Society is stitched together, like a quilt, from a patchwork of social contracts. The economy totally depends on the freedom to create and break these contracts which are the connective tissue of society, as Adam Smith pointed out long ago. Some of these contracts are agreed to at a personal level with oneself, some in relationships, families, communities, and some between citizens and government, and some between governments and between government entities. The combined accumulation of social contracts creates the fabric of society. It gives rise to countries. This patchwork quilt of vividly different ideas provides comfort because everyone knows that it comes from weaving and stitching together the many strands of our collective and personal histories. A magnifying glass will show the strange and unexpected beauty of the social fabric but also the knotty problems that remain unaddressed or unresolved. This social fabric is inevitably uneven, stronger in some places, and fragile in others. Yet, there’s a rhythm to the design. A Yin and Yang, A Push Me Pull You. The warp and weft are promises and obligations. We admire the remnants of fights that have been well and honorably fought, even if we lose the case because we trust the system. If we don’t trust the system and don’t believe the fight was fair, then we start ripping into the reasons why, pulling at loose threads, and unpicking the handiwork of those we disagree with. When things go really awry and trust is truly lost, the threads and torn fabric begin to coalesce into a hangman’s rope which will soon see the whole system swing, hoisted on its own petard.
This is where we are now with a President who told us he wanted to burn down Washington (we thought it was figurative, not literally) and then implicitly incited an attack on the elected legislature and who seems to have encouraged the mob to attack his own sitting Vice President. It is where we are with a Supreme Court that pulled the rug out from the public by overturning rights to personal freedom that many had thought were unassailable. It is where we are with a public that is slowly beginning to realize that the right to protest and object to such public policy has been lost through the rise of anti-protest legislation and through the introduction of surveillance technology that gives away not only our physical positions at a protest but our moral and political positions as well.
It is no accident that the eldest of The Three Fates who spin the threads of destiny for the world was called Clotho. Her sister Lachesis specialized in measuring out and allotting the thread and her other sister, Atropos, was responsible for deciding when to cut the thread of life. The three sisters stood above the greatest of Gods, and even Zeus himself. Plato said they were the daughters of Ananke (Necessity). The Romans saw these three as the personification of childbirth. We all know the story. If you prick yourself on the spindle, fate takes over. Ask Sleeping Beauty and check out Bruno Bettelheim’s analysis of the fairy tale – hint, it’s about the onset of sexuality. When it works smoothly, the spindle creates the threads and yarns from which we weave the social fabric.
The needles that sew and knit together the many social contracts have a reliable rhythm too. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. Checks and balances should ensure the fabric design stays more even than not. But the rhythm of public dialogue has become erratic in recent years as the whole social fabric has become awash with distrust, partisanship, and marred by successive pressing crises. It was already under stress from the heavy weight of the debt burden. Inflation then started fraying every fiber. At some point, we stopped sewing together and started simply needling each other. If we run a magnifying glass over the grand quilt, we see that the social contracts are ripping apart and the social fabric has become ever more fragile. We can see why it’s no longer serving as a collective comforter. Instead, the shreds are winding themselves into a hangman’s noose. Witness our public institutions swinging in the wind.
The Roe versus Wade reversal shocked many to their core. As a mother of a teenager and an open-minded friend, I am privy to conversations occurring amongst the tender teens, women, men, and anyone whose sexuality is not firmly hardened into place. They all had nary an awareness of the Supreme Court until it dropped an anvil on their future. Now they speak of freezing eggs to avoid facing prison for terminating a pregnancy brought on by rape or incest. They are well aware that we live in a world where it's not uncommon for the pinprick of a tiny needle in a bar – the modern spindle - to blackout the memory of what’s occurred. The idea that you could be sent to prison for being a victim is turning these folks into social activists. The idea that you can’t love whoever you want and need to love (above the legal age limit) is an anathema to them. They want the social contract to protect their right to manage their own body and are willing to fight for that.
But, in many places, they cannot protest now because the right to protest has been severely curtailed. This is another break in the social contract.
Blinded by apathy or inured to the constant bad news, many have failed to notice that G7 countries like Great Britain, Canada, and Australia have made it nearly impossible to protest. The newly passed Police Bill in the UK says that sound is the criteria. It is now a criminal offense to cause “serious distress, serious annoyance or serious inconvenience” without a “reasonable excuse”. If the sound created by a protest is above a certain decibel level, anyone present can be jailed for up to a decade. It’s clever because someone may have Nelson Mandela’s grace and can remain silent as they protest, but if somebody else with less self-control slips up, you are in trouble. Note that the police won’t need to arrest you on the spot. Your mobile phone will reveal that you were present and allow the police to come to arrest people one by one at their own front doors, which is much more civilized for the police. The promise that citizens have the right to protest is an important thread that has been pulled without much comment. Perhaps that’s not surprising in a world where the public is quick to de-platform anyone with views the crowd doesn’t agree with. The social contract used to allow protest. It used to allow free speech. Now that isn’t true anymore. That social contract is gone.
So, some say “I give up” and get on their personal commitments, focusing their attention on the smaller more personal social contracts that are within their control. But, they quickly run headlong into more infuriating broken social contracts. The pension that’s been paid into for years is underfunded and may not pay out on time, or to the full extent, if at all. They start to notice that governments were easily able to fund the bailout of the bankers with record levels of fiscal stimulus, exceeding the amounts that have been spent on wars. But if a teacher or an employee of an airline or railway or even a staff member at The Bank of England asks for a pay rise to offset the inflationary consequences of the banker bailout, they are told that this is unpatriotic, not in the public interest and that they should be quiet. But, they are not going to be quiet. This is why strikes are back. Strikes will accelerate until a new social contract is forged. That’s how strikes end. Not with pay hikes but with a new social contract.
This list could go on and on. The point is that the economy cannot progress very easily when the participants in it are unsure of the social contract or so deeply unhappy with it. The economy is a function of the social contracts that underpin it. One hardly needs to cite the stats on the contribution of women to the GDP of a nation. Now those numbers will be smaller. You can’t fight biology, especially if you can’t access contraception (if Justice Thomas has his way). How ironic that the FDA looks set to start legalizing “love drugs” shortly. If nothing else, the economy will suffer if people are so shocked by the loss of their safety blanket of the old social contracts that can’t think straight enough to focus on their work.
What are the solutions? One thought is to restore the capacity for nuance, for subtlety, and for complexity. A simple cross-stitch approach where everyone from the news media to politicians to the public all mash up any complexity till it’s the texture of baby food mush, is not working. Somebody needs to restore the meat and potatoes of hard conversations about complex and subtle problems, even if it messy leaves stains on the social fabric. Dumbing things down is undermining the social fabric. The issue of abortion in the US was never simply a matter of a yes or no before. It’s always been about timing and circumstances. Is it ok to abort at 2 days, 2 weeks, 2 months, or 20 weeks, and for what reason? Failure to address the complex and nuanced nature of the problem allowed some to turn it into a stark yes or no. Some thought needs to go into the economic consequences of a world where abortions might be illegal, and contraception might be illegal too. Employers are under little obligation to provide a creche in the US or even in the UK. Better demographics alone don’t make the economy improve. Look at many nations in the Middle East that have fast-growing young populations but slow-growing economies.
An economy driven by a strict loom of morality without regard to the ability of parents to look after offspring is going to perform differently than one where the social contract protects individuals over procreation. What is the right mix? We cannot be surprised to get a different answer in Norway from Alabama or in New York from Arkansas. Every social contract is different. No one social contract is “right” for everybody or every nation. The social contract that works in China or Italy isn’t the same as the one that works in America. The one that works in the North of Italy is different from the one that works in the South. Similarly in America, the social contracts at the local and state level are remarkably diverse. The issue here is not that social contacts are right or wrong. The question is whether the process of creating social contracts is imbued with trust and confidence or not.
People have lost trust and confidence in the business of gathering and creating diverse threads and fabrics. We may have women and African Americans and rich and poor people on the Supreme Court but there is a distinct lack of diversity in their current thinking. The hallmark of good 21st Century leadership is that it achieves diversity of thinking rather than just diversity of people. The Supreme Court has made itself about as popular as embroidery and quilting except to those who want to impose their beliefs on others. Ironically, this was the whole point of America in the first place – to be a refuge for a diversity of thinking. Maybe that’s why quilting emerged as a treasured national art in America? The world needs more and better country quilting, more and better thread, and more and better fabrics to underpin nation-building. Failure to continue this process, however great the setbacks, is bound to land us up where we’ve been before – clothed in the fabric of fascism, in Brown and Black shirts instead of cozied up in a juicy colorful rainbow riot of vitality and cultural comfort.
Many will have moral and social opinions on all this. They should. As Adam Smith showed us with his Theory of Moral Sentiments, the economy depends upon the philosophical framework. Moral philosophy is the cradle of the nascent growing economy. Beliefs define what will grow.
The magnifying lens for the economic questions is important because, without a functioning economy, everything else falls apart, as WB Yeats said. The center cannot hold. Pressures will have ripped the social contracts and the social fabric apart more than just at the seams. Take away or suppress the feminine voice and the entire cultural tone changes. The cultural fabric won’t be as robust, as vital, or as democratic. Take away the right to exercise voice at all and the disintegration soon collapses the vibrant and colorful fabric back to black. Soon we end up being the autarkies we are trying to defend ourselves against. Soon we end up with one person with one idea who is willing to take out his Vice President and the Congress because they’ve gotten in the way of his execution of that idea.
To give the Supreme Court members their due. They didn’t say abortion is illegal. They said the Constitution does not protect the right to an abortion. To give the former President his due, many Americans seem to think the country would be better off without Washington altogether because so many social contracts have been so irretrievably broken by its residents.
The only way out is to say “I am not always right”, and to acknowledge that there might be many ways of doing things. We need to agree to do the work, even if it involves working with someone whose ideas we oppose in order to weave a more vivid, vital, and robust future. We set the dye. We choose the pattern. If we want something better, we will have to make it ourselves. The economy of tomorrow depends enormously on the willingness or unwillingness of regular people to decide whether they are going to preserve and strengthen this old security blanket or just throw it out and start again. Since religion arguably started this whole bloody mess, we should remember that Jesus spoke of the difficulty of getting a camel through the eye of a needle. It turns out that the Aramaic word was kamilon which meant a thick rope, not a live camel. Can we thread the rope into the eye of a needle? Yes. It’s better than seeing the institutions we’ve built hanging from a noose. But, it will be a painstaking process and one that involves everyone being involved and turning the magnifying glass on themselves (including the government itself), admitting that nobody has a monopoly on the right way of doing things. This is the philosophical work that the economy and democracies need to grow.
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I'm GREATLY struck by the parallels between Pippa’s exposition about the needs and benefits of the social fabric, and Jeff Booth’s idea that the networking of our minds which emerges in cities, results in a sort of ‘supercomputer’. (Jeff is the author of “The Price of Tomorrow”, a way too-little-known examination of the importance of secular (long-term) deflationary forces.) Further on his minds-become-supercomputer idea, Jeff observes that the ‘glue’ which holds that network of minds together to form that ‘supercomputer’ is Money (the means of people peacefully, voluntarily coordinating their lives’ activities). Jeff discusses this around the 18 minute mark, in his conversation with Robert Breedlove, in Breedlove’s “What is Money” podcast episode 181, released a few days ago.
Each of these two, sort of parallel ideas, seems to me to be excellent validation of its counterpart. Great work, Pippa!
100% right. We are way way too polarized these days. And sadly, our politicians are well aware of it but let it persist as they view it a way to gather votes.