More on the "Neo-Calvinist rodeo": two cheers for the market

In my previous post I mentioned my own fairly minor role at this year's Kuyper conference as a respondent to Dylan Pahman's excellent book, The Kingdom of God and the Common Good. Pahman has now posted his own account of his role as an Orthodox Christian at the "Neo-Calvinist rodeo": Dispatch from KuyperCon. Here is Pahman:

We talked about our common ground of Scripture and catholicity. We debated the proper relation between the Law and the Gospel. We discussed the fraught history of traditionally Orthodox societies with autocracy, while nevertheless noting many important—and too often overlooked—exceptions. To that end Koyzis even expressed his hope that my book would be translated into Greek, Russian, and other traditionally Orthodox languages.

Pahman also quotes my former colleague John Bolt below:

Neo-Calvinism needs to engage the development of modern market economies in an appreciative and constructive manner, not only in criticism and ideologically in terms of idolatry and liberation. Michael Novak did that for Roman Catholic social teaching; Dylan has done it for Orthodoxy; I think it still needs to be done within the Neo-Calvinist tradition. 

In response I indicated that I find it difficult to summon up the same enthusiasm for the market as Bolt, but at the time I did not fully elaborate. I shall do so here.

I have no difficulty recognizing that market economies are superior to the command economies of the former communist countries. There is no doubt that the former has met people's material needs much better than the central planning embodied in Soviet-era five-year plans. No sane person would prefer to live in the communist German Democratic Republic rather than in the Federal Republic of Germany. This is why East German authorities had to build a wall: to prevent people leaving of their own free will for obviously greener pastures. The virtues of the fairly free market are by now evident to most everyone.

Following the Dutch philosopher Dirk Vollenhoven, Albert M. Wolters distinguishes between structure and direction in assessing the variety of phenomena of created reality, something informing my own analysis in Political Visions and Illusions and elsewhere. The market is an undeniable structure of creation, and we do well to receive it with gratitude. Those who would demonize the market or view commercial transactions as intrinsically demeaning or unworthy of the virtuous person risk deprecating an unavoidable created structure from which everyone potentially benefits.

However, this is no longer the 1980s. Ronald Reagan is out of the White House, and Margaret Thatcher long ago vacated No 10 Downing Street. Michael Novak has passed on to his reward. And communism is largely a thing of the past, except for a few holdouts. The market has triumphed on a global scale, with chronic poverty rates now lower than at any time in history. For this we can be thankful.

Nevertheless, the market is just the market, no more and no less. It has a limited and legitimate place in life. My lack of enthusiasm is not for the market as such but for those, primarily of a libertarian bent, who would extend the market principle into spheres of life where it clearly does not belong. Not everything can be made into a commodity with a monetary value. Even those phenomena that can be assigned a monetary price ought not to be reduced to that price, as if it is determinative of its full value to society. 

Moreover, among those in the grip of liberal ideology, there is a tendency to reduce a variety of relationships, including basic institutional communities, to exchange relationships—to mere partnerships amongst self-interested individuals. This has been applied to the state for centuries, and it is now being applied to marriage and other institutions in our own day. In other words, the triumph of the market has brought with it a comparable victory of a market ideology over many of its rivals.

Discerning structure and direction requires spiritual discernment. We should be capable of rejecting the market ideology while affirming a modest place for the market itself. I believe that Pahman has effectively achieved this in his new book.