Greed

From Gordon Gekko to David Hume

Stewart Sutherland

• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781908323798
• eBook ISBN: 9781908323804
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In a riveting scene from the film Wall Street, Gordon Gekko proclaims that "greed is good." The great philosopher David Hume, on the other hand, describes greed as the most destructive of the vices. The recent banking debacle and continuing uproar about executive bonus pay has placed the controversial issue of greed at the very heart of how we view modern society. Is Gekko's maxim simply in need of some moderation? Or is Hume's view too extreme?

In Greed, Stewart Sutherland examines these conflicting notions and discusses how we might approach the problem of greed today. He looks at the concept of incentives, which are essential for achieving results, and whether the desire for money is really as dangerous as it might seem. Powerful and timely, Greed is a much-needed look at an attitude that, for better or worse, is an unavoidable driving force in modern society.

So What?

In this concluding section we may speculate about what this proposes about how to deal with the universal human characteristic of greed. These proposals fall into two different categories. The first is at the individual level, the second at the structural and public level.

The Individual

Hume makes plain the process of civilising what Shakespeare characterises as the ‘mewling and puking’ age. This has three strands to it.

Strand 1: The family

The first is the experience of the family, and the gradual process of tempering the demands of the self with the competing demands of siblings, parents and in general those who surround the child. This will seem to some terribly old-fashioned, terribly conventional, but the challenge is to suggest an alternative route. Perhaps the notion of the kibbutz has possibilities and sadly for some, alternative forms of ‘looked-after’ life have had to be developed. On the latter all the evidence suggests that the often heroic attempts to make this work – especially beyond the quasi-family of the foster home – are second and often third best. Nonetheless they are the best options which we have so far developed. The Humean point is that at least to attempt to find a substitute in the absence of the natural family, is to start in the right direction.

I have no empirical basis for commenting on the success or otherwise of the kibbutz movement, other than that my Jewish friends who have emigrated to Israel have done so to enhance family life rather than to replace it with an alternative.

Strand 2: Language

Hume’s second point is that as a matter of fact, the very process of learning to inhabit a language is a process of inclusion within a society. We learn that the processes of defining meaning and clarity are independent of the purely self-focussed grunts, growls and snarls of immaturity, although the latter and their transcendence is the route towards the civilising structures of communication. There is no doubt that handicap in this area inhibits human flourishing.

Strand 3: Education

Hume had mixed views of education, for he was well aware that it could be misused as well as used – certainly in formal contexts. However, he was not in doubt that education, formal and informal, was an indispensable pillar of the shaping of society and the individuals who constitute that society. The development of what he referred to by the technical term ’sympathy’ depends upon the use of empirical and non-empirical reasoning as well as the enhancement of the imagination.

This is not the point to begin an exposition of the nature of good educational practice, but it should be clear that in formal contexts this is the major contribution which society makes to the process of ‘civilising’. (One point of empirical evidence is the appallingly low educational attainments of those who find themselves temporarily off of the main highway of society – in prison. The statistics of illiteracy and lack of basic numerical skills are neon-lit warnings.)

Of course, an even greater part of education of the young takes place outside the formal structures of the classroom – through parents, friends (and enemies), the surrounding culture, and increasingly today through self-controlled technology. (We have gone beyond the offerings of radio, of television, to the tablet and the smart phone. In a Humean world we are urged to respond to the possibilities as well as pitfalls of this as a civilising encounter.)

In education one of the key messages is to re-think the place of the education of the emotions in formal as well as informal settings. What are the differences between the emotions surrounding shame and inadequacy? In Hume’s world the concepts of shame and indeed pride have a place in the emotional range of a money-man or a banker. In Gekko’s world the only bad banker is an inadequate one. Learning these distinctions which constitute part of the moral awareness on which society is built, is in part a task for education, formal and informal.

The constraints of society

The type of society we inhabit is form...

Table of contents

• GREED
• Contents
• The problem
• David Hume: destructive or creative sceptic?
• Self-assertion or ‘sympathy’?
• Stability, Property and Greed
• So What?
• Notes