Chapter 1
Mainstreaming the Edges: Reflections on Edinburghâs Royal Mile and Fair Trade
John Atherton
Living on the edges can become a way of making a living off marginalisation â a charge brought against some academic exponents of hybridity, including Homi Bhabha. For example, Ramachandra talks of such postcolonial theorists as âaffluent, self-exiled Asians ensconced in the Western academyâ. They play on âpostcolonial Western guiltâ and also on âthe romantic image of the intellectual âexileâ, epitomizing the fissured identities and hybridities generated by colonial dislocations and celebrated in some postmodern worksâ.1 Even its more creative exponents, like Sandercock, can weave powerful narratives criticising contemporary urban living and developing alternatives as mongrel cities â yet examples of the latter are often ephemeral and fragile. For Baker, âher cosmopolis still works powerfully as an activating concept rather than a practical guideâ. Depressingly, for Baker, her practical case studies of feasible alternatives âare almost all short-livedâ.2
Similarly, analysis of the contemporary context presents a number of scenarios, for example, as three fields of operating, as empires, capitalism and globalisation. These can be interlocked, by Hardt and Negri, as a new empire of global capitalism.3 This recognises the dispersion of power through new technology flows, yet also its strong focusing in terms of fields of power as Bourdieu has so carefully argued.4 Yet Hardt and Negriâs âMultitudeâ, as countermovement to Empire, like Sandercockâs mongrel cities, does not generate feasible alternatives to current mainstream political economy.5 It does not persuade by its credibility. In other words, postcolonial theorists like Bhabha, urban planners like Sandercock, and politicalâcultural theorists like Hardt and Negri, share a feature of many more radical theologians. They are strong on the critique of established orderings, and often creatively and powerfully so. Yet they are weak on developing feasible alternatives to global mainstreams. Their criticisms, often ethically informed, frequently inspire.
Yet I am increasingly concerned that, unless accompanied by proposals for more adequate and workable alternatives to the defective mainstream, they are open to the charge of irresponsibility. Max Weberâs seminal studies of the relationships between religion and economics, too easily over-identified with his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, rightly included work on India and China, now once again at the heart of the emerging economies and their growing dominance in the world economy. Importantly for this argument, his work also included reflections on an ethic of responsibility. This involved a critique of charismatic and prophetic authority, and related to his distinction between âan ethic of responsibility and an ethic of absolute endsâ.6 These reflections are very relevant to what I am arguing for in terms of developing feasible alternatives to the present social order.
What I am interested in is that problem of edges, in my case, as ethical economics. Baker, in his The Hybrid Church in the City, used my work on Christian political economy, with ethical economics as one of its key constituents, as an example of hybridity. More importantly, for this project on blurred encounters, ethical economics is a strong example of location on the edges, in this case, of mainstream neoclassical economics, and its associated market economies and economics. These dominate the world economy and the discipline of economics. They are plumb in the middle of whatever mainstream means and is. Yet the story is more complex, more blurred than that. Historically, economics has been identified with two dimensions; on the one hand, positive economics (or technical, âscientificâ or, for Sen, engineering); and on the other hand, normative (or, for Sen, ethical) economics.7 Recognition of that ethical dimension (as well as the positive side) represents a long and distinguished history from Adam Smith, through Malthus, Marshall, Keynes and now Sen and Stiglitz (both recent Nobel Laureates in Economics).
Almost from its origins, certainly including Ricardo in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, modern economics has been increasingly dominated by the positive strand. By the mid-to-late twentieth century the divorce was almost complete, with a clear agenda that positive economics was essentially scientific in the way the natural sciences were, and therefore claiming to be value free. Ethical economics became quite marginal to that development if not, indeed, irrelevant. That is still the case in economics text books and policy-making. So for Henderson, this prioritising of the positive in economics has constituted what he calls âthe dominant economic traditionâ.8 Interestingly, this resonates with Radical Orthodoxyâs work on economics in which Long writes of the dominant tradition of mainstream liberal Christian social ethics.9 That dominant tradition of positive neoclassical economics in the hands of one of its later twentieth-century major exponents, Nobel Laureate in Economics Milton Friedman, becomes âfundamentally a positive social scienceâ, essentially independent of every value proposition or of every ethical position. Its interest is not âto describe what âought to be the caseâ, but what is the case⌠In short, positive economics is, or can be, an âobjectiveâ science in precisely the same way as any of the physical sciencesâ.10
Yet both within and outside the discipline this deep imbalance is increasingly questioned. For example, from within the discipline of economics, Amartya Sen has powerfully promoted the need to rebalance the positive with the ethical dimension of economics: âThe wide use of the extremely narrow assumption of self-interested behaviour ⌠has seriously limited the scope of productive economicsâ. Indeed, the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics was shared by Kahneman and Smith, âindividuals who questioned the extreme view of rational behaviour as the basis for economic decision-makingâ.11 Outside this discipline, there is also a growing interest in the need to reformulate economic understandings of neoclassical economic behaviour, for example, the work of the sociologist Bourdieu, and his reflections on the âPrinciples of an Economic Anthropologyâ.12 Yet despite this reawakening of interest in the role of ethical economics in the wider economic task, it remains significantly on the edges of mainstream economics.
It is that situation which I will address not least because globalisation processes and problematics, particularly since 1990, have sharply brought to the fore the multidimensionality of the economic task, and particularly in necessary conversation with other disciplines. These global problematics include: the environment; poverty reduction; trade; work (see the International Labour Organisation and the World Council of Churchâs conversations on decent work);13 the well-being/happiness hypothesis literatures, with their reference to a post-scarcity and post-absolute-poverty anthropology, and entry into the âparadoxes of prosperityâ (as increasing economic growth and inequality, and the stubborn refusal of happiness to increase commensurate with income growth and its link with increasing social ill-being or disease as crime, addictions, mental ill-health, reduced volunteering and trust, etc).14 The growing and extensive literatures on well-being and happiness particularly include a strong focus on the essential contribution to well-being of the moral and religious dimensions of life. For the economist Layard, a philosophy of life figures as one of his âBig Sevenâ features of happiness, and includes reference to personal values but also ethically oriented social arrangements formulated as âthe common goodâ. In the most direct language he also concludes that âpeople who believe in God are happierâ.15 The philosopher Anthony Kenny and the economist Charles Kenny in their study, subtitled Happiness in Philosophical and Economic Thought, included a chapter on âHappiness and Moralityâ.16
The task therefore for me and for others is how to reinforce that ethical dimension in conversation with economists and with other related disciplines (including psychology, neurophysiology, epidemiology, sociology and anthropology). This is likely to involve finding ways to mainstream ethical economics by bringing it into the centre of economics. Such a strategy does not mean removing its distinctive character. It does mean recognising that it will be changed in that process, as will the mainstream. So, for Mudge, bringing alongside each other in conversation different stories of similar realities (in our case ethical and engineering economics), a process he calls parallel hermeneutics, invariably results in a mutual benefit. For in that process, the task is not to produce a common belief or doctrinal merger. It rather involves pursuing a parallel relationship with one another, each asking questions in their own way within their traditions, acknowledging that others alongside are doing it in their ways too. In this way, cultures, religions or theories act back upon themselves with respect to information coming from other cultures, civilisations and theories. âSuch solidarity often involves a move toward a place materially weaker but spiritually stronger than oneâs own. The gift (of one story to the other) is not merely given; it turns out to move more strongly in return.â17 The benefits of that reciprocal action are reinforced by important work on how traditions, including religions (but here, for us, economics), faced with the challenge of rapidly changing contexts, can reformulate and become more adequate and effective. So Baker and Brown both use MacIntyre to illustrate how traditions can develop through a process of reformulation through interaction with context, a process of mutual learning from and to the Other.18
To test this hypothesis, as the importance and possibility of mainstreaming ethical economics within the dominant economic tradition of neoclassical economies, two brief case studies began to elaborate this proposition. The first is a pilgrimage down the Royal Mile in central Edinburgh to explore places where âedgesâ have become mainstream. The second examines questions raised by mainstreaming Fair Trade in secular production and exchange systems. As a combination of narrative and analytical forms, the two studies exemplify multidimensional approaches to the increasingly multidimensional nature of economics. Both illustrate the feasibility of Readerâs thesis of eating well so that being devoured by the Other need not necessarily result in a complete digestion but can involve the survival of the marginal entity within the mainstream body.19
A Journey down Edinburghâs Royal Mile: Stories of How the Edges Engage with Dominant Traditions
Walking down the Royal Mile from the castle to Holyrood Palace is not the simplest of journeys, particularl...