Tag: Karl Marx

Gandhi and the Move from Micro to Macro-morality

Posted on by Daniel Gauss

by Daniel Gauss

Raj Ghat in New Delhi, India (all photos by Dan Gauss)

Standing at Raj Ghat, the memorial for Gandhi in New Delhi, near where his corpse was cremated, I began to think about a problem I’ve been grappling with for a long time. With all the good, kind-hearted and sincere people in the world, why is the world not becoming a substantially more humane place?

I am surrounded by incredibly sweet people. I’m often deeply moved, and genuinely amazed, by how generous and compassionate they are, and the lengths they go to in order to be helpful. If you were to judge the world solely by these folks, you would think it to be a gentle, caring place. Comedian Patton Oswalt wrote (after the Boston Marathon bombing), in regard to those causing harm in the world, “The good outnumber you, and we always will.” So, then, why are the good people losing?

It’s pretty clear that the world is not a gentle, caring place. There are at least 50 state-based armed conflicts right now, corruption and duplicity thrive, greed runs unquestioned and unchecked and our climate is deteriorating. In the USA our prisons are full, children struggle to read, income inequality is outrageous and people are barely scraping by paycheck to paycheck. We are in another war. Many of our cities are still racially segregated and class divisions cause unjust treatment and disparate life opportunities and outcomes. Our cities are filled with homeless. The news seems like an unending sequence of cruelty and incompetence.

Standing in silence before the eternal flame at Raj Ghat, reflecting on all that this man did, I felt that his determined effort not only to become more humane, but also to challenge the larger systems that produce suffering, provided the beginning of an answer for me.

After visiting Raj Ghat, and wandering through the nearby Gandhi museum, which traces his life from infancy to death, my big theory now involves what might be called “micro-morality” and “macro-morality.” I think most people shoot for and are largely satisfied with micro-morality…politeness, kindness, volunteering, controlling their temper, forgiving, being nice.

Gandhi demonstrated that micro-morality is essential, but not good enough. Read more »

Monday, May 31, 2021

The oldest injustice

Posted on by Emrys Westacott

by Emrys Westacott

Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations begins with this claim:

The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes….[1]

In other words, labour is the ultimate source of a society’s wealth. In feudal times it had been common to view land in this way since it was the basis for all agricultural produce, and the 18th century French physiocrats still championed that view. But Smith agreed with John Locke’s observation that a loaf of bread is not just produced by a baker but also, indirectly, by the work of the ploughman, the reaper, the thresher, the miller, the people who trained the oxen, mined iron for the plough, quarried stones for the mill, and so on. In fact, Locke argues,

if we rightly estimate things as they come to our use, and cast up the several expences about them, what in them is purely owing to nature, and what to labour, we shall find, that in most of them ninety-nine hundredths are wholly to be put on the account of labour.[2]

The idea that labour is the ultimate source of a nation’s wealth would seem to bolster the argument that that those who perform the labour should enjoy an appropriate share in the wealth that they create. This idea was certainly alive at the time of the English Revolution in the mid 17th century. The Digger leader Gerard Winstanley, claiming biblical authority for his position, denounced the enclosures of common land by the rich, arguing that God intended the Earth to be “a common store-house for all” and was dishonored by the idea that He approved of the current distribution of wealth, “delighting in the comfortable Livelihoods of some, and rejoicing in the miserable poverty and straits of others.”[3] Read more »