I'm always tickled to make Sibby's headlines. I hesitate to respond, though, since I know a lot of my readers may ask, "What the heck are they talking about?" or, more likely, "Who cares?"
But Sibby is just so wrong this time, I must indulge. Sibby, my response follows. But for those of you who don't care for our little blog-world back-and-forth, here: watch a bit of the cultural bedrock of my own secular humanism, Star Trek (see this episode synopsis for context):
Now Sibby, do you really believe that the problem Naomi Klein points to (and that John W. Whitehead and I amplify is "certain business leaders who adhere to the secular humanist worldview"? No, the problem is that those business leaders don't give a tenth of the damn that you do about philosophy. Those CEOs are not the liberal patsies you envision strolling fuzzyheadedly about Harvard Yard advocating Marxism and denying Christian professors tenure. Those CEOs were too busy treating college as vo-tech for MBAs to even notice the secular humanism the liberal arts crowd espouses.
Klein says American corporations are developing and promoting technology that helps China oppress its people and that will help other governments, including our own, take away citizen liberties. You can't pin that problem on secular humanism or any other worldview windmill you care to tilt at. Corporations have no worldview. They don't value human life the way either Christians like you or secular humanists like me do. They don't believe in God's salvation or man's inherent goodness. Corporations, these artifical entities that our courts blasphemously endow with personhood, are driven by profit, period. Not patriotism, not religion, not truth, nothing but profit.
I would suggest that conscientious secular humanists are as interested as conscientious Christians in fighting human rights abuses in China (and everywhere else), and that both my people and yours are more interested in standing against totalitarianism than the corporations and free-market fundamentalists who say we can't afford to upset the world economy. Don't be fooled: those CEOs defending free trade with China aren't motivated by principle; they're motivated by the very selfish, materialist desire to keep their access to a market of 1.3 billion well-controlled Chinese workers and consumers.
Corporations profit from totalitarianism. That's not secular humanism. That's exactly what I called it yesterday: amoral materialism.
Corporations are interested first in profits. They would tend to cease existing for long otherwise, and provided an environment of competition exists to prevent monopoly power that profit incentive benefits the economy and the consumer.
ReplyDeleteThe exceptions are when when the consumer benefits in the short term at the expense of either themselves down the road or at the expense of others. Secular Humanist may be right about the innate goodness of people, but we should also recognize the innate short-sighted stupidity of people.
In accepting free trade with totalitarian states that allow substandard conditions, freely disregarding all of the regulations that US industry has to add into the cost of producing the same things. We undermine our own internal free market in favor of cheaper goods. If taken to an extreme, worship of international free markets undermines national security and the national welfare. Even if that foreign production is well regulated, the differences in wages and standards of living will still dictate a much lover cost of production outside our country. If free markets were unrestrained we might end up a country that didn't farm at all for example (or didn't produce any fuel for our energy needs). So free markets are fine if government keeps those things in mind.
I don't think either apply in Klein's story though. I see no reason at all for you to say corporations profit from totalitarianism other than to regurgitate the equally unfounded remark by Klein that 'the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style...' anything. All you need to do is examine this history of Japan or India. The rapid growth has little to do with China's continued repression, and everything to do with the differential between a third world economy and the advanced economies of the world. It has happened repeatedly already in eastern Asia, just on an enormously smaller scale. China's GDP growth will level off as they fully catch up. In fact if there were uprisings over low wages or government repression across China that increased pay or relaxed controls, it would likely result in a better economy which would be in capitalism's interest.
I think the immoral decision to help China by L-1 is the lack of moral leadership. A true sense of loyalty to country, state, and community in business means commitment to do the right thing in spite of profit losses. This still exists, but decisions are being made from stockholders at a distance owning pieces of a company so they can later sell it and don't care about it beyond that. Those stockholders may be spread across the planet as much as the company. Why should they care about America or about human rights 5000 miles away? A corporation is only as heartless as those that own it.
I was wondering who Cory knows that Klein knows that knows anything about being responsible for a corporation. Because those friends of Klein might be doing just what she says. Then blaming everyone else for it.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's Al Gore!