Restoring the Human Connection: The First Step to ... - SGI-USA

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The inhabitants of the world of anger—always seeking to surpass, unableto countenance inferiority—are incapable of any sense of fulfillment. Theycling to the insatiable pursuit of money to compensate for the perpetualinstability of their standing in the world.Our present-day system of values is said to be diversifying, but it is in factbecoming more solely focused on money, which penetrates all realms ofsociety and daily life. Within our collective sense of ourselves there is aprogressive and fundamental process of decay. This, many point out, is thetrue face of contemporary society.Even if one warns against the dangers inherent in the love of money,history has proven the impossibility of eliminating currency from humansociety as a medium of exchange. Any attempt to forcefully restrict theworkings of money will be met with a fierce counterreaction, as thedecisive failure of the experiment of communism in the twentieth centuryproved. And, of course, any return to the premodern model of a communalsociety in which monetary values rank below those of class and caste (aswas the case in Edo-period Japan where classes were ranked in descendingorder as samurai, farmer, craftsman and merchant) would be unthinkablefor people who have known modern freedoms.We therefore seem to have no choice but to learn to live with, train andtame the capitalist system. As individuals and as societies, we need todevelop the capacity to control money and capital rather than sinking intocommodity fetishism. Just as we need to position the worlds of anger andhunger properly within the interrelated context of the ten worlds, it isnecessary to reposition economic values within the various hierarchies ofvalues integral to the processes of life.In last year’s proposal, I quoted Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) posing thequestion, “When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing16
time with me rather than I with her?” 17 In the same way, we need to askourselves as a matter of urgency—as a first step toward the revival andrecovery of our humanity—whether, when we are playing with money andcapital, we are not in fact being played by it.“Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man.” 18John F. Kennedy (1917–63) spoke these words at a time when the worldfaced nuclear saturation, and we cannot afford to regard them as merepolitical rhetoric.Is capitalism moral?Here I would like to discuss the issues raised by the French philosopherAndré Comte-Sponville in his recent work Le capitalisme est-il moral? (IsCapitalism Moral?). This title is of course intentionally ironic as mostpeople would regard capitalism as entirely unconcerned with questions ofmorality, and to look for morality in capitalism is as meaningless, as theexpression has it, as looking for fish in trees.Comte-Sponville distinguishes four different orders or domains withinhuman society:• The first is the technological-economic-scientific order, which revolveson the axis of that which is possible versus that which is not possible.• The second is the legal-political order, whose axis is the legal versus theillegal.• The third is the moral order, whose axis is good versus evil and obligationversus injunction.• The fourth is the ethical order, the order of love, whose axis is joy versus17
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Restoring the Human Connection: The First Step to ... - SGI-USA

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