition we discussed in hypothetical terms on page 191 of Being Human. “What if a person were born without a drive to defend? Such as person would have to be treated permanently like an infant, always protected by others from all the hazards of life.” It shows that dD is based on our genes and even locates the specific genes that are missing. Finally it shows how the conflicts between our genetic impulses generate the adaptive flexibility that, as the article puts it, is so characteristic of human behavior. This is all new and powerful evidence for the genetic basis of both dB and of dD and the way they interact. It could even help us in searching for the specific location of the genes for the other three drives.
Tags: Drive to Defend, Darwinian Theory of Human Behavior | 0 Comments »RD Theory and the Iraq War
Posted: September 16, 2007As Being Human is being concluded, the paramount issue being debated in the United States is what to do about Iraq, where the violent guerrilla insurgency has devolved into a many-sided violent civil war. Last December the crucial Baker-Hamilton report was released to the Bush administration along with the advice of the military and many others. In January Bush responded by announcing ‘the surge’, the increase in the number of troops in Iraq. Now, eight months later, Bush has announced, fortified with General Petraeus’ report, that he is, with only a modest rollback of troops to the pre-surge level, staying the course in Iraq for the indefinite future. (more…)
Tags: Drive to Defend, Darwinian Theory of Human Behavior | 0 Comments »
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