The Three Motives

 It's easy to scoff at radical left-wing projects of reconstituting human society on the basis of love or other forms of voluntary pro-social behavior; but one can equally ask how far any human society would get if it tried to operate without these motives. Opening John Ruskin's classic work of Victorian social criticism, Unto This Last—a work that profoundly influenced Gandhi and other social reformers—one may feel tempted to roll one's eyes at first with world-weary skepticism at his project of rearing a new society on the foundation of the "social affections." But Ruskin then catches one up short with his observations on a line from Adam Smith. 

Somewhat unfairly, Ruskin quotes the great Scottish political economist—out of context—on the subject of what generally motivates people to be honest. In this passage, at least, Smith claimed that the chief motivator was the threat of being penalized on the market—after all, a dishonest supplier engaged in sharp dealing and offering shoddy merchandise would soon find himself without employment. While this might appear uncontroversial to most of us, Ruskin begs us to consider what would become of a society that treated Smith's idea of self-interest as truly the sole basis for human society. How long would any political community survive, he asks, that recognized no other reason for honesty than this? 

My dad would agree with Ruskin: one of his long-standing complaints is with the number of people in this world who seem to believe that virtually everyone would cheat and break the rules, so long as they were assured that they could get away with it. I'm inclined to agree with them both that complex human society would never have lasted as long as it has if this were truly the only reason that people ever treated one another decently—rather than only one motive among several. 

After all, if the Trump presidency taught us anything, it's the number of areas in which the survival of our political system and core social institutions depends implicitly on the mutual recognition of informal moral norms. The former president's commitment to betraying every one of those norms so long as he believed he was still barely within the letter of the law or could otherwise get away with it—and thereby endangering the continuity of the whole system—brought this uncomfortable fact into particularly stark relief. 

That said, the Scottish economist and moral philosopher had obviously also identified a real motive force in human life. Thus, when Ruskin accuses Smith of reducing all human motivations to crass material self-interest, one wishes to ask: well, are you saying it does not influence people's behavior on the market to have to worry about losing potential customers through cheating or other unfair practices? And if an enlightened self-interest can sometimes serve pro-social ends as well—is that not all the better? 

What often seems to motivate critiques of capitalism of Ruskin's sort is less a fully worked-out alternative than a disgust with the idea of basing human society on the principle of self-interest. I share this visceral reaction. People's desires to enrich themselves and outstrip others and aggrandize their own interests are surely some of the least attractive in the human psyche; and we can agree with Ruskin at the outset that no society could long survive that was founded exclusively on these motives. The informal norms that allow such competition to occur on productive terms in the first place would be at risk, if every participant had their eye solely on the main chance, and nothing else. 

But, sadly, it seems just as chimerical to dream of founding a complex society on the exclusive basis of love, as it does to lay its foundations in self-interest. As Francis Fukuyama and others have documented at some length, the only known human societies in which people cooperate regularly, and in a sustainable manner, on the exclusive basis of affective ties are small bands of genetically-related kin. In order to enjoy the benefits of more complex social institutions than this—including the greater physical security and prosperity than come from state and market formations—it would appear to be necessary to draw upon other inducements to cooperation. Human societies have so far devised two, aside from the aforementioned affective ties: coercion and mutual exchange. 

As a friend and I were discussing some time ago, most of the botched political communities of the past have failed by trying to ground a complex society on only one or two of these three basic human motives, rather than recognizing the need for and validity of all three. 

Anarchist and voluntarist collectives, for instance, seek to base a system of ongoing mutual collaboration solely on the motive of altruism—they are thus trying to fulfill Ruskin's vision of a community based entirely on "social affection." What always happens eventually with such collectives, though, is that they either break apart or resort to various systems of formal and informal coercion (shunning, if not violence; expulsion, if not incarceration) to keep their cooperative enterprise going. After all, it only takes one person to refuse to cooperate to have a system based on the sole motive of indefinitely-given, freely-bestowed cooperative labor collapse, or else be forced to resort to one of the other three motives. 

Societies on a larger scale that have sought to eliminate the motive of economic self-interest entirely from a national economy often begin with lofty talk of love and social affection as the new glue that will bind society, in the aftermath of the market—but all sooner or later degenerate into vast engines of coercion, in order to enforce cooperation. Viz. just about every Marxist-Leninist state of the past century. 

Indeed, there are glimpses of this in Ruskin as well. He may speak of social affection, but he holds the organized violence of the state—what Godwin aptly called the "gore-dripping robes of authority"—implicitly in reserve to deal with those who fail to come on board with the new program. Those who, under the new dispensation, he writes, "being found objecting to work [...] should be set under compulsion of the strictest nature, to the more painful and degrading forms of necessary toil, especially to that in the mines and other places of danger[.]" 

In this sense, Hayek and Belloc were right to warn against a "road to serfdom," or a descent into the "servile state," implicit in the socialist utopias. A socialism of cooperation that finds human nature uncooperative—and social affection too weak a tie to ensure cooperation on a broad scale—and that has, as a matter of definition, already ruled out of bounds the use of economic incentives as a means to motivate cooperation, often has no choice but to resort to organized violence and coercion as a last resort. Ruskin's proposal for enslaving the recalcitrants in the mines, written close to the very dawn of modern socialism, and coming from the pen of one of the movement's generally more humane and less sanguine exponents, already gives this ugly truth away. 

In the United States presently, though, we seem to have the opposite problem. Instead of trying to base all of society on motives of altruism, we have sought to dispense with them entirely. We have dedicated ourselves to the proposition that complex human society can be maintained exclusively on the basis of economic self-interest and the coercive power of the state. Thus, most of our political debates oscillate between these two poles. We have a business class that has imbibed the lesson that the purpose of their profession is to make money, by whatever means, rather than to supply human needs. We have a political class that responds to every increase in social disorder with a vast expansion of the state's coercive machinery, gracing this "home of the free" with one of the planet's largest standing prison systems.

A society based solely on economic greed and fear of punishment is as sure to fail, in the long run, as a society based solely on mutual affection. In order to sustain itself indefinitely, after all, a complex human society needs to leverage all three inducements to ongoing collaboration. As the Trump era underlined, every system of pure legal coercion will always have gaps; and even if it did not, people's willingness to enforce the law's edicts and grant legitimacy to those who promulgate them depends necessarily on informal norms that cannot be coerced. And sheer greed will degenerate into privatized violence, in turn, rather than peaceful competition, if the laws cannot be enforced and the state cannot maintain its Weberian monopoly on the legitimate use of coercion. 

The answer to our present society of greed and fear, though, is not to try to reinvent society on the sole basis of mutual affection. For the reasons stated above, a complex society that makes no room for the operation of the market, and its individual incentives of exchange, or the state, and its enforcement of the rules through legitimate coercion, would be neither sustainable nor desirable. But of the three basic motives to cooperation, "social affection" is clearly the one most lacking in the current state of U.S. society. Thus, it is the one most in need of greater emphasis today. 

This—rather than his unworkable and at times frankly sinister political program—is what makes Ruskin such salutary reading today. Our American society needs more Ruskin and less Smith. And just as our society as a whole needs to incorporate social affection as one of its foundational motives to cooperation, so do we need to make room for all three motives in each of our professional lives, rather than cabining off and privatizing the moral self from our identities at work. 

To the extent that it exists at all in our current society, after all, the motive of social affection is largely compartmentalized to "philanthropy"—as if doing well by others were a distinct sphere from the economy; something that should be funded as a left-over way to "give back" some of the money that we first piled up through amoral means. Such a notion arises from the fact that, in American society, we tend to regard the only motive force in our professional lives as being one of greed, rather than recognizing that the proper basis for a working life should be all three of the core motives. 

Most Americans understand the purpose of business life, after all, as being to "make money." Thus, the only reason why one should be ethical in one's business practices is either if: 1) to do so serves the ultimate goal of making money in the long-term, through creating a positive reputation in the community (this is the reason, we recall, Smith gave for why people are "honest" in making trades); or 2) they are motivated by the wholly negative sanction of fear of punishment from the state. Thus, greed and fear are the only recognized motives in business, and any "moral" motives of altruism or "social affection" are treated as left-overs to be expressed—if at all—only in the form of end-of-life charitable giving, wholly separate from one's career. 

The belief that business is primarily about "making money" is so deeply ingrained in Americans that it still has the power to shock us when Ruskin calls it into question. The true purpose of commerce, writes Ruskin, is to provide for society's needs. Any money that an individual engaged in this profession makes for themselves should be incidental. Is this possible? Well, Ruskin asks, is it not what we expect of every other profession that we regard as remotely honorable? Of doctors and lawyers and clergy, for example (and this was more true in his day than in ours), we expect that they will primarily practice in order to be of service to their client—any fee or honorarium they receive for their efforts being a secondary inducement at most. Why should we not ask the same of businesspeople? 

So long as businesspeople do not incorporate such a moral dimension or altruistic motive to their professional lives, Ruskin writes, they will forever be without honor or public esteem. And it is hard to disagree with him. The American titans who got rich through M&A deals and leveraged buyouts may inspire envy, but seldom admiration. Those who adopt programs of "corporate social responsibility" solely on the basis of "enlightened self-interest" often get only eye-rolls and scoffs from the broader public. 

This too Ruskin predicts. The employer who grants his staff privileges in order to gain an advantage is generally rewarded with derision, whereas those who do so out of genuinely moral impulses, expecting if anything to lose by it, but doing it anyway because it is the right thing to do, will find themselves gaining the respect of the world. "[I]n this, as in all other matters," Ruskin writes—invoking the Gospel—"whosoever will save his life shall lose it, whoso loses it shall find it." 

This is likewise the message of Ruskin's moving and beloved fairy tale, The King of the Golden River, which is that only the person willing to risk his own prosperity in order to do what is right—the person who does right because it is right, not because he wants to get rich—will, paradoxically, succeed in the end. One is reminded here of D.H. Lawrence's observation, from one of his poems, which teaches a similar lesson—and should probably be the epitaph of every failed effort at corporate image management and reputation-massaging that is undertaken for fundamentally mercenary and cynical reasons: "Those that go searching for love/ only make manifest their own lovelessness,/ and the loveless never find love,/ only the loving find love,/ and they never have to seek for it."

If people stopped trying to collapse moral motives into economic ones in this manner, recasting them as "enlightened self-interest," and simply recognized that altruistic motives should be one of the three inducements to human cooperation in the business realm as everywhere else, then we wouldn't have to cabin off morality into "charity." We should simply recognize that a business, like a complex society or any other human institution, needs all three motives to function. There must be a law backed up—at however remote a distance—by force; there must be economic incentives that make it in a person's own direct interest in engage in a collaborative enterprise. 

But not a single one of these institutions—not a business, not a career, not a government, nor a society—can survive if one does not also deploy human moral impulses. These three motives to human cooperation are the three legs of a stool on which all human endeavors may rest in perpetuity. Weaken or remove any one of the three, and the rest will topple. We have seen societies before try and fail to rest their bulk solely on the leg of altruism, or solely on the leg of coercion. Each will collapse, or will swiftly turn into the other. 

Our American society of the last several decades has tried to get by, in contrast, without the third leg of the moral life. We have taken it out of our professional and business lives, and increasingly out of our political lives. If it exists at all anymore, it is left to Sunday mornings (though ever fewer of us attend church) or year-end charitable pledges. This is unsustainable. An activity that is not regarded as a core part of our true selves, but rather a side activity, will eventually be discarded in the interests of efficiency. 

The only hope for us is if we can learn to find again the moral dimension in everything we do—to see that the moral realm is here, in our daily lives—and that there are some absolutely essential parts of human life that can only endure at all if they are founded in something other than greed and fear.