07 November 2010

The context of tradition is grace

The mechanism for transacting in the inalienable is tradition. The context of tradition is grace. Something is given to you, and your obligation is to pass it on to someone else. 
We, as society at large, cannot transform all traditions into market trades because we cannot transform all value into exchange value because we believe grace is an important element in the conduct of that society. The cultural context of a society is a matter of grace, as is the existence of the market mechanism itself, along with the ancillary institutions the market requires for its proper functioning. 
The market cannot properly address the problems of climate crisis because the climate is inalienable and therefore it must remain a free good and must not be transformed into a good about which we can transact through prices because the effect will be a world with substantially less grace. 
The climate crisis is part of a process that's expanding the impact of the resource curse. The danger of climate crisis is less in what it will do to the polar ice cap or the re-direction of the Gulf Stream, and more in what it will do to the balance between trades and tradita. When trades replace tradita in the management and distribution of power we don't get more market, we get more brute power. 
The difference between legitimate authority and brute power is the degree of self-restraint those in power are ready, willing and able to exercise. That self-restraint is a matter of tradition and the result of grace. Just as the elimination of mainstream religions doesn't necessarily result in more enlightenment and secular humanism – it could well result instead (and, that is the more likely outcome) in more paganism – so the elimination of traditions in and the removal of grace from the wielding of power would not necessarily result in a broader market with more individual freedom. The more likely outcome would be the advance of strongman rule and the domination of raw power over the governance of legitimate authority. 
If we define the advance of civilization as the triumph of legitimate authority over the exercise of raw power, then the program of the radical expansion of market mechanisms into the arena of the inalienable is a recipe for civilization's retreat.

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