Challenging My Own Thinking. Is Modern Capitalism Moral?* Kid Rock

*(By Modern Capitalism, I mean America, post-WW2, i.e., the past 80 years)

I have always believed that capitalism is the best way to organize society. That belief has been to me as water is to fish, surrounding my life and my worldview so completely that the belief had become so omnipresent as to be invisible to me.

In the patois of the intellectual internet, it is one of my “priors,” or an “upstream” belief, from which all my other beliefs flow “downstream.”

I’ve always known that there were people who held a very different “prior,” who believed that modern capitalism was in fact a scourge not only to most Americans, but to the rest of the world. People who believed that capitalism was well on its way to destroying the environment and creating a rabid consumerist society that sacrificed the truly valuable, non-materialistic things in life on the altar of the soulless cult of “more.”

It was always convenient for me to dismiss these critics as misguided cranks or young people who had yet to face “real life.” Or people in various advocacy groups, academia, and not-for-profits who made their living agitating against the status quo. Barnacles on the ship of our capitalist state.

One of the foundations of my key “priors” had been that modern capitalism had “lifted billions of non- Americans out of poverty.” If the claim was true, I reasoned, then how could anyone dispute capitalism’s morality.

A few months ago, however, I read a devastating report disputing the claim of capitalism’s beneficence to the developing world. I did further research and concluded that the measurements and statistics the claim was based on were highly flawed. Even the progenitor of the claim, the World Bank, had many misgivings about its own statistics. I wrote a post on it (below, for new subscribers) about the perniciousness of false praise, in this case the smug belief that our economic system had already done moral wonders, a moral miracle, in helping billions in the developing world. (The post starts with a false praise anecdote about my wife and tennis)

https://robertsdavidn.substack.com/p/exaggerated-or-false-praise-is-often

What ought to have followed from that was a dent in my “prior,” large enough to lead me to at least question the morality of capitalism in our own country.

This I did not do. Until now.

To be clear, I have not come across exaggerated praise in the form of flawed statistics about the state of the overall American economy or for that matter flaws in the way we measure the number of Americans who live in poverty. I think the numbers we have are solid.

However, I have begun to read challenging critiques about the morality of our pro-growth, consumerist society. Strictly political critiques tend to leave me unmoved as their authors generally have enormous axes to grind. Instead, I’ve been impressed by some of the critiques I would categorize as more “behaviorist.”

For example, here’s an excellent aphorism from Gurwinder (gurwinder.substack.com) “In a society configured to keep you wanting more, contentment lies not in accumulating possessions but in relinquishing desires.” Gurwinder was referencing L.M. Sacasas below:

L. M. Sacasas (substack.com@theconvivialsociety) : “Only by the perpetual creation of novel needs and desires can economic growth be sustained given how things presently operate. So just about every aspect of our culture is designed to make us think that happiness, or something like it, always lies on the other side of more.”

I’ve always believed that for an economy, more is better, and that the best outcomes for the most people are provided by our superior system of free enterprise with government intervention as needed­. (“as needed,” what vast differences of opinions can be contained in those two words!)

And I’ve always equated “the best outcomes” with the standard measures of national income, whether GDP or disposable income, whether expressed as an average or as a median. I’ve benefitted disproportionately from this “superior” system, so perhaps that’s proof of the old saw that “where you stand depends upon where you sit.”  Relatedly, I’ve felt no remorse about spending money, convinced that the money spent has a multiplier effect on GDP, etc. I still think this way.

But what about morality? Are there moral choices about how much you spend and what you spend it on? How could there not be?

I recently came across the writing and podcast of Hayley Nahman (hayleynahman.substack.com). She has a very high moral bar about commercial and consumer activity. For example, she will not accept money to promote a product, because she (1) believes it taints her recommendation and (2) she has a large enough paying audience to no longer need the income stream as an influencer. She’s quick to add that she’d never criticize another substack author with fewer subscribers who needed influencer money to make a decent living. As another example, she tries not to buy product from Amazon, because Amazon’s hegemony and the vast fortune of Jeff Bezos both go against her moral values. But sometimes she does use Amazon.  So she’s aware that her moral values and her behavior will never be completely aligned. When they’re not, she’ll just take her dollop of guilt and move on.

Here’s an excerpt from Hayley’s terrific answer to a question from a reader whose boyfriend “often asserts that all his desires and choices align with his values, yet regularly gets triggered to the point of being patronizing and judgmental when I (or other people) express having a desire that is not altruistic or rooted in a structure he approves of. 

Part of Hayley’s answer:

“My point is that the pursuit of pleasure is a separate endeavor from the pursuit of morality. In fact, morals hold meaning because they tend to ask something of us—to show up, to follow-through, to sacrifice or compromise. If your boyfriend’s moral framework is never compromised by his desire, he’s either lying, a saint, or has shaped his moral framework rather conveniently. I’m aligned in your suspicion that his tendency towards mockery suggests the first or third explanation. (It also makes me less impressed by his supposedly virtuous way of life, lol, but that’s neither here nor there.) I want to clarify that if I’ve ever suggested that my desires don’t deviate from my ideological convictions, that’s untrue. I entertain and satisfy desires that compromise my values all the time! But I also make a concerted effort to recognize the costs of those compromises, and while that recognition may not be in itself moral, I do think it leads me to make more moral decisions. When I do, I tend to feel more grounded and connected to myself and others.”

So, where am I on this question of morality? To justify my good fortune, I’ve always leaned on the moral balance of “giving back” (philanthropy to use a highfalutin word.)  But there’s a line of criticism that philanthropy is as much a part of the problem as it is a solution, that philanthropy by the rich is a luxury good that buys social status at a tax-adjusted discount. And that further, this luxury good is only made necessary/available by our lack of an appropriate and moral safety net.

This post was in part inspired by Kid Rock. We were having dinner with friends, and Kid’s song “All Summer Long” came up on my Spotify playlist.  I thought about having seen a recent video of the “Kid” shooting up Bud Light cans with an AR-15. That was his response to Bud’s use of a transgender spokesperson. Should I be supporting in any way, no matter how small, a person whose values are abhorrent to me? But I like that song.

These are the questions I’m just beginning to challenge myself with. If I have answers, I’ll keep you posted.

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