«Люди так же различны, как различна их ДНК», - утверждает Даррин Макмэхон, забывая о другом измерении - различии индивидуального опыта, еще многократно увеличивающем человеческое разнообразие. Как бы то ни было, любая концепция равенства - это вычленяемое из этого разнообразия абстрактное общее свойство, которым в разные времена и в разных местах
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Conditions of widespread impoverishment began to change around 1800, when a dramatic takeoff began-first in Western Europe and North America, more recently in India and China.
There are different ways to quantify the takeoff. But the upshot is that income in the 34 countries that constitute the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has risen since 1800 on the order of 2,900%. All told, Ms. McCloskey concludes, the Great Enrichment is “the most important secular event” since the Agricultural Revolution that began in the 10th century B.C., and it has pulled millions and millions of people out of poverty and destitution.
How to explain this startling transformation? Economists and social theorists have put forward a number of explanations, from capital accumulation to property rights and the rule of law. Left-wing critics of capitalism, for their part, have either denied the Great Enrichment altogether or argued that the West’s wealth was extracted, zero-sum, from the colonized and oppressed.
Ms. McCloskey convincingly dismisses each one of these explanations. <...> No, this monumental achievement was caused by a change in values, Ms. McCloskey says-the rise of what she calls, in a mocking nod to Marx, a “bourgeois ideology.” It was far from an apology for greed, however. Anglo-Dutch in origin, the new ideology presented a deeply moral vision of the world that vaunted the value of work and innovation, earthly happiness and prosperity, and the liberty, dignity and equality of ordinary people. Preaching tolerance of difference and respect for the individual, it applauded those who sought to improve their lives (and the lives of others) through material betterment, scientific and technological inquiry, self-improvement, and honest work. Suspicious of hierarchy and stasis, proponents of bourgeois values attacked monopoly and privilege and extolled free trade and free lives while setting great store by prudence, enterprise, decency and hope.
Such values were best expressed, Ms. McCloskey maintains, in the writings of Adam Smith and Benjamin Franklin. But they found their way into a whole range of 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century productions, from novels and sermons to newspaper columns and works of art. Collectively, they constituted a striking shift in rhetoric that justified new values for a world in which improvement and innovation were not just tolerated but esteemed.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morality-of-prosperity-1465769881
В чем смысл западной идеи равенства, как мотора экономического роста? Можно рассмотреть эту идею на примере семьи. Дети, естественно, никоим образом не могут быть равными с родителями. Если позволять им все, они только нанесут себе вред. Но они могут быть равными в том смысле, что наравне со взрослыми рассматриваются, как члены семьи. Если ребенок не боится сознательно или подсознательно, что разгневанный родитель выгонит его из семьи, такой не скованный страхом ребенок может в полной мере развить свои природные способности. Равенство, как чувство принадлежности и отсутствия страха изгнания, таким образом дает любящей семье преимущество.
Поэтому советская система была такой извращенной. С одной стороны, практически насильственное равенство. С другой стороны, постоянный сковывающий страх оступиться и оказаться в тюрьме или могиле. Этот страх нивелировал ту пользу, которую равенство могло бы принести.
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Макклоски отделяет себя от Вебера, пытаясь разделить психологию и социологию - под влиянием новых идей изменились не люди, а общество в целом, которое стало более открытым к «буржуазным» ценностям.
"I call it the bourgeois revaluation. It's not so much that individual business people became psychologically more greedy or harder working. That's Max Weber, and it's wrong. It's mistaken. What happened is that the rest of the society joined in praising bourgeois actors. Not entirely. England, to this day, has a certain sneering attitude towards people in trade, but that's increasingly obsolete. In any case, between the time of Shakespeare and Jane Austen, it radically transformed, as I show in the books. We started to admit into civilized society the bourgeoisie, which we had formerly excluded. <…>
In a hierarchy, you're stuck if you're a milkmaid. You're stuck if you're a slave. That's pretty obvious. Hierarchies of the sort we had-men over women, masters over slaves, masters over apprentices for that matter-were stultifying, stultifying. They made people stupid. Whereas giving them the dignity that liberalism does, treating ordinary people as empowered, as our friends on the left say, is exactly what made for the explosion of innovation."
https://www.mercatus.org/hayekprogram/hayek-program-podcast/deirdre-mccloskey-austrian-growth-and-humane-liberalism
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Было бы интересно проследить сходство и различие между англо-голландским капитализмом 17-го века и, например, капитализмом итальянских республик времен Возрождения - а также финикийских и греческих торговых поселений античности. Да, капитализм 17-го века был тесно связан с научно-технической революцией небывалого масштаба, но есть ли какие-то различия в психологии, в отношении людей к предпринимательской деятельности? На первый взгляд, минимальные.
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"Note: the crux was not psychology-Max Weber had claimed in 1905 that it was-but sociology. Toleration for free trade and honored betterment was advocated first by the bourgeoisie itself, then more consequentially by the clerisy, which for a century before 1848 admired economic liberty and bourgeois dignity, and in aid of the project was willing to pledge its life, fortune, and sacred honor. After 1848 in places like the United States and Holland and Japan, the bulk of ordinary people came slowly to agree. By then, however much of the avant garde of the clerisy worldwide had turned decisively against the bourgeoisie, on the road to twentieth-century fascism and communism."
https://deirdremccloskey.org/docs/pdf/McCloskey_IdeasEnrichedTheWorld.pdf
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