Is it enough to merely moralize capitalism? To promote ethical market regulation? To make international financial transactions more transparent? It is permissible to doubt that these measures are sufficient. Not that the very encouraging initial results of the G20 summit should be rejected or criticized. The “Washington Consensus” is over, explained British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. It has been said, here and there, that the G20 has laid the foundation for a new global economic order. Some even mentioned a “Yalta” of economy and finance. All commendable expressions that demonstrate a willingness to tackle the crisis head-on.
But to claim, as the heads of state and government gathered in London assured, to change the fundamental rules of the economic system without altering its logic and the spirit underlying it, is to admit to powerlessness: being reduced to stroking a hand that one cannot bite.
Whether there is a stimulus package or not, transparency of tax havens or not, the crisis—and its disastrous human consequences—now raise expectations that are as specific as they are legitimate among the peoples. Especially among the young. And it would be naive to believe that a series of primarily economic measures will convince them to patiently await the outcomes. As evidence, consider the outbreaks of violence that accompanied the G20 summits and the NATO meeting. From the State of New York to Bastia, passing through Strasbourg, to take the most recent examples, a marked increase in extreme violence, gratuitous acts, protests, and other criminal behaviors has been observed, whose unequivocal condemnation should not, however, mask their essential meaning: invited to leave a world that the G20 has just sharply criticized for all its artifices and condemned for all its abuses, the peoples of the planet experience this transition with the anxiety of not yet seeing the horizon of a new society, which is largely in gestation. This G20 summit clearly indicates the direction but remains surprisingly silent on the nature of the promised land.
Without comparing them to the “terrors of the year thousand”, everyone grasps the anxiety-inducing nature of the uncertainties and questions regarding this forthcoming planetary order. Nicolas Sarkozy’s dramatization before the London summit, perceived as heavily scripted, was probably only partially so: any sudden and involuntary change of traditional benchmarks provokes human anxiety, which defends itself through a form of aggression and the highlighting of a threat represented by the other.
Changing the world of economics without changing the economy of the world will serve no purpose, except to disturb the compass that is supposed to indicate, even with a margin of individual interpretation, future directions. Yet, this same world daily demonstrates a cursor pulled between reasonings anchored in the past and aspirations seeking modernity. The Internet is a paradigmatic example: intended to eliminate barriers between people to allow for the free advent of a global village of information and democratic exchanges, it is today co-opted by a profit-driven logic and framed by laws aimed at penalizing illegal downloading of cultural works.
From human rights to religious issues, from education or family to pure politics, there are countless examples of this dichotomy of commitments that most often end in the grave of good intentions. To display a concern for moralizing capitalism without extending this initiative into the human sphere would amount, to paraphrase Schopenhauer, to giving the beggar an “alms that keeps him alive enough today to be hungry again tomorrow.”
