My last piece for Profit, “The tragicomic science”, tried to bring the insights of Aristotle’s Poetics to bear on the praxis of economics. This article tries to carry on the same task of seeing how economics may be ontologically and epistemologically analogous to the structure of the dramatic art of tragedy as expounded in the above-mentioned treatise. Aristotle considers that tragedy recounts actions neither of an utter villain nor those of a complete saint. It rather portrays the actions of someone who holds an intermediate position between these two extremes incurring misfortune not due to iniquity but due to error and weakness. It is the actions of such a person which constitute the stuff of tragedy.
Though Aristotle stipulates that such a person be highly renowned rather than a commoner, yet it is basically a median criterion of character that governs the emotions and actions of the tragic hero. In terms of this characteristic orientation, economic agents resemble a classical tragic hero, neither too good nor too bad, subject to serious miscalculation of events and other people, racked by the attendant remorse but nevertheless bent on compulsively continuing in their chosen course of action regardless of the consequences.
Like Aristotle’s conception of the origins of tragic action, economic crises also follow not from extremely evil intentions but from a mundane and stubborn persistence in pursuing fallacious prescriptions about promoting prosperity. In fact, the causes of most crises of humanity lie not in unmitigated evil but rather in wrong notions about what is right intransigently followed. These mistaken ideas are put into action with so much carnivalesque zeal that while they are being practiced it seems no better alternative could be available. These erroneous ideas captivate the reason of those who believe in them. This mesmerising works not by disabling reason but by making it serve the ends of misdirected ideas logically and consistently.
Recessions, like that of 2008, are a typical instantiation of the inexorable economic practice based on flawed theories of the creation of wealth, progress and security which periodically lead to massive misery for human beings across the globe. Retrospective justification of flawed actions and policies as essentially correct allows the attribution of responsibility for this misery to the so-called contingent environmental factors which are in turn conveniently portrayed as external to the framework of flawed ideas. This redemptive defence, though it appears like the abandonment of the course of action that previously proved wrong and therefore disastrous, in reality, helps to create the conditions for reverting to it. By confusing ignorance and knowledge it makes the detection and admission of error not only immensely difficult but virtually impossible. Like tragic action, the causes of economic crises are rooted in the triadic error of perception, cognition, and practice.
Tragic action is moreover described by Aristotle as a type of action that entails suffering and pain for persons at the hands of those who are very close to them demonstrating that identity of kinship has seldom prevented human beings from hurting each other. Rather this affinity may have been the driving force behind one of the fundamental forms of opposition, that is, familial strife, which may also assume the grievous form of physical violence. A similar motive for action, based on identity, can be discovered to be at work in the relationship between people and institutions in general.
For example, economic crises generate vast amounts of pain, desperation, and misery because they are usually the result of the mismanagement of those institutions which profess to be devoted to the welfare of people. In fact the sole justification for the existence of institutions and the accumulation of control in their hands is supposed to be the maximisation of welfare and the minimisation of harm and waste. This devotion assumes identity of purpose and by that token institutions come to possess the widest possible social reach and impact through people’s willing consent causing them to acquiesce in the institutional acquisition of power at the expense of individual liberty and agency. One such institution happens to be the state which thrives on a contrived narrative of identity and closeness between itself and the governed.
Economic crises rupture this oneness periodically and reveal momentarily the state of affairs as they are actually stacked. A projected identity of interests between people and institutions, however, does not prevent them from pursuing mutually divergent logics of action. It does not mean that there are never situations when the interests of people and institutions are not aligned but the fact remains that the latter tend to digress from their role of welfare-maximisation and become self-serving in a way that is detrimental to public interest. This diversion happens recurrently because institutions and those running them are almost always the beneficiaries and only rarely the victims of their own policies and decisions. This tendentiously beneficial experience may in fact feed back into the continued adherence to the disastrous economic course underpinned by the triadic error just as the action resulting in disaster is perceived by the tragic protagonist to be in her/his benefit till it she/he is engulfed by it.
The writer is a Senior Policy Analyst working for the OIC’s Standing Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation and can be contacted at [email protected].
