A MANIFESTO FOR UDJ
Moral Economy, an Alternative to Capitalism
and Socialism
11 December, 2009 | By Teodros Kiros (PhD)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Maat was to Egypt ’s social and political life. The concept of Maat insinuated itself
with every aspect of Classical Egypt. Pharaohs and the majestic slaves who
erected the pyramids swore by Maat. Rich and poor, men and women, slaves and
free citizens worshipped the magic of Maat. Matt was the moral organizer of
everyday life in classical Egypt . Every facet of Egyptian life was organized by the
expansive principle of Matt. Every facet of Egyptian life was framed by Maat.
Why did Matt have such a presence in Egyptian life? What was its magical spell? I
should now like to address these questions. The human self required an organizing
moral principle. Moral life cannot function without a moral frame, a frame that
furnishes the self with boundaries and limiting conditions of social action. It is
precisely this lacuna that was lacking in Egyptian morality until the self-creating
Egyptian gods originated the expansive concept of Maat. Matt, was symbolized by
the feminine principle of “truth, balance, order and justice”. Maat was harmony,
righteousness, patience and vision, born out of the feminine principle of patient
labor. For the ancient Egyptians, the order of the universe was also the ideal order
for the human world.
For the Greeks, the universe was ordered by Logos, by the rational word. It is this
order that Plato used in his Republic, when he constructed an ideal city out of
Logos. This principle was later translated into, “In the beginning was Logos”, and
was with God and the Logos was God (John1:1). Jesus himself was Logos, in
marked contrast, for the ancient Egyptians, the organizing principle of Logos was
replaced by the organizing principle of Maat. The Egyptian city was ruled by kings
who personified Maat. The human heart, which was worshipped by the Egyptians,
and which was the seat of thinking, was also the seat of Maat. The pharaohs were
expected to rule with Maat, and not without it. The pharaoh’s greatness was
measured by the quality and quantity of Maat that he or she internalized. After
death, their hearts would be weighed by the scale of Maat, the scale of Justice.
When famines occurred and deep inequalities became a way of life, it was the duty
of the rulers to uphold Maat and measure the depth and extent of the suffering.
Not that this ideal was perfectly upheld, particularly when nature overwhelmed the
rulers ideals, but there was at least an absolute and objective standard by which
social/ political life was judged and measured.
Maat as a moral form requires an appropriate economic form, which has yet to be
theorized. I should now like to defend the following hypothesis. No matter how
elastic and flexible the dominant capitalist economic form, and however generously
it is stretched, the capitalist economic form is plainly speaking morally vacuous to
accommodate the greatness of Maat as a moral form. The most fitting moral form
that could work in tandem with Maat is an economic form that is anchored on a
solid moral foundation. Maat is precisely that moral foundation, which is yearning
for an economic form, particularly relevant for the African condition.
A moral form requires a supportive economic form. Classical Egypt had the right
moral form but not the right economic form. Whereas Maat singled out the self as
capable of stepping out of its ego shell and embracing other egos outside of it, the
corresponding famine and hunger situations forced the actual Egyptian not to
embrace the other, but to destroy other selves. It is these particular moments of
despair and anguish that killed the enabling moments of patience, justice and love,
Maat’s feminized principles. The Egyptian self was thus denuded of its potential
grandeur, which would make many Afrocentrists, intent on proving the moral
superiority of the African self, cry in despair. To say that material deprivation
produced moral deprivation is not to argue that at no point, did the African self
ever present itself as moral. The idealized attempts by Egypt’s leaders that led to
internalize the limiting conditions of Maat proves the Afrocentric hypotheses that
there was a particularly Egyptianized/Africanized effort at internalizing moral
greatness, but it was not institutionalized in Egyptian life, the way that the capitalist
form did in the 17th century and beyond.
The moral form of life that Maat promised remained on paper, as nothing more
than an ideal. The ideals were not institutionalized as ideas, which can be lived,
which can be practiced. African thinkers did not take the time to embody these
ideals in the life blood of institutions. In short the moral form did not produce a
corresponding economic form, in the precise way that the capitalist form
produced a corresponding moral form, and institutionalized the latter in far
reaching institutions of the state and its civil society. That is the task that I should
like to impose on myself. The celebrated moral features of Maat are generosity,
justice, uprightness, tolerance and loving patience. Indeed, these are demanding
virtues that capitalism as the dominant economic form cannot support, no matter
how diligently it tries.
Adam Smith, the world-famous economist, but who was also a moral philosopher,
argued that unless capitalism is restrained by morality, as a limiting condition of
greed and superfluity, it will eat itself up. To that effect, he developed an elaborate
moral theory comprising of what he called “moral sentiments” to control the
excesses of the market. He proposed compassion and sociality as two powerful
moral sentiments that could regulate the excesses of the market. The moral
sentiment, he thought, could counter the purely instrumental features of the
capitalist economic form. Of course, to this day, his warning of an inevitable
doom has yet to be heeded, and capitalism itself continues to marvel of its
resiliency to create crises and immediately correct them, thereby proving its
“naturalness” and making it easy for its proponents to present it to the world as a
God-chosen economic form. Any attempt to counter it with something like Maat is
dismissed as a pipe dream. No one in their right mind is expected to take Maat
seriously. And the fact that the geographical origin of Maat is an African
civilization conveniently results in dismissing Maat as irrelevant and wishful
thinking.
Maat as a moral form is considerably deeper than the passing moral sentiments
that the Scottish moral philosopher, David Hume, proposed. Generosity, justice,
uprightness, tolerance, wisdom and loving patience go directly against our natural
proclivity of injustice, dishonesty, intolerance, closedmindness, ignorance and
hate. These vices seem to fit the ready-to-hand tapestry of our makeup, which by
now has become so second nature that no Maat is going to dissemble these
powerful vices, which were effectively used to build empires and economic forms
that support the visions of the rich and powerful. In contemporary life revitalizing
the features of Maat requires nothing less than manufacturing a new human being.
We must create new human beings, human beings who have to be willing and
capable of acting generously, patiently, tolerantly and lovingly. We do not have
such human beings in sufficient numbers that matter to construct an economic
form that values justice, uprightness, wisdom, tolerance and loving patience.
Taking the virtues singly, the following picture emerges. Let us begin with
generosity.
Generosity is a virtue. It is a virtue that is willing to give without receiving, or is
willing to give without the deliberate intent of receiving anything, or that the
receiving is only an accident, and not an intentional act. The generous person then
gives a particular good A to person B; and person B does not simply receive A as a
matter of course. B receives A with a profound respect of the giver, and even
plans, if she can, to one day reciprocate not in the same way, but in some way.
The reciprocity need not be of equal goods. A and B need not be two equal goods,
in which equality is measured by money. What makes the act morally compelling
is the desire to reciprocate, and not the quantity of the reciprocity.
One of the economic forms of Maat, as illustrated above, is a vision of the self as
generous, and generosity itself does not require a calculated practice of reciprocity
but simply the desire and the commitment to give when one can, and sometimes to
give A to B, although A has to sacrifice good C for the sake of giving A to B, even
when one cannot, and perhaps should not, and yet the generous gives
nevertheless. One of the central pillars of Maat as an economic form is the
cultivation of a human self willing and capable of acting generously in the relational
moral regime of giving and receiving, or simply giving without receiving, or
receiving with a profound sense of gratitude and respect. The celebrated moral
features of Maat are generosity, justice, uprightness, tolerance and loving patience.
Indeed, these are demanding virtues that capitalism as the dominant economic
form cannot support, no matter how diligently it tries.
Justice is one of the features of Maat and it is also a potential source of a Moral
Economy, appropriate for the African condition.
As Aristotle taught, one does not become just merely by abstractly knowing what
Justice is; rather, one becomes just by doing just things. The puzzling question is
this: if one does not know what justice is then how can she know what just things
are, so that she could choose only just things and not others? The question is not
easy to answer. But an example might give us a sense of what Aristotle means,
and then proceed to discuss the matter at hand, justice as one of the economic
forms of Maat.
It is Christmas evening and a family is gathering for a dinner and the table has been
set for ten people. Among the popular dishes are five pies, and shortly before the
guests arrive, one of the family members has been asked to cut the pies into exact
sizes, such that no single person would feel that he has mistakenly picked one of
the smallest pies, in the event that a person picked a piece and it turned out to be
the smallest.
The task of the pie cutter is to observe that justice is served and that all the pies
are cut evenly and fairly. This is of course an exceedingly difficult task, but justice
demands it, and the just cutter must prove the worthiness of her moral action.
What must this person do? That is the moral question. Well, at the minimum the
person herself must be just in order to perform just action, and in this instance,
justice means nothing more than cutting the pieces equally to ones best ability, and
that she must do so fairly.
She must cut the pies with a moral imagination and an intuitive mathematical
precision, and must pray to the transcendent to make her see justly, and that she is
enabled to measure precisely. There is a spiritual dimension to the science of
measurement, which could have been simply done with a measuring tape. That
possibility, however convenient, is not elegant. She is not going to stand there with
a tape ruler to cut pies. Rather, the expectations are two, that (1) she is going to
make an effort to be precise, because her intention is to be just and (2) that her
eyes are just, or that she prays that they would be. (1) and (2) are the
requirements; the rest is left to moral imagination.
She cuts the pies, and it turns out that all the pieces appear to be equal, and when
the guests arrived, they randomly pick the pieces, and appear to be clearly
satisfied. What we have here is a display of justice in the Aristotelian sense, in
which justice is defined as an activity that is guided by a measure of equality, and
equality itself is manifest in the attempt at being fair to everyone, and in this
example, an attempt to be fair to the guests, without their ever knowing that they
are being worked on. They judge the event as illuminated by justice, and the event
as uplifting. They eat, drink, converse, dance and leave.
Justice presents itself in this event, through the presence of those delicious pies,
each of which was a duplicate of the other. Generalizing this to a higher level,
what we can say is that any economic form must be guided with justice as an
event of doing things fairly and that all the commodities that human beings should
want must be distributed with such a standard, the standard of justice as fairness.
Given justice as fairness, commodity A can be distributed between persons B and
C in such an equitable way that B and C share commodity A by getting the same
amount at any time, any place and for a good reason.
Compassion is another feature of Maat; indeed, it is one of the cardinal moral
forms for the new moral economy that I am theorizing here. Compassion is to
moral economy as greed is to capitalism. One cannot imagine capitalism without
the salient principle of greed, and similarly, one cannot imagine moral economy
without the originary principle of compassion. The modern world is divided by
class, race, gender, ethnicity and groups. Out of these divisions it is class division
that is the most decisive, as it is also the one that seems to be so natural that we
cannot surmount the pain and agony that it produces. In a class-divided world,
compassion is the least present because there is no compelling reason that
persuades individuals to be compassionate if they are not naturally compassionate,
or are inclined toward it. Of course, where compassion is not naturally present, it
could be taught either by example or directly through teaching.
An example should elucidate the place of compassion in moral economy. It is
summer, and exhaustingly hot. People that you encounter are hot tempered too.
Everybody is on edge, including you. You happen to be a coffee lover, so there
you are standing behind a long line of people to get your fix. The heat has made
you really impatient, and you are ready to explode on anything around you. You
are also naturally generous but not this day. Soon, before you leave the coffee
shop, a homeless person smiles at you and tries to engage you in a conversation,
hoping that you will understand the purpose of the conversation. Of course you
understand, but you ignore him and walk by. But then something bothers you, and
you come back to the coffeshop and generously give the man what he wanted.
You are proud of yourself, because you have done what generosity demands, that
you control your temper and perform the morally correct action. Surely, you say
to yourself it was not easy, but you did it.
Now you wonder what all this means, and why you did it. It is obvious to you
why you did the action. Indeed, it is because you are really a compassionate
human being but also a religious person. You really have no obligation to pay
attention to that person. He is not related to you, he is not an ex friend that fortune
turned against, nor did you do it so as to be a hero by the media.
Your action is morally worthy only because you have internalized compassion. To
you compassion comes quite naturally. It is part of your moral frame. Any
repeated action becomes a habit. So compassionate action comes habitually to you.
You rarely fight it. Rather, you exuberantly let it lead your way, as it eventually did
on that hot and difficult day. But even on that day you conquered the temptation of
doubt, and excessive self love, by the moral force of compassion. That is why you
corrected yourself, when you were briefly but powerfully tempted by
forgetfulness on that hot day and returned to do the morally right thing.
Compassion is morally compelling when it is extended to a total other, which has
nothing to do with our lives, other than the silent duty we have toward those who
await our moral attention. It is much easier to be compassionate toward a loved
one, a friend, a relative and even an acquaintance; harder is the task when the
subject is a real other, such as that homeless person by the coffee shop. In order
for any action to be morally worthy the motive must be pure, and the purity is
measured by the quality and quantity of the compassion that is extended to any
needy human being, uncontaminated by external motives, such as love, friendship,
acquaintance and relation.
It is in this particular way that I am arguing that compassion serves Maat.
Tolerance is a crucial feature of moral economy. In fact, it could easily be argued
that it is an indispensable organizing principle, which works in tandem with loving
kindness. Just as we cannot love a person without respecting her, except
delusorily, we cannot live with one another without tolerating each others’ needs,
habits, likes and dislikes.
In the economic sphere tolerance is subtly pertinent. We cannot readily sense its
inner working unless we pay attention to its musings at the work place, as we
interact with one another as bosses and employees.
Consider the following example to underscore the point. There is this employee
who does things in ways that many people find annoying. She customarily comes
late to work; she procrastinates; she spreads papers, cans and food stuffs all
around her sometimes she cannot even find herself amid the dirt, the pile and the
dust. Yet, and this is the point, whatever she does is done flawlessly, as flawless
as human products could be. Her boss has agonized over what to do with her; he
has contemplated firing her numerous times. Lulled by the elegance of her work
and his loving-kindness toward her, he decides to keep her. He has promised
himself to erase those occasional thoughts of getting rid of her. As he told one of
his friends, he has learned, and not very easily, the ways of tolerance as a principle
of management, of managing employees who will not and cannot change their
habits for the rest of their lives.
I consider this manager very wise and skilled at the art of management. He
decided, obviously because he could change himself as hard as it was, rather than
expect his employee to change. The structure of his thoughts could be put
syllogistically. Y can change his way / X cannot change easily / Therefore Y must
change for the sake of Z.
Y is the manager. X is the annoying employee. Z is the organization where Y and
X work. In this situation Z is saved precisely because the manager internalizes
tolerance and loving-kindness as the organizing principles of the organization. Y
controls his ego and chooses to advance the interests of Z over and against his
own private needs. He did not fire X because his ego demands it. Nor does he ever
insist that X must change. He has intuitively and empirically concluded that it is not
pointless to expect X to change, nor would it benefit Z to lose X, since X is an
intelligent and skilled worker.
Where tolerance is habitually practiced at workplaces it becomes an indispensable
good that could save many employers the unnecessary cost that is incurred on
hiring and firing employees and ease the distress of the families and loved ones of
employers and employees. Tolerance can easily remedy the situation. If it is much
easier for managers to change than it is for excellent employees with annoying
habits, and then it is those who can change their ways who must change for the
sake of a functional and democratic moral economy.
Patience is a feature of Maat. The ideal leader as well as the ideal citizen must
patiently wait to witness the appearance of the Transcendent. Nothing great is
accomplished without a transcendental intervention, the seal of completeness, of
Generosity and Justice, two other features of moral economy, as I have argued in
previous essays.
Rarely is patience, however, associated with economic forms. Economic forms
are founded on seizing the opportunity before it vanishes. The activity is
everything but patient. Patience and quick money making are the virtues of
capitalism. In that world view, success is measured by shrewdness, quickness,
impatience and opportunism. Whereas patience is undermined by capitalism, the
economic form for Maat reveres it. The economic form for the African condition
demands it. Without this virtue the disadvantaged citizen of the African continent is
doomed, fated to starve and die.
A moral economy, in contrast, when founded on Maat, shares with Maat an ardent
belief in patient waiting, and this is particularly true during times of famine,
poverty and loss. Patient waiting is the much needed virtue that both generosity
and justice demand. An example might illuminate the abstraction.
African Economy in country A has been blooming, and the Western world has
been hailing it as a model for the future. Country A gets spoiled and its inhabitants
shop madly. No commodity is beyond their reach, so they think. Suddenly, all
things, with the exception of the Transcendent change, since no condition is
permanent. The oil fields drain. The spoils of the economy are distributed unevenly.
The citizens become impatient with country A, which had introduced them to the
pangs of luxury, which have now become the pangs of hunger. Friends turn
against friends. The shopping frenzy slows down. Their lovers do not love the
men anymore. The rate of divorce increases, since the men’s ability to maintain
expensive lifestyles are no more.
Patient waiting for better days is not a norm. Loves and friendships founded on
comfort, wealth and excessive wealth are not permanent. They flounder as easily
as they initially sprawled. Things that last must be built slowly, in the furnace of
time, and be sculpted in accordance with the laws of beauty.
Country A is no longer a model of hope, but a model of despair. An economic
form that does not institutionalize patient waiting as a way of life digs its grave
when conditions change. That is why patient waiting also must be systematically
insinuated in the African citizen’s psyche, as an ethics of living, and a stylistics of
what I have previously called-existential seriousness. A responsible economic form
must inculcate the virtue of patience among its citizens, from early on. This
complicated and demanding virtue must be taught at all levels of school. It must be
part of economic principles, and be taught as such, and not be pushed to the side
lines, as part of religion and theology, which does not have much to do with
morals, and has nothing to do with economics. It is this dogma of capitalist
economics that must change.
My argument here is a modest contribution to challenge one of the foundational
dogmas of bourgeois economics. The morals must guide economics and a new
moral economy that works in concert with moral philosophy and religion is
precisely what the African condition requires. More morality, with a distinct
religious voice, such as the notion of patient waiting, will strengthen and expand
our horizons as we struggle with poverty, famine and other sorrows of modern
life.
We need more people who can patiently wait as everything changes, hopeful that
no condition is permanent, including the conditions of nations, when their
economies get distorted and the citizens are hardened and become cruel towards
one another, and that the notion of helping your fellow citizens sounds indeed very
strange, to those who are comfortable. Instead, during trying times, citizens do not
patiently wait for things to change; instead, they give up altogether, or become
irreligious and immoral. It is in this way that patient waiting, I argue, becomes one
of the pillars of moral economy, one of the features of Maat, along with generosity
and justice, which I examined in previous essays.
Justice is one of the features of Maat and it is also a potential source of a Moral
Economy, appropriate for the African condition. As Aristotle taught, one does not
become just merely by abstractly knowing what Justice is; rather, one becomes
just by doing just things. The puzzling question is this: if one does not know what
justice is then how can she know what just things are, so that she could choose
only just things and not others? The question is not easy to answer. But an
example might give us a sense of what Aristotle means, and then proceed to
discuss the matter at hand, justice as one of the economic forms of Maat.
It is Christmas evening and a family is gathering for a dinner and the table had
been set for ten people. Among the popular dishes are five pies, and shortly before
the guests arrive, one of the family members has been asked to cut the pies into
exact sizes, such that no single person would feel that he has mistakenly picked
one of the smallest pies, in the event that a person picked a piece and it turned out
to be the smallest.
The task of the pie cutter was to observe that justice is served and that all the pies
are cut evenly and fairly. This is of course an exceedingly difficult task, but justice
demands it, and the just cutter must prove the worthiness of her moral action.
What must this person do? That is the moral question. Well, at the minimum the
person herself must be just in order to perform just action, and in this instance,
justice means nothing more than cutting the pieces equally to ones best ability.
She must cut the pies with a moral imagination and an intuitive mathematical
precision, and must pray to the transcendent to make her see justly, and that she is
enabled to measure precisely. There is a spiritual dimension to the science of
measurement, which could have been simply done with a measuring rope. That
possibility, however, convenient, is not elegant. She is not going to stand there
with a ruler to cut pies. Rather, the expectations are two, that (1) She is going to
make an effort to be precise, because her intention is to be just and (2) that her
eyes are just, or that she prays that they would be. (1) and (2) are the
requirements; the rest is left to moral imagination.
She cut the pies, and it turned out that, all the pieces appeared to be equal, and
when the guests arrived, they randomly picked the pieces, and appeared to be
clearly satisfied. What we have here is a display of justice in the Aristotelian sense,
in which justice is defined as an activity that is guided by a measure of equality,
and equality itself is manifest in the attempt at being fair to everyone, and in this
example, an attempt to be fair to the guests, without they ever knowing that they
are being worked on. They judge the event as illuminated by justice, and the event
as uplifting. They ate, drunk, conversed, danced and left.
Justice presented itself in this event, through the presence of those delicious pies,
each of which was a duplicate of the other.
Generalizing this to a higher level, what we can say is that any economic form
must be guided with justice as an event of doing things fairly and that all the
commodities that human beings should want must be distributed with such a
standard, the standard of justice as fairness. Given justice as fairness, commodity
A can be distributed between persons B and C, in such an equitable way, that B
and C share commodity A by getting the same amount at any time, any place and
for a good reason.
The celebrated moral features of Maat are generosity, justice, uprightness,
tolerance and loving patience. Indeed, these are demanding virtues that capitalism
as the dominant economic form cannot support, no matter how diligently it tries.
Adam Smith, the world famous economist, but who was also a moral philosopher,
did argue that unless capitalism is restrained by morality, as a limiting condition of
greed and superfluity, it will eat itself up. To that effect, he developed an elaborate
moral theory comprising of what he called “moral sentiments” to control the
excesses of the market. He proposed compassion and sociality as two powerful
moral sentiments that could regulate the excesses of the market. The moral
sentiment, he thought, could counter the purely instrumental features of the
capitalist economic form. Of course, to this day, his warning of an inevitable
doom has yet to be heeded, and capitalism itself continues to marvel its resiliency
to create crises and immediately correct them, thereby proving its “naturalness”
and making it easy for its proponents to present it to the world as a God chosen
economic form. Any attempt to counter it with something like Maat is dismissed
as a pipe dream. No body in her right mind is expected to take Maat seriously. And
the fact the geographical origin of Maat is an African civilization, conveniently
results in dismissing Maat as irrelevant and wishful thinking.
Maat as a moral form is considerably deeper than the passing moral sentiments
that the Scottish moral philosopher proposed. Generosity, justice, uprightness,
tolerance, wisdom and loving patience go directly against our natural proclivity of
injustice, dishonesty, intolerance, closedmindness, ignorance and hate. These vices
seem to fit the ready to hand tapestry of our makeup, which by now has become,
so second nature that no Maat is going to dissemble these powerful vices which
were effectively used to build empires and economic forms that support the
visions of the rich and powerful. In contemporary life revitalizing the features of
Maat requires nothing less than manufacturing a new human being.
We must create new human beings, human beings who have to be willing and
capable of acting generously, patiently, tolerantly and lovingly. We do not have
such human beings in sufficient numbers that matter to construct an economic
form that values justice, uprightness, wisdom, tolerance and loving patience.
Taking the virtues singly, the following picture emerges. Let us begin with
generosity. Generosity is a virtue. It is a virtue that is willing to give without
receiving, or is willing to give without the deliberate intent of receiving anything, or
that the receiving is only an accident, and not an intentional act. The generous
person then gives a particular good A to person B; and person B does not simply
receive A as a matter of course. B receives A with a profound respect of the giver,
and even plans, if she can, to one day reciprocate not in the same way, but in
some way. The reciprocity need not be of equal goods. A and B need not be two
equal goods, in which equality is measured by money. What makes the act morally
compelling is the desire to reciprocate, and not the quantity of the reciprocity.
One of the economic forms of Maat, as illustrated above, is a vision of the self as
generous, and generosity itself does not require a calculated practice of reciprocity
but simply the desire and the commitment to give when one can, and sometimes,
to give A to B, although A has to sacrifice good C for the sake of giving A to B,
even when one cannot, and perhaps should not, and yet the generous gives
nevertheless. One of the central pillars of Maat as an economic form is the
cultivation of a human self willing and capable of acting generously in the relational
moral regime of giving and receiving, or simply giving without receiving, or
receiving with a profound sense of gratitude and respect.
Moral Economy, an Alternative to Capitalism
and Socialism
11 December, 2009 | By Teodros Kiros (PhD)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Ethiopia needs a new Economic
Form, an alternative to EPRDF’s
oppressive socialism, and I
suggest that UDJ adopts this
manifesto, suitably revised for
contemporary Ethiopia , as the
party is preparing to win the next
election for the Birtukan’s future
generation.
- Maat was to ancient Egypt as
Maat was to Egypt ’s social and political life. The concept of Maat insinuated itself
with every aspect of Classical Egypt. Pharaohs and the majestic slaves who
erected the pyramids swore by Maat. Rich and poor, men and women, slaves and
free citizens worshipped the magic of Maat. Matt was the moral organizer of
everyday life in classical Egypt . Every facet of Egyptian life was organized by the
expansive principle of Matt. Every facet of Egyptian life was framed by Maat.
Why did Matt have such a presence in Egyptian life? What was its magical spell? I
should now like to address these questions. The human self required an organizing
moral principle. Moral life cannot function without a moral frame, a frame that
furnishes the self with boundaries and limiting conditions of social action. It is
precisely this lacuna that was lacking in Egyptian morality until the self-creating
Egyptian gods originated the expansive concept of Maat. Matt, was symbolized by
the feminine principle of “truth, balance, order and justice”. Maat was harmony,
righteousness, patience and vision, born out of the feminine principle of patient
labor. For the ancient Egyptians, the order of the universe was also the ideal order
for the human world.
For the Greeks, the universe was ordered by Logos, by the rational word. It is this
order that Plato used in his Republic, when he constructed an ideal city out of
Logos. This principle was later translated into, “In the beginning was Logos”, and
was with God and the Logos was God (John1:1). Jesus himself was Logos, in
marked contrast, for the ancient Egyptians, the organizing principle of Logos was
replaced by the organizing principle of Maat. The Egyptian city was ruled by kings
who personified Maat. The human heart, which was worshipped by the Egyptians,
and which was the seat of thinking, was also the seat of Maat. The pharaohs were
expected to rule with Maat, and not without it. The pharaoh’s greatness was
measured by the quality and quantity of Maat that he or she internalized. After
death, their hearts would be weighed by the scale of Maat, the scale of Justice.
When famines occurred and deep inequalities became a way of life, it was the duty
of the rulers to uphold Maat and measure the depth and extent of the suffering.
Not that this ideal was perfectly upheld, particularly when nature overwhelmed the
rulers ideals, but there was at least an absolute and objective standard by which
social/ political life was judged and measured.
Maat as a moral form requires an appropriate economic form, which has yet to be
theorized. I should now like to defend the following hypothesis. No matter how
elastic and flexible the dominant capitalist economic form, and however generously
it is stretched, the capitalist economic form is plainly speaking morally vacuous to
accommodate the greatness of Maat as a moral form. The most fitting moral form
that could work in tandem with Maat is an economic form that is anchored on a
solid moral foundation. Maat is precisely that moral foundation, which is yearning
for an economic form, particularly relevant for the African condition.
A moral form requires a supportive economic form. Classical Egypt had the right
moral form but not the right economic form. Whereas Maat singled out the self as
capable of stepping out of its ego shell and embracing other egos outside of it, the
corresponding famine and hunger situations forced the actual Egyptian not to
embrace the other, but to destroy other selves. It is these particular moments of
despair and anguish that killed the enabling moments of patience, justice and love,
Maat’s feminized principles. The Egyptian self was thus denuded of its potential
grandeur, which would make many Afrocentrists, intent on proving the moral
superiority of the African self, cry in despair. To say that material deprivation
produced moral deprivation is not to argue that at no point, did the African self
ever present itself as moral. The idealized attempts by Egypt’s leaders that led to
internalize the limiting conditions of Maat proves the Afrocentric hypotheses that
there was a particularly Egyptianized/Africanized effort at internalizing moral
greatness, but it was not institutionalized in Egyptian life, the way that the capitalist
form did in the 17th century and beyond.
The moral form of life that Maat promised remained on paper, as nothing more
than an ideal. The ideals were not institutionalized as ideas, which can be lived,
which can be practiced. African thinkers did not take the time to embody these
ideals in the life blood of institutions. In short the moral form did not produce a
corresponding economic form, in the precise way that the capitalist form
produced a corresponding moral form, and institutionalized the latter in far
reaching institutions of the state and its civil society. That is the task that I should
like to impose on myself. The celebrated moral features of Maat are generosity,
justice, uprightness, tolerance and loving patience. Indeed, these are demanding
virtues that capitalism as the dominant economic form cannot support, no matter
how diligently it tries.
Adam Smith, the world-famous economist, but who was also a moral philosopher,
argued that unless capitalism is restrained by morality, as a limiting condition of
greed and superfluity, it will eat itself up. To that effect, he developed an elaborate
moral theory comprising of what he called “moral sentiments” to control the
excesses of the market. He proposed compassion and sociality as two powerful
moral sentiments that could regulate the excesses of the market. The moral
sentiment, he thought, could counter the purely instrumental features of the
capitalist economic form. Of course, to this day, his warning of an inevitable
doom has yet to be heeded, and capitalism itself continues to marvel of its
resiliency to create crises and immediately correct them, thereby proving its
“naturalness” and making it easy for its proponents to present it to the world as a
God-chosen economic form. Any attempt to counter it with something like Maat is
dismissed as a pipe dream. No one in their right mind is expected to take Maat
seriously. And the fact that the geographical origin of Maat is an African
civilization conveniently results in dismissing Maat as irrelevant and wishful
thinking.
Maat as a moral form is considerably deeper than the passing moral sentiments
that the Scottish moral philosopher, David Hume, proposed. Generosity, justice,
uprightness, tolerance, wisdom and loving patience go directly against our natural
proclivity of injustice, dishonesty, intolerance, closedmindness, ignorance and
hate. These vices seem to fit the ready-to-hand tapestry of our makeup, which by
now has become so second nature that no Maat is going to dissemble these
powerful vices, which were effectively used to build empires and economic forms
that support the visions of the rich and powerful. In contemporary life revitalizing
the features of Maat requires nothing less than manufacturing a new human being.
We must create new human beings, human beings who have to be willing and
capable of acting generously, patiently, tolerantly and lovingly. We do not have
such human beings in sufficient numbers that matter to construct an economic
form that values justice, uprightness, wisdom, tolerance and loving patience.
Taking the virtues singly, the following picture emerges. Let us begin with
generosity.
Generosity is a virtue. It is a virtue that is willing to give without receiving, or is
willing to give without the deliberate intent of receiving anything, or that the
receiving is only an accident, and not an intentional act. The generous person then
gives a particular good A to person B; and person B does not simply receive A as a
matter of course. B receives A with a profound respect of the giver, and even
plans, if she can, to one day reciprocate not in the same way, but in some way.
The reciprocity need not be of equal goods. A and B need not be two equal goods,
in which equality is measured by money. What makes the act morally compelling
is the desire to reciprocate, and not the quantity of the reciprocity.
One of the economic forms of Maat, as illustrated above, is a vision of the self as
generous, and generosity itself does not require a calculated practice of reciprocity
but simply the desire and the commitment to give when one can, and sometimes to
give A to B, although A has to sacrifice good C for the sake of giving A to B, even
when one cannot, and perhaps should not, and yet the generous gives
nevertheless. One of the central pillars of Maat as an economic form is the
cultivation of a human self willing and capable of acting generously in the relational
moral regime of giving and receiving, or simply giving without receiving, or
receiving with a profound sense of gratitude and respect. The celebrated moral
features of Maat are generosity, justice, uprightness, tolerance and loving patience.
Indeed, these are demanding virtues that capitalism as the dominant economic
form cannot support, no matter how diligently it tries.
Justice is one of the features of Maat and it is also a potential source of a Moral
Economy, appropriate for the African condition.
As Aristotle taught, one does not become just merely by abstractly knowing what
Justice is; rather, one becomes just by doing just things. The puzzling question is
this: if one does not know what justice is then how can she know what just things
are, so that she could choose only just things and not others? The question is not
easy to answer. But an example might give us a sense of what Aristotle means,
and then proceed to discuss the matter at hand, justice as one of the economic
forms of Maat.
It is Christmas evening and a family is gathering for a dinner and the table has been
set for ten people. Among the popular dishes are five pies, and shortly before the
guests arrive, one of the family members has been asked to cut the pies into exact
sizes, such that no single person would feel that he has mistakenly picked one of
the smallest pies, in the event that a person picked a piece and it turned out to be
the smallest.
The task of the pie cutter is to observe that justice is served and that all the pies
are cut evenly and fairly. This is of course an exceedingly difficult task, but justice
demands it, and the just cutter must prove the worthiness of her moral action.
What must this person do? That is the moral question. Well, at the minimum the
person herself must be just in order to perform just action, and in this instance,
justice means nothing more than cutting the pieces equally to ones best ability, and
that she must do so fairly.
She must cut the pies with a moral imagination and an intuitive mathematical
precision, and must pray to the transcendent to make her see justly, and that she is
enabled to measure precisely. There is a spiritual dimension to the science of
measurement, which could have been simply done with a measuring tape. That
possibility, however convenient, is not elegant. She is not going to stand there with
a tape ruler to cut pies. Rather, the expectations are two, that (1) she is going to
make an effort to be precise, because her intention is to be just and (2) that her
eyes are just, or that she prays that they would be. (1) and (2) are the
requirements; the rest is left to moral imagination.
She cuts the pies, and it turns out that all the pieces appear to be equal, and when
the guests arrived, they randomly pick the pieces, and appear to be clearly
satisfied. What we have here is a display of justice in the Aristotelian sense, in
which justice is defined as an activity that is guided by a measure of equality, and
equality itself is manifest in the attempt at being fair to everyone, and in this
example, an attempt to be fair to the guests, without their ever knowing that they
are being worked on. They judge the event as illuminated by justice, and the event
as uplifting. They eat, drink, converse, dance and leave.
Justice presents itself in this event, through the presence of those delicious pies,
each of which was a duplicate of the other. Generalizing this to a higher level,
what we can say is that any economic form must be guided with justice as an
event of doing things fairly and that all the commodities that human beings should
want must be distributed with such a standard, the standard of justice as fairness.
Given justice as fairness, commodity A can be distributed between persons B and
C in such an equitable way that B and C share commodity A by getting the same
amount at any time, any place and for a good reason.
Compassion is another feature of Maat; indeed, it is one of the cardinal moral
forms for the new moral economy that I am theorizing here. Compassion is to
moral economy as greed is to capitalism. One cannot imagine capitalism without
the salient principle of greed, and similarly, one cannot imagine moral economy
without the originary principle of compassion. The modern world is divided by
class, race, gender, ethnicity and groups. Out of these divisions it is class division
that is the most decisive, as it is also the one that seems to be so natural that we
cannot surmount the pain and agony that it produces. In a class-divided world,
compassion is the least present because there is no compelling reason that
persuades individuals to be compassionate if they are not naturally compassionate,
or are inclined toward it. Of course, where compassion is not naturally present, it
could be taught either by example or directly through teaching.
An example should elucidate the place of compassion in moral economy. It is
summer, and exhaustingly hot. People that you encounter are hot tempered too.
Everybody is on edge, including you. You happen to be a coffee lover, so there
you are standing behind a long line of people to get your fix. The heat has made
you really impatient, and you are ready to explode on anything around you. You
are also naturally generous but not this day. Soon, before you leave the coffee
shop, a homeless person smiles at you and tries to engage you in a conversation,
hoping that you will understand the purpose of the conversation. Of course you
understand, but you ignore him and walk by. But then something bothers you, and
you come back to the coffeshop and generously give the man what he wanted.
You are proud of yourself, because you have done what generosity demands, that
you control your temper and perform the morally correct action. Surely, you say
to yourself it was not easy, but you did it.
Now you wonder what all this means, and why you did it. It is obvious to you
why you did the action. Indeed, it is because you are really a compassionate
human being but also a religious person. You really have no obligation to pay
attention to that person. He is not related to you, he is not an ex friend that fortune
turned against, nor did you do it so as to be a hero by the media.
Your action is morally worthy only because you have internalized compassion. To
you compassion comes quite naturally. It is part of your moral frame. Any
repeated action becomes a habit. So compassionate action comes habitually to you.
You rarely fight it. Rather, you exuberantly let it lead your way, as it eventually did
on that hot and difficult day. But even on that day you conquered the temptation of
doubt, and excessive self love, by the moral force of compassion. That is why you
corrected yourself, when you were briefly but powerfully tempted by
forgetfulness on that hot day and returned to do the morally right thing.
Compassion is morally compelling when it is extended to a total other, which has
nothing to do with our lives, other than the silent duty we have toward those who
await our moral attention. It is much easier to be compassionate toward a loved
one, a friend, a relative and even an acquaintance; harder is the task when the
subject is a real other, such as that homeless person by the coffee shop. In order
for any action to be morally worthy the motive must be pure, and the purity is
measured by the quality and quantity of the compassion that is extended to any
needy human being, uncontaminated by external motives, such as love, friendship,
acquaintance and relation.
It is in this particular way that I am arguing that compassion serves Maat.
Tolerance is a crucial feature of moral economy. In fact, it could easily be argued
that it is an indispensable organizing principle, which works in tandem with loving
kindness. Just as we cannot love a person without respecting her, except
delusorily, we cannot live with one another without tolerating each others’ needs,
habits, likes and dislikes.
In the economic sphere tolerance is subtly pertinent. We cannot readily sense its
inner working unless we pay attention to its musings at the work place, as we
interact with one another as bosses and employees.
Consider the following example to underscore the point. There is this employee
who does things in ways that many people find annoying. She customarily comes
late to work; she procrastinates; she spreads papers, cans and food stuffs all
around her sometimes she cannot even find herself amid the dirt, the pile and the
dust. Yet, and this is the point, whatever she does is done flawlessly, as flawless
as human products could be. Her boss has agonized over what to do with her; he
has contemplated firing her numerous times. Lulled by the elegance of her work
and his loving-kindness toward her, he decides to keep her. He has promised
himself to erase those occasional thoughts of getting rid of her. As he told one of
his friends, he has learned, and not very easily, the ways of tolerance as a principle
of management, of managing employees who will not and cannot change their
habits for the rest of their lives.
I consider this manager very wise and skilled at the art of management. He
decided, obviously because he could change himself as hard as it was, rather than
expect his employee to change. The structure of his thoughts could be put
syllogistically. Y can change his way / X cannot change easily / Therefore Y must
change for the sake of Z.
Y is the manager. X is the annoying employee. Z is the organization where Y and
X work. In this situation Z is saved precisely because the manager internalizes
tolerance and loving-kindness as the organizing principles of the organization. Y
controls his ego and chooses to advance the interests of Z over and against his
own private needs. He did not fire X because his ego demands it. Nor does he ever
insist that X must change. He has intuitively and empirically concluded that it is not
pointless to expect X to change, nor would it benefit Z to lose X, since X is an
intelligent and skilled worker.
Where tolerance is habitually practiced at workplaces it becomes an indispensable
good that could save many employers the unnecessary cost that is incurred on
hiring and firing employees and ease the distress of the families and loved ones of
employers and employees. Tolerance can easily remedy the situation. If it is much
easier for managers to change than it is for excellent employees with annoying
habits, and then it is those who can change their ways who must change for the
sake of a functional and democratic moral economy.
Patience is a feature of Maat. The ideal leader as well as the ideal citizen must
patiently wait to witness the appearance of the Transcendent. Nothing great is
accomplished without a transcendental intervention, the seal of completeness, of
Generosity and Justice, two other features of moral economy, as I have argued in
previous essays.
Rarely is patience, however, associated with economic forms. Economic forms
are founded on seizing the opportunity before it vanishes. The activity is
everything but patient. Patience and quick money making are the virtues of
capitalism. In that world view, success is measured by shrewdness, quickness,
impatience and opportunism. Whereas patience is undermined by capitalism, the
economic form for Maat reveres it. The economic form for the African condition
demands it. Without this virtue the disadvantaged citizen of the African continent is
doomed, fated to starve and die.
A moral economy, in contrast, when founded on Maat, shares with Maat an ardent
belief in patient waiting, and this is particularly true during times of famine,
poverty and loss. Patient waiting is the much needed virtue that both generosity
and justice demand. An example might illuminate the abstraction.
African Economy in country A has been blooming, and the Western world has
been hailing it as a model for the future. Country A gets spoiled and its inhabitants
shop madly. No commodity is beyond their reach, so they think. Suddenly, all
things, with the exception of the Transcendent change, since no condition is
permanent. The oil fields drain. The spoils of the economy are distributed unevenly.
The citizens become impatient with country A, which had introduced them to the
pangs of luxury, which have now become the pangs of hunger. Friends turn
against friends. The shopping frenzy slows down. Their lovers do not love the
men anymore. The rate of divorce increases, since the men’s ability to maintain
expensive lifestyles are no more.
Patient waiting for better days is not a norm. Loves and friendships founded on
comfort, wealth and excessive wealth are not permanent. They flounder as easily
as they initially sprawled. Things that last must be built slowly, in the furnace of
time, and be sculpted in accordance with the laws of beauty.
Country A is no longer a model of hope, but a model of despair. An economic
form that does not institutionalize patient waiting as a way of life digs its grave
when conditions change. That is why patient waiting also must be systematically
insinuated in the African citizen’s psyche, as an ethics of living, and a stylistics of
what I have previously called-existential seriousness. A responsible economic form
must inculcate the virtue of patience among its citizens, from early on. This
complicated and demanding virtue must be taught at all levels of school. It must be
part of economic principles, and be taught as such, and not be pushed to the side
lines, as part of religion and theology, which does not have much to do with
morals, and has nothing to do with economics. It is this dogma of capitalist
economics that must change.
My argument here is a modest contribution to challenge one of the foundational
dogmas of bourgeois economics. The morals must guide economics and a new
moral economy that works in concert with moral philosophy and religion is
precisely what the African condition requires. More morality, with a distinct
religious voice, such as the notion of patient waiting, will strengthen and expand
our horizons as we struggle with poverty, famine and other sorrows of modern
life.
We need more people who can patiently wait as everything changes, hopeful that
no condition is permanent, including the conditions of nations, when their
economies get distorted and the citizens are hardened and become cruel towards
one another, and that the notion of helping your fellow citizens sounds indeed very
strange, to those who are comfortable. Instead, during trying times, citizens do not
patiently wait for things to change; instead, they give up altogether, or become
irreligious and immoral. It is in this way that patient waiting, I argue, becomes one
of the pillars of moral economy, one of the features of Maat, along with generosity
and justice, which I examined in previous essays.
Justice is one of the features of Maat and it is also a potential source of a Moral
Economy, appropriate for the African condition. As Aristotle taught, one does not
become just merely by abstractly knowing what Justice is; rather, one becomes
just by doing just things. The puzzling question is this: if one does not know what
justice is then how can she know what just things are, so that she could choose
only just things and not others? The question is not easy to answer. But an
example might give us a sense of what Aristotle means, and then proceed to
discuss the matter at hand, justice as one of the economic forms of Maat.
It is Christmas evening and a family is gathering for a dinner and the table had
been set for ten people. Among the popular dishes are five pies, and shortly before
the guests arrive, one of the family members has been asked to cut the pies into
exact sizes, such that no single person would feel that he has mistakenly picked
one of the smallest pies, in the event that a person picked a piece and it turned out
to be the smallest.
The task of the pie cutter was to observe that justice is served and that all the pies
are cut evenly and fairly. This is of course an exceedingly difficult task, but justice
demands it, and the just cutter must prove the worthiness of her moral action.
What must this person do? That is the moral question. Well, at the minimum the
person herself must be just in order to perform just action, and in this instance,
justice means nothing more than cutting the pieces equally to ones best ability.
She must cut the pies with a moral imagination and an intuitive mathematical
precision, and must pray to the transcendent to make her see justly, and that she is
enabled to measure precisely. There is a spiritual dimension to the science of
measurement, which could have been simply done with a measuring rope. That
possibility, however, convenient, is not elegant. She is not going to stand there
with a ruler to cut pies. Rather, the expectations are two, that (1) She is going to
make an effort to be precise, because her intention is to be just and (2) that her
eyes are just, or that she prays that they would be. (1) and (2) are the
requirements; the rest is left to moral imagination.
She cut the pies, and it turned out that, all the pieces appeared to be equal, and
when the guests arrived, they randomly picked the pieces, and appeared to be
clearly satisfied. What we have here is a display of justice in the Aristotelian sense,
in which justice is defined as an activity that is guided by a measure of equality,
and equality itself is manifest in the attempt at being fair to everyone, and in this
example, an attempt to be fair to the guests, without they ever knowing that they
are being worked on. They judge the event as illuminated by justice, and the event
as uplifting. They ate, drunk, conversed, danced and left.
Justice presented itself in this event, through the presence of those delicious pies,
each of which was a duplicate of the other.
Generalizing this to a higher level, what we can say is that any economic form
must be guided with justice as an event of doing things fairly and that all the
commodities that human beings should want must be distributed with such a
standard, the standard of justice as fairness. Given justice as fairness, commodity
A can be distributed between persons B and C, in such an equitable way, that B
and C share commodity A by getting the same amount at any time, any place and
for a good reason.
The celebrated moral features of Maat are generosity, justice, uprightness,
tolerance and loving patience. Indeed, these are demanding virtues that capitalism
as the dominant economic form cannot support, no matter how diligently it tries.
Adam Smith, the world famous economist, but who was also a moral philosopher,
did argue that unless capitalism is restrained by morality, as a limiting condition of
greed and superfluity, it will eat itself up. To that effect, he developed an elaborate
moral theory comprising of what he called “moral sentiments” to control the
excesses of the market. He proposed compassion and sociality as two powerful
moral sentiments that could regulate the excesses of the market. The moral
sentiment, he thought, could counter the purely instrumental features of the
capitalist economic form. Of course, to this day, his warning of an inevitable
doom has yet to be heeded, and capitalism itself continues to marvel its resiliency
to create crises and immediately correct them, thereby proving its “naturalness”
and making it easy for its proponents to present it to the world as a God chosen
economic form. Any attempt to counter it with something like Maat is dismissed
as a pipe dream. No body in her right mind is expected to take Maat seriously. And
the fact the geographical origin of Maat is an African civilization, conveniently
results in dismissing Maat as irrelevant and wishful thinking.
Maat as a moral form is considerably deeper than the passing moral sentiments
that the Scottish moral philosopher proposed. Generosity, justice, uprightness,
tolerance, wisdom and loving patience go directly against our natural proclivity of
injustice, dishonesty, intolerance, closedmindness, ignorance and hate. These vices
seem to fit the ready to hand tapestry of our makeup, which by now has become,
so second nature that no Maat is going to dissemble these powerful vices which
were effectively used to build empires and economic forms that support the
visions of the rich and powerful. In contemporary life revitalizing the features of
Maat requires nothing less than manufacturing a new human being.
We must create new human beings, human beings who have to be willing and
capable of acting generously, patiently, tolerantly and lovingly. We do not have
such human beings in sufficient numbers that matter to construct an economic
form that values justice, uprightness, wisdom, tolerance and loving patience.
Taking the virtues singly, the following picture emerges. Let us begin with
generosity. Generosity is a virtue. It is a virtue that is willing to give without
receiving, or is willing to give without the deliberate intent of receiving anything, or
that the receiving is only an accident, and not an intentional act. The generous
person then gives a particular good A to person B; and person B does not simply
receive A as a matter of course. B receives A with a profound respect of the giver,
and even plans, if she can, to one day reciprocate not in the same way, but in
some way. The reciprocity need not be of equal goods. A and B need not be two
equal goods, in which equality is measured by money. What makes the act morally
compelling is the desire to reciprocate, and not the quantity of the reciprocity.
One of the economic forms of Maat, as illustrated above, is a vision of the self as
generous, and generosity itself does not require a calculated practice of reciprocity
but simply the desire and the commitment to give when one can, and sometimes,
to give A to B, although A has to sacrifice good C for the sake of giving A to B,
even when one cannot, and perhaps should not, and yet the generous gives
nevertheless. One of the central pillars of Maat as an economic form is the
cultivation of a human self willing and capable of acting generously in the relational
moral regime of giving and receiving, or simply giving without receiving, or
receiving with a profound sense of gratitude and respect.
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