A Case of Rotten Apples

Don Boland

In his book "The Well and the Shallows" G. K. Chesterton has a chapter entitled "Reflections on a Rotten Apple". The book was written in the third decade of the twentieth century. In it he says: "The eighteenth century has been called the Age of Reason. I suppose that there is no doubt that the twentieth century is the Age of Unreason. But even this is an understatement". One may believe that if he were alive today, at the beginning of the twenty first century, he would observe this unreason in its full social effect. For the rotten apple that he had noted, but which unfortunately no one else took much notice of, having accordingly been left undisturbed, has done its natural work and caused almost the whole bunch to become rotten.

The unreason or falsehood that he saw was of a general kind, but it has had a particular practical application in the world of economics, where, as he says, it has become entrenched as a worship of the means rather than the end.(1) Concretely, we might put it that, in terms of good economics, the selling of apples has come to be regarded as more important than the eating of them. Chesterton puts it this way: " … it is a particular hitch or falsification arising from a very recent trick of regarding everything only in relation to trade. Trade is all very well in its way, but Trade has been put in the place of Truth. Trade which is in its nature a secondary or dependent thing, has been treated as a primary and independent thing; as an absolute."(2) " … the madness of the trader who cannot see any good in a good, except as something to get rid of" has finally corrupted the mind of the whole society, and with particular virulence the minds of its leading economists and politicians.(3)

Not that there is anything wrong with trade. But it is a (social) means to an end that very quickly distorts all our economic thinking if we treat it, as we do now, as an end of itself. "In all normal civilizations", remarks Chesterton, "the trader existed, and must exist. But in all normal civilizations the trader was the exception; certainly he was never the rule; and most certainly he was never the ruler. The predominance that he has gained in the modern world is the cause of all the disasters of the modern world."

This propensity for the abuse of the role of trade or exchange is not a new discovery. Aristotle, in this very connection, had long ago observed that trade very easily deceives some people into the pursuit of profit (money) for its own sake.(4) It is just that the modern world has developed this false economy into an art form. Indeed, it has almost acquired the status of a (secular) religion.(5) Much of modern Economics, too, is an (unsuccessful) attempt to make scientific sense of it.

Chesterton, like Aristotle, saw clearly the irrationality or "madness’ of such worship of trade. The activity as such has no natural limit. Of itself it lacks an end or limit. "There is a limit to the number of apples a man can eat … But there is no limit to the number of apples he may possibly sell; and he soon becomes a pushing, dexterous and successful Salesman and turns the whole world upside down."(6)

The inevitable result of the dominance of such irrationality in our thinking is the further enrichment of the few and the increase in the impoverishment of the majority of people within the community. " .. the last effect of treating apples as goods rather than as good," noted Chesterton in his day, "has been in a desperate drive of public charity and in poor men selling apples in the street."

To talk about Private property in such an economic system is to indulge somewhat in a delusion.(7) "… our individualistic and commercial modern society is actually the very reverse of a society founded on Private Property. I mean that the actual direct and isolated enjoyment of private property, as distinct from the excitement of exchanging it or getting a profit on it, is rather rarer than in many simple communities that seem almost communal in their simplicity."

If Chesterton thought that in his time "the complexity of commercial society has become intolerable, because that society is commercial and nothing else" what are we to think of our contemporary commercial and financial society? The fact that we have learned to live with such insane complexity and seem to be able to manage it to some extent without understanding it is a cause for concern rather than for congratulation. It is a fertile field for commercial charlatans and financial wizards because of its unintelligibility, based as it is on a fundamental (economic) falsehood.

What is of most concern is how this false commercial mentality has passed beyond the confines of the worlds of business and its political "partner". Located within those social organs its damage was real enough but indirect, to the social body rather than its mind or spirit. Now it is beginning to infect directly the mind of society as a whole. This is noticeable in its effect on language(1) and most disturbingly upon education even at the primary level. The nonsense "business" jargon invented by pseudo-experts in business, and the management muddlers who in profound ignorance confidently "implement" policies written in management jargon, now have been let loose upon the very culture of society. It may not be a coincidence that such general stupefaction does serve the interests of those who profit from social injustice.

Chesterton’s insights into this modern malaise provide solid evidence for the verdict of Etienne Gilson, one of the most celebrated historians of philosophy of the twentieth century, that Chesterton was one of the deepest thinkers of all time. But he was, perhaps fortunately, not a professional philosopher or academic thinker. His understanding of things was intuitive, consisting rather in a sense of something wrong, and what is needed to right it, than in a well developed, and necessarily abstract, intellectual theory. Accordingly he expressed his insight in more concrete terms.

His proposals for a remedy were also put in similar terms. The insane complexity of modern economic life he saw called for a return to a more simple life, more simple that is, in its principles; not denying the increase in complexity that comes with the increase in population and advances in science and technology. He did not think that we could become self sufficient without trade. "I do not imagine, or desire, that things would ever be quite so simple as that." He knew that a major cause of our economic troubles lay somehow in how trade dominated social life. The need therefore was to understand better the social function of trade and find out what was wrong with it today.

Expressed in such concrete terms as he put it, however, the appropriate distinctions could not be made. On that account the more sophisticated intellectuals of academia have been inclined to regard his comments upon economics and proposals for reform as simplistic and naïve. Chesterton himself was aware of being the target of this modern sophistry and had the obvious answer for it. "But we must understand things in their simplicity before we can explain or correct their complexity." "But the principle is simple; and the only way to proceed through a complex situation is to start with the right first principle."

The modern economists are content to work from a wrong first principle (for their study is of the mess that is its result) and then apply their not inconsiderable intellects to the exciting challenge of unraveling the unfathomable complexity of the absurd, an exercise doomed to repeated failure. Undaunted they continue; for is not the latest theory of the true scientific method Popper’s principle of falsification?

I have attempted in a series of articles to identify the abstract philosophical distinctions that are required for a full analysis of the problem, drawing them from two of the most simple-minded thinkers of the past, Aristotle and Aquinas.(9) They, surprisingly enough, have the understanding of the distinctions and principles needed. What we have to supply is their application to the modern factual situation that Chesterton was driven in frustration to describe as one of "blind buying and selling; of bullying people into purchasing what they do not want; of making it badly so that they may break it and imagine they want it again; of keeping rubbish in rapid circulation like a dust-storm in a desert".(10)

Admittedly, we have managed since Chesterton’s time to moderate the more extreme features of unbridled Capitalism as he experienced it (though we have recently again set upon a course of returning it to its pristine glory). There are welcome signs too of an increasing awareness of the need for ethical restraints upon "market forces". But the principal focus of the economy remains commercial in the sense that Chesterton understood it in his day, namely, of buying and selling solely for the sake of profit, to which the more natural social priorities of production, employment and consumption are subordinated.

(1) He perceptively notes a switch in economic focus from the (economic) good to goods.

(2) The kind of trade that Chesterton has in mind is, as he says, best expressed in "the fable of the man who sold razors, and afterwards explained to an indignant customer, with simple dignity, that he had never said the razors would shave. When asked if razors were not made to shave, he replied that they were made to sell." It is this form of exchange that I have symbolized elsewhere as MCM (buying not in order to consume but to sell at a profit) and simply for the sake of making a profit. In this commercial mentality little thought is given to what kind of goods one is dealing with and what they are for. The whole focus is on "economic growth", i.e. on the ever-increasing profits of the commercial enterprise. The directors, the real managers of the enterprise, when challenged about this make the lame excuse that they are there wholly to look after the interests of the owners of the company (the shareholders who, necessarily, tend to be primarily interested in the monetary return on their "investment". Thankfully, we can detect a growing awareness of the weakness of this excuse).

(3) The politicians of today seem to spend most of their time traveling round the world preaching the new gospel of World Trade. Many of these politicians like to think of themselves as "practical people", expert in dealing with the complexity of modern economic problems. In his own day, however, Chesterton saw those who were called "practical politicians" not as people having any real understanding of the serious social problems but as "corrupt and evasive muddlers" who only confused the issues even further. Cf. also his "The Revival of Philosophy – Why?" discussed in my article "Why do we need Philosophy?"

(4) Cf. Aristotle Politics c.1 1257b 34 – 1258a 14: "the whole idea of their lives is that they ought either to increase their money without limit, or at any rate not to lose it… and so there arises the second species of wealth-getting".

(5) The notion of religion is not out of place here. But it is the religion of Mammon. Chesterton describes the modern day proclamation that "the apple was made for the market and not for the mouth" as "the supreme blasphemy and heresy". It does indeed end up playing into the hands of the Master of Deceit. ".. we should note that the devil plots against the things of God and tries to destroy them. Now among the means by which he destroys holy things, the chief is avarice." (St. Thomas’ Commentary on St. John’s Gospel 2:12-17 para.381).

(6) There is a call here for a distinction that Chesterton does not explicitly make (see note 9). But it is clear from his examples that he is referring to trade divorced from its natural end or purpose, what Aristotle called "unnatural exchange" (engaging in buying and selling simply for the sake of profiting from the differences in the purchase and sale prices of the same things, now referred to as "commodities").

(7) It is a delusion that affects particularly the defenders of modern unbridled (pure) Capitalism.

(8) Cf. "Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words: Contemporary Cliches, Cant and Management Jargon" by Don Watson, Publisher Random House, Australia 2004.

(9) Cf. "Capitalism – its definition", "The Merchant and the Middleman"; "Communism and the Common Good"; "Voluntary Associations and Trade Unions"; The Ethics of Taxation"; "The Reform of Taxation"; "Why do we need Philosophy?". All are available on request from dgboland@zip.com.au .

(10) It is not to be thought that this tendency to rampant commercialism is the only part of the modern economy that requires to be discarded like a rotten apple. Chesterton himself was aware of even more fundamental flaws in the modern economic order, or disorder, most especially in relation to the basic (mal) distribution of property (hence the name of his general proposal for economic reform is Distributism). A return to full integrity or goodness of the social economy will require the getting rid of all the rotten apples in the bunch.