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According to Alasdair MacIntyre, "the tradition of the Virtues is at variance with central features of the modern economic order and more especially its individualism, its acquisitiveness, and its elevation of the values of the market to a central social place" (After Virtue, Notre Dame, 1981).
Louis Dumont (From Mandeville to Marx: Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977) traces this rejection of traditional values back to the Dutch physician Bernard Mandeville and his Fable of the Bees: "Private Vices, Publick Benefits," which appeared in 1723. As Mandeville's Fable opens, the hive of bees is living in prosperous corruption, but the bees have begun to regret their lost virtue and pray for its recovery. When their prayer is answered, industrious activity and prosperity disappear, and are replaced by sloth, poverty, and boredom in a much reduced population. Mandeville's "moral" is that envy, greed, avarice and pride are "Ministers of Industry":
Productive activity driven by greed and envy results in social abundance. It is widely recognized that Adam Smith's central theme - that self-love works to the common good - comes from Mandeville. This is the origin of Smith's notorious "invisible hand" which is supposed to regulate society to the best interest of everyone. Pleonexia, radical greed, a vice since Aristotle, has become the driving force of the modern, productive economy.
The religions teach that greed and vice are bad. Why then have they had so little to say about economic theory? Recent years have witnessed growing skepticism about the benefits of growth and development and about the continued emphasis on material consumption (e.g., Paul Wachtel on Day 2), particularly among the ecologists (e.g., Herman Daly) and grass roots organizations. The "bads" and "externalities" produced by the industrial system - pollution, ecological imbalances, and harmful impacts of chemical additives on health - have become increasingly important, persistent, and visible.
Paul Wachtel and others have emphasized that increased material consumption has not led to social harmony or happiness. To the contrary, it has perhaps heightened a feeling of the emptiness of materialism. The developing countries that have tried to copy the industrialization development strategies of the Western countries have found that even after forty years of such policies, a meaningful development is still far away. In many cases, per capital income has not grown very much, but unemployment, poverty and income-inequality have grown tremendously. There are good reasons to question the very concept of development, as well as growth and related issues. Questioning economic development and growth has led reflective people to question the fundamental assumptions that underly all economics.
The participants in this section have asked themselves the following question: What would an economics based on the principles of Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Ba'hai, or any number of other faiths, look like? How would the policies that would follow from these economic theories differ from those of conventional economics? Would they necessarily deteriorate into fanaticism or fundamentalism if they were to be put into practice?
One of the most well-developed articulations of such an economics is to be found in Essays in Gandhian Economics, by Romesh Diwan and Mark Lutz (New Delhi: Gandhi Peace Foundation, 1985, available from TOES Books, Suite 3C, 777 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017; e-mail: cipany@igc.apc.org.
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