Unquoting the Markets
Dr. Jacqueline Hidalgo reads ‘economic scripture’
Photo: Charles Rondeau
Mis abuela/o/xs’ lives are worth more than mine.
This past week, as I have shifted gears-- because I am privileged enough to work from home and still get paid--I have realized how much I owe mis antepasadx/o/as: they taught me to cook beans in large quantities (which mi papá now calls apocalipsis frijoles); they taught me how to sew (and I tried to volunteer to sew masks for the local hospital, but I don’t sew well enough -- sorry, Mom); and they taught me that adaptation is survival.
They shared wisdom with me from lifeworlds I had never witnessed. And so it is beyond stupid and shortsighted to me that Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick would suggest that grandparents are willing to die so that the US economy survives, “for keeping the America that all America loves” (does all América really love this economy?)
Yet, even writing this, I am aware of how much I cannot talk about human lives without economic metaphors--that lives are “worthy” or have “value,” that I “owe” my ancestors. As Jorge Juan Rodríguez V has pointed out on Open Plaza (and as so many scholars elsewhere have also written about), an apocalypse is a revelation. It is fundamentally a structure of knowledge, a way of revealing that which had been hidden. Apocalypse seeks truth amid a crisis of meaning, and public-health responses to COVID-19 have pushed the US economy to just such a moment of crisis.
Economics as religion
This economic apocalypse refocuses our attention on convictions our lawmakers have been trying to obscure. The US economy is a religion that President Donald J. Trump, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Lt. Gov. Patrick, The Wall Street Journal, and others devote themselves to. Their fantasy that the economy’s future should look like the economy’s past, that the elders should be sacrificed for the young, sounds like a page straight out of Lee Edelman's No Future, which describes the social violence that accompanies our cultural worship of children (as an ideal; José Esteban Muñoz argues in Cruising Utopia that real flesh-and-blood children are generally social sacrifices for the “good” of society) and our fantasies of a future made whole and innocent.
As Carmen Nanko-Fernández reminded me, our politicians’ devotion is to Moloch, a god demanding child sacrifice, and to Mammon, a god of wealth, a stand-in for money.
We, of course, are not the first to draw connections between economics and religion. Contrary to the warning of serving two masters (see Matthew 6:24 or Luke 16:13), Trump, Patrick, and others believe they can juggle multiple devotions, serving both God and Mammon.
“ I am aware of how much I cannot talk about human lives without economic metaphors”
On Sunday, March 22, when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi negotiated with Mnuchin, good Catholic that she is, Pelosi quoted Pope Francis and remarked how world leaders had to assume the responsibility of caring for the people. "While you are quoting the Pope," Mnuchin retorted, "I am going to quote the markets." Pelosi relayed her surprise, since she had expected him to turn to the Old Testament.
Now I would like to read Mnuchin’s rejoinder to Pelosi as him pointing out that her Catholic faith should not be a touchstone in making governance choices for a religiously diverse nation (since I would agree with that perspective, no matter how much I appreciate the words of Papa Francisco). Yet in the context of a Trump administration bent on restarting an economy at the potential cost of millions of human lives, Mnuchin’s statement reads quite differently. Pelosi likely brought up the Old Testament because Mnuchin’s family is Jewish, and she expected that he would speak from the wells of his own religious values (assuming that religious values are scriptural is a problem all its own and best saved for another blog post). He rebutted Pelosi’s religious authority by turning to the markets as if they were scripture--a suprahuman authority making demands of us mere mortals.
Of course, scripture is not strictly suprahuman, a fact that should be obvious regardless of your views on divine inspiration. People wrote scriptures and people interpret scriptures. Religions depend on the people who practice them.
So too does the economy.
The hermeneutics of economics
My Williams colleague, economist Sarah Jacobson, argues that “the economy is people” and that we should see markets as “a reflection of one aspect of human wellbeing.” If millions of people die, the economy would decline because it reflects human demise. Instead of human sacrifice, we can take other measures to address human and economic well-being (because economic well-being is just shorthand for human well-being).
Still, the economy can be likened to Christianity in the sense that, while some Christian communities appeal to the suprahuman authority of scripture, others turn to their scriptures as a mirror for human experience and struggle.
The economic apocalypse is a crisis that transforms the meanings we see. Long before COVID-19, some lives were consistently valued as worth more than others. People have already been dying because of certain fundamentalist visions of the market; people have died without proper health insurance; people have died of hunger; people have died from illnesses caused by overwork and by lack of access to good food and potable water; people have died from environmental risks they should’ve never borne; people have died trying to cross the border-- the random sacrifice that COVID-19 is exacting, though, should certainly frighten all of us, not just the elders.
Religions have too often been used to justify choosing social systems over human life. While an apocalypse reflects a crisis in meaning, we can also use it as an opportunity to rethink the meaning-making practices of our economy. If we haven’t questioned enough what sort of well-being these markets reflect, maybe more of us will now question a market that supposedly tells us to sacrifice our loved ones. Perhaps We the People can write new economic scriptures.
I am, of course, not the only person who thinks my elders’ lives are worth more than this particular social system. Twitter responded with #NotDying4WallStreet. Mis antepasada/o/xs survived many social systems that undervalued their lives. I hope that their wisdom can outlast a social system that articulates human life only in terms of economic worth.
