Bhumics 17: The Shadow of the Beast

Episteme and Moralite

To the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, an episteme is the underlying framework or set of assumptions that determines what counts as knowledge in a particular historical period. This structure sets the "conditions of possibility" for knowledge and discourse.

There’s also the lesser known Foucauldian concept of the ‘moralite,’ the moral analog of the episteme, what’s considered good and praiseworthy, what’s considered bad and condemnable and what’s so ugly as to be outside the pale.

The two are related. It’s unacceptable to torture your cat but it’s perfectly fine to subject that cat’s sister to medical experimentation for the greater human good. I may be personally horrified by her sister’s fate, but the institutional legitimacy of the latter outweighs my personal beliefs. Capitalism supplies us with both an episteme and a moralite with ‘price’ serving as the medium for both.

Say what you will about the capitalist system, but its fascinating that almost everything can be produced and traded at a price. Some say that's a good thing: don't you prefer paying the man behind the counter five bucks and getting a sandwich in return than to hold the chef hostage at gunpoint? So much better to trade than to fight, isn't it? Albert O. Hirschman asks:

How did commercial, banking, and similar money-making pursuits become honorable at some point in the modern age after having stood condemned or despised as greed, love of lucre, and avarice for centuries past?

We are appalled by the buying and selling of humans, but think nothing of selling our waking hours to the local capitalist. Salaried jobs are the moral and material center of our societies. It's preferable that commodities - however abhorrent to some - are bought and sold on the open market and made respectable through taxation and regulation. Which is why liberals advocate the legalization and marketization of drugs, prostitution and even the selling of organs. The bourgeois virtues can't be disassociated from their mode of production.

People - or, I should say, men - used to challenge one another to duels all the time; it was seen as an honorable way to settle disputes. Aaron Burr (then the VP of the United States) fatally shot Alexander Hamilton in the duel they fought in 1804. Duels and vendettas are morally acceptable in honor based societies, part of their moralite, but we consider it barbarian. Living in a rational age as we do, interests win over passions. We can reduce the problems of society to:

What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order?

-- the first line of Hayek's "The use of knowledge in society."

Now that rationality is more or less automated with AI, we can ask questions like: “what kind of intelligence is there in Market Intelligence?” I want to be able to answer that question precisely one day. Today is not that day. Instead, let’s spend some time thinking about practices and habits the market system enables but are frowned upon by its grandees, i.e., somewhere between the bad and the ugly of its moralite.

Let’s talk about drugs, baby.

White Powders

As in cocaine, not crocin. Thievery has always existed and will continue to do so, and by its very nature it avoids market transactions. Which is why it is a marginal criminal activity. No mere thief has bribed heads of state as El Chapo supposedly did with Enrique Pena Nieto. In contrast, the most credible recent figures place the size of the global illicit drug market between $426 billion and $652 billion per year, somewhere between what Amazon and Walmart sell in a year.

There’s no way the drug trade would exist at the scale it does without it being a sophisticated global industry with supply chains spanning the globe, headed by sharp businessmen who sometimes use violence to settle their disputes. El Chapo is closer to Sam Walton than to Aaron Burr.

I will admit to a morbid fascination with drug lords ever since Pablo Escobar etched himself into my memory as a teenager, but the drug trade is interesting for intellectual reasons too - we can learn a lot about a beast by inspecting its shadow.

First of all, why are drugs illegal?

Sherlock Holmes used to check out on cocaine in between catching the bad guys. Even Coca-Cola is called Coca-Cola because - you guessed it - cocaine was one if its ingredients. The constitution of illegality feels arbitrary - let’s compare cocaine with that other white powder: sugar. Sugar’s history is as sordid as it gets; millions of people were kidnapped and trafficked to satiate European sweet teeth. And its health consequences are arguably comparable to that of cocaine - not crack, but the kind upper class people snort.

First: why is one legal, even celebrated, while the other gets you into solitary or six feet under? Is there a logic to the decision, and if so, is the logic driven by the ‘interests’ of a specific group of people?

Second: let’s say that cocaine is illegal and sugar isn’t for some arbitrary reason, how do markets for illegal substances function? How are prices set and contracts enforced? How do people pay their creditors?

These are questions that fall broadly under ‘a critique of moralite’ investigating the conditions of possibility of a system of commerce that has a (negative) moral connotation.

I suspect the critique of the shadow economy can tell us a lot about the daylight economy too. The daylight businessman straddles the good and the bad with finesse - Exxon executives would rather you pay attention to the car ads that show you driving into the sunset than to the carbon in the atmosphere coming out of their backside. They pay top dollar in advertisements, campaign contributions and lobbyist fees to make sure you see the first and deny the second.

They can legitimately shape your episteme and your moralite

Drug lords don’t have that luxury - no one’s saying cocaine is good for you, though El Chapo convinced Sean Penn he was a Mexican Robin Hood. How do they sustain a massive industry that’s clearly bad for everyone involved in it? These drug lords aren't nice people. Some of them might even be the most evil people alive. But their contribution to the total of human and non-human suffering is nothing in comparison to the presidents and generals and CEOs who shine in the daylight.

The vengeful, cruel, sadistic personality that we know from these crime syndicates is spreading to large portions of the world. I don't think it's a causal effect of criminal activity. Rather, the same conditions that gave rise to the spread and the globalization of the drug trade are now generalizing and becoming available to a different kind of entrepreneur.

IMHO only a critique of moralite can reveal the underlying conditions.

Finally, two lines about the critical method and its objects. Foucault devoted his researches to institutions such as the mental asylum, what scholars have called ‘sites’ of investigation. Sites are passé in our networked, planetary age; instead we should trace the webs and flows associated with commodities such as cocaine. Or carbon.Finally, two lines about the critical method and its objects. Foucault devoted his researches to institutions such as the mental asylum, what scholars have called ‘sites’ of investigation. Sites are passé in our networked, planetary age; instead we should trace the webs and flows associated with commodities such as cocaine. Or carbon.

Afterword

For the past forty years, we have lived the reality of ‘Capitalism Alone,’ of the commercial order being the glue of the globe. In fact, its successful coexistence with various political systems, ranging from authoritarianism to liberal democracy, is a strength, for it means that strife is reduced across the board independent of the rulers’ tendencies. What was it that Deng Xiaoping was supposed to have said: “to get rich is glorious.’ Putin’s Russia is less brutish than Stalin’s Soviet Union. William Robertson via Hirschman:

Commerce tends to wear off those prejudices which maintain distinctions and animosity between nations. It softens and polishes the manners of men.

That’s the moralite of the commercial order in one sentence, one that was revived in neoliberal guise for much of my lifetime. Unfortunately, that moralite is under endogenous and exogenous pressure; the first due to inequality and the feeling that some of us have been duped by the others (Trump has been consistent in this regard his entire life) and externally due to the second order consequences of accumulation such as climate change.

The drug trade, in my view, is implicated in both critiques of commercial moralite, for it corrupts the commercial system from within and without. Let’s see if that’s the case.