Thesis 1: Human beings flourish through
participation in shared practices ordered toward common goods. Human
flourishing cannot be reduced to biological survival or preference satisfaction
but depends upon participation in practices through which persons are
recognized as members of a shared form of life. These include the exercise of
virtue, meaningful (non-alienated) labor, political action in Arendt’s sense,
and relations of mutual care or love. Such practices presuppose bounded forms
of association within which persons can be known, act together, and share
responsibility for the material and normative conditions of their common life.
Commentary:
This is the anthropological premise drawn from
Aristotle, Aquinas, Berry, and Arendt. It grounds the later claim that scale
matters for the realization of distinctively human goods.
Thesis 2: Subsistence-oriented macro-economies
tend to embed economic power within dense networks of shared practice. Where
economic activity is ordered toward the reproduction of a shared form of
life rather than toward expansion, production is governed by limits set by
land, season, household labor, and the need to sustain durable relationships
over time. Economic interdependence typically coincides with shared social
membership, raising the non-economic costs of domination and thereby
constraining exploitative relations within the community.
Commentary:
This does not deny the possibility of exploitation
(e.g., Sparta was a subsistence economy), but locates its likelihood in the
degree to which economic interdependence coincides with or diverges from
communal membership (contrast with Amish communities).
Interlude.
I need
to clarify what I mean by subsistence economy. A subsistence economy is not one
that merely satisfies the biological requirements of survival, but one that is
ordered toward securing the material conditions necessary for the ongoing
reproduction of a shared human form of life across generations. Such an
economy aims at sufficiency relative to the practices through which persons
become capable of participation in common goods including the cultivation of
virtue, the transmission of knowledge, the exercise of craft, artistic
expression, political deliberation, familial life, and relations of mutual
care. In this sense, subsistence must be understood at both a biological and a
cultural level. Biological subsistence requires the provision of food, water,
shelter, clothing, and bodily security sufficient to sustain life. Cultural
subsistence, by contrast, requires the provision of those material supports
without which participation in the practices constitutive of human flourishing
would be impossible: tools for literacy and education (e.g., paper, books,
printing technologies), means of artistic and symbolic expression (e.g.,
instruments, pigments, performance spaces), artifacts of memory and tradition
(e.g., archives, libraries, liturgical objects), tools adequate to craft and
intellectual work, and technologies that support health, communication, or
environmental stewardship at scales compatible with communal governance. Within
a subsistence-oriented economy, technologies are evaluated not solely according
to their capacity to increase productivity or consumption, but according to
whether they sustain or displace the practices through which a community
maintains its shared life. A printing press, for example, may be wholly
compatible with subsistence insofar as it supports literacy, education, and the
intergenerational transmission of knowledge. By contrast, technological systems
like the smart phone that reorganize attention, labor, or social interaction in
ways that subordinate communal practices to the imperatives of scale or
accumulation may undermine the very forms of participation that subsistence
seeks to secure. Production is governed by limits set by land, season,
household labor, craft competence, and the need to sustain relationships over
time. The people upon whom one depends economically are typically the same
people with whom one must raise children, share tools, bury the dead, resolve
disputes, celebrate marriages, and survive bad harvests. Economic power is
therefore embedded within a dense web of non-economic relationships. You cannot
easily exploit someone whose continued cooperation is necessary for your own
family’s survival through the winter and whose judgment of your character
matters in domains that cannot be exited by contract (marriage alliances,
reputation, mutual aid, etc.). In such a setting, power is constrained by what Alasdair
MacIntyre would call the requirements of ongoing practices, or what Wendell Berry
would simply call “membership.” Thus the aim of a subsistence economy is not
the indefinite expansion of productive capacity, but the maintenance of a
material basis sufficient for memory and learning, artistic creation, craft
competence, family formation, political action, and the cultivation of mutual
responsibility. It seeks to provide what is necessary not merely for human
survival, but for the continuation of recognizably human ways of living
together.
Thesis 3: Large-scale agrarian and feudal
economies institutionalized class domination through control of land. In early
empires and feudal regimes, access to subsistence was mediated by juridically
enforced obligations to landholding elites who extracted surplus through
tribute, rent, or labor service. Exploitation was structurally embedded but
mediated through relatively stable relations of personal dependence, often
accompanied by customary obligations of protection and stewardship.
Commentary:
Here Marx’s insight into class opposition holds at
the level of structural description, though power remains territorially
anchored and socially intelligible.
Thesis 4: Capitalist economies are structurally
oriented toward continual accumulation. Expand or perish. Get richer or perish.
In market-based systems, surplus must be reinvested to maintain competitive
position. Economic activity becomes ordered not toward sufficiency or status
maintenance but toward the indefinite expansion of productive capacity. Technological
innovation is rewarded insofar as it enhances productivity, reduces labor
costs, or expands market opportunities and thus conditioned by this imperative.
Commentary:
This introduces the systemic imperative often
described (misleadingly) as “growth,” better understood as constant accumulation
under competitive pressure, typically concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
Thesis 5: Technological development reflects capitalist
imperatives rather than autonomous progress. The trajectory of technological
innovation is shaped by the economic systems within which it is financed and
deployed. Accumulation-oriented economies tend to prioritize technologies that
enhance efficiency, control, or scalability, whereas alternative institutional
arrangements might direct comparable scientific capacities toward ecological
stability or community-level autonomy. (The form the Internet took, for
example, embodies at every level capitalist imperatives, though it was developed
as a university research-sharing tool. Other technologies are not developed in
capitalism that might be developed in a subsistence economy.)
Commentary:
This integrates Marx with Lewis and Langdon
Winner: technology is not neutral but embodies prior judgments about ends. It
is not too much to say that technology is social and economic power objectified.
Thesis 6: System-generated needs become conditions
for how we conduct our lives and communicate. As participation in education,
health care, economic exchange, and civic administration becomes dependent upon
technological infrastructures, access to system-generated goods (e.g., digital
platforms, connectivity) ceases to be optional and becomes a precondition for
acting within shared practices.
Commentary:
At this point, maintaining or expanding such
systems appears indistinguishable from promoting human flourishing itself,
rendering critique difficult.
Thesis 7: The distinction between serving human
flourishing and reproducing the system that defines it becomes progressively
opaque. Where agency depends upon integration into complex infrastructures,
investments in system maintenance are justified as necessary for participation
in common life, even where systemic expansion may erode the communal practices
through which flourishing was originally understood. (e.g., social media a
recent example, etc.)
Commentary:
System reproduction becomes self-legitimating.
Thesis 8: Geopolitical security compels
participation in accumulation-oriented systems.
Where technological capacity functions as a
principal determinant of military and geopolitical power, political communities
must pursue continual economic and infrastructural expansion not merely from
preference for domination but from prudential concern for autonomy. Otherwise,
a polity risks becoming “the Indians” to other expanding powers.
Commentary:
This is a dilemma I cannot find a way out of.
Thesis 9: The pursuit of communal limits may
entail strategic vulnerability. Communities that limit accumulation to sustain
the anthropological conditions of flourishing risk subordination by rivals
organized for technological and economic expansion.
Commentary:
Security through (technological and economic)
power conflicts starkly with flourishing through limits.
Thesis 10: National democracies embedded in
globalized systems apparently lack the capacity for structural reform. While
elections remain meaningful at the level of policy
administration, capital mobility and technological competition constrain the
range of economically viable options available to any single polity, orienting
democratic governance toward managing systemic imperatives rather than
collectively determining them.
Commentary:
Elections determine managers of the deck, not the
course of the ship.
Thesis 11: The restoration of community-based
economies depends upon resolving the tension between scale and security. This
may require either protective security islands (the Amish), global institutions
capable of limiting competitive accumulation, or arrangements that decouple
defensive technological capacity from the systemic imperative of economic
expansion.
Commentary:
These options appear to exhaust the principal
structural responses to the dilemma.
Thesis 12: In technologically advanced capitalist
systems, power increasingly takes the form of systemic control over the
conditions of agency rather than direct interpersonal domination. As
technological development becomes embedded within accumulation-oriented
economic systems, the expansion of human power over nature tends simultaneously
to expand the power of some human agents over others by enabling the design and
governance of infrastructures upon which participation in social life depends.
In such contexts, domination may operate not through coercive command but
through the structuring of environments, incentives, and technical systems that
shape the range of actions available to participants, rendering the exercise of
power less visible as interpersonal rule and more pervasive as the management
of the conditions under which agency is possible at all.
Commentary:
This reflects Lewis’s claim in The Abolition of Man that the “power of
Man over Nature” becomes, in practice, the power of some men over others
mediated by technology. In accumulation-driven systems, this power is exercised
not primarily by sovereigns or ruling estates but by those who design, finance,
or regulate the technological infrastructures through which ordinary social
practices are conducted. The result is a form of domination compatible with
formal equality and procedural democracy, yet capable of shaping human action
at a deeper level than earlier, more overtly juridical forms of control.
Thesis 13: Where economic and technological
systems are organized at scales incompatible with community-level participation
in shared practices, the erosion of the social conditions required for human
flourishing tends to manifest in the commodification of core human capacities
and the destabilization of familial and communal forms of life.
When
labor, attention, sexuality, artistic expression, and even identity itself are
increasingly mediated by market exchange and system-level coordination,
activities once embedded within networks of mutual recognition and shared
purpose may be reorganized as services, performances, or consumable
experiences. The displacement of work from practices ordered toward common
goods into roles defined by market demand may contribute to forms of alienation
in which the exercise of skill and judgment is subordinated to externally
determined metrics of efficiency or profitability. Familial and communal
relationships may be strained by patterns of mobility, time-discipline, and
precarity associated with competitive labor markets, while cultural production
risks becoming oriented toward visibility and monetization rather than the
transmission of meaning across generations.
Commentary:
In such conditions, the “pillars” of human life — stable households,
intergenerational continuity, meaningful work, shared ritual, and the
cultivation of character — may become increasingly difficult to sustain. As
Christopher Lasch observed in his analysis of the culture of narcissism, social
environments that reward performance, flexibility, and self-presentation over
durable commitment may encourage adaptive strategies oriented toward
self-optimization rather than membership. The resulting pathologies need not be
interpreted as failures of individual virtue alone, but as responses to
institutional contexts that render long-term responsibility and mutual
dependence economically or socially costly.
The issue is not simply that traditional forms of life have been
abandoned, but that the structural conditions under which they might be
sustained have been progressively weakened by systems that reward mobility,
abstraction, and scalability over rootedness and continuity. The damage is not
only economic, but anthropological, affecting the capacities through which
persons become capable of fidelity, trust, craftsmanship, and love.
It is
not that people cease to value love, fidelity, craftsmanship, or responsibility;
it is that the institutional environment makes acting on those values
increasingly difficult and rewards alternative strategies better suited to survival
or advancement. So the “damage” to the pillars of humanity appears less as
decadence than as a shift in the kinds of selves the system selects for.
And that
dovetails with my earlier theses. If human flourishing depends upon practices
sustained within bounded communities, and if large-scale accumulation systems
systematically reorganize life in ways that make such participation impossible,
then the emergence of self-forms oriented toward performance rather than
membership may represent not cultural decline alone, but structural
misalignment between human nature (anthropological reality) and institutional
demands.
Taken
together, this connects with the opening anthropological claim: that human
flourishing depends upon participation in shared practices through which people
recognize one another as members of a common life ordered toward goods not
reducible to preference satisfaction or market exchange. Where economic and
technological systems are organized at scales that render such participation
difficult or impossible to sustain, the capacities through which these
practices are realized – fidelity, trust, craftsmanship, political
responsibility, and relations of mutual care – may be progressively weakened. (I
believe to have observed this weakening from my great grandparents, members of
a viable farming community, to my generation and beyond.) The resulting
transformation in forms of selfhood Should not be attributed to a decline in
morals alone, but reflects adaptive responses to institutional environments
that reward mobility, performance, and exchangeability over long-term
commitment and interdependence (cf. Macintyre). In this sense, the erosion of
familial and communal forms of life may be understood not as the abandonment of
human nature, but as the consequence of social arrangements in which the
conditions required for its realization are increasingly difficult to secure.
postscript. I believe "original sin"
should be interpreted as being caught in regimes of power that distort original
human nature. Of course, the original sin is wanting to escape reality, human
reality, natural reality, divine reality, for the purpose of aggrandizing the
self (in the form, historically, of power over others, their labor, and the
command of the surplus wealth produced by it.) Human beings are created for
participation in an order not of their own making: the natural order (our
embodiment and limits); the community order (mutual dependence); and, in
theological terms, the divine order (goods that transcend preference). Original
sin, on my reading, is not simply that individuals are prone to be selfish and
greedy, but that the human will is tempted to refuse creaturely participation
in favor of self-determination or “autonomy”: i.e., to seek security,
permanence, or mastery by reorganizing the world in ways that promise
independence from vulnerability, dependence, or finitude. Historically, this
has often taken the form of
power over others; appropriation of their labor; command
of surplus; the attempt to stand outside reciprocity.
If the
desire to escape dependence or contingency is widespread (as both classical
theology and modern psychoanalysis would suggest), then regimes of power may
arise that institutionalize this impulse, not only permitting but rewarding
forms of agency oriented toward control, accumulation, and insulation from
shared limits. Thus the distortion becomes no longer merely personal but
social: institutions may come to embody strategies for managing vulnerability
through expansion; technological development may promise control over natural
processes; economic systems may reward those who successfully detach security
from membership.
So I
want to say that original sin manifests not only in disordered individual
choices but in the creation and maintenance of social arrangements that seek to
overcome the conditions of creaturely dependence through the concentration of
power and control. In this sense, the temptation “to be as gods” can be read as
the attempt to secure flourishing by standing apart from the limits and mutual
obligations that make it possible.
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