Stewardship

Economics does not have a good reputation when it comes to attempts at rethinking life.

Considered to deal with work, money and capital, it stands in contrast to everything that is felt to be ‘life’. Hegel and Marx spoke of the realm of necessity. Goethe spoke of the realm of worry, far from everything that constitutes the beauty of life. Michel Serres wrote that he only concerned himself with the economy when “in tears” and when he had “passed the time of loving”. In a German tradition that has much to do with slightly inflated expectations of culture and education, money is opposed to spirit, provision is opposed to spontaneity, and saving is opposed to generosity. This is not a good starting point for thinking about economics in the present context.

But what do we mean by the economy in this context? We think of the exploitation of labor by capitalists, of cheap consumer goods, of usurious interest rates, of unfair competition and, naturally, of money, which buys things without regard to their intrinsic value. Where the market rules, religion becomes the sale of indulgences, love becomes prostitution, and every office becomes corruptible. Court judgments have their price, as do apprenticeships. In many countries of the world, these conditions are just part and parcel of everyday life, but are not compatible with an empathic understanding of life that appreciates things in their own right. Those who truly live, so the widespread assumption goes, do nothing just for the sake of advantage. Those who truly live appreciate every situation for its own sake. Those who truly live do not distinguish between means and ends.

One cannot argue that these impressions of the economy are based entirely on a misconception. They are based on an observation of our surroundings and on understanding how business management – according to Christian as well as Marxist beliefs – is subjugating the Earth. We live with, and in, a production regime in which the future carries more weight than the present. And we rely on money that makes us assess any situation from perspectives that are alien to it. But while all this may be true, it is also not the whole picture. Because one important aspect is being overlooked. The future can only play a role where the present also carries weight. Money can only unfold its alien gaze when it is clear what is being alienated. The intrusion of the economy into production, into the future, into benefits and profits, is not only the mirror image of a life that appreciates the beauty of the moment, but it is also what makes such a life possible in the first place. There could be no production without the necessary means, no future without a present, no advantage without a keen eye for the situation, and no money without noticing the possibility of an increase in value. Business management not only displaces life, it also remains elementally dependent on it.

My proposal boils down to viewing business management in terms of stewardship. This shifts the perspective from seeking profit to caring for resources. The economy is the institutionally more or less fixed framework of an argument relating to the scarcity of goods. Stewardship, on the other hand, is the ongoing process of a constantly renewed search for how to deal with scarcities. This process is already full of life because it takes place here and now, as much as it worries about the future, and as much as it continues experiences from the past. The process of stewardship is in the present. It carries respect for things because they cannot be managed in any other way. It relies on partners who have a similar sense of what is at stake. Life itself is part of the same process because it not only consumes itself at every moment, but also rebuilds itself. It is born from the resources it provides for itself, and yet it knows that it is also dependent on resources that must be provided independently of its actions, from air to breathing, and from water to drinking. Life moves within these resources. It manages them whenever their consumption contributes to their renewal.

Moreover, talking about stewardship as a living process is linked to the question of what is being managed. The question is harder to answer than you might think. Capitalism, for example, as Werner Plumpe points out in his book Das kalte Herz. Kapitalismus: Die Geschichte einer andauernden Revolution (Berlin 2019), creates a market for mass consumption by providing “the poor” with both jobs and cheap consumer goods. Socialism is no different. In both cases, success depends on providing machines at great capital expense that yield high returns with economies of scale, including the ability to maintain a large number of suppliers. This type of economy, which is best described as a production regime strictly speaking, not only manages scarce goods but, above all, society – namely the willingness of people to accept dependent labor for secure consumption. One may suspect what kind of life this managing involves. The kind of dependencies that are deemed acceptable and the kind of consumption that is perceived as satisfactory have changed throughout history. While business management pretends that all this is a matter of mere technical possibilities, the perspective of stewardship enables us to focus on the quite fragile social balance that makes this process successful. 

In addition, there is a question that no one has asked more sharply than Talcott Parsons and Neil J. Smelser in their book Economy and Society: A Study in the Integration of Economic and Social Theory (London 1956): How is it possible to find a new workforce in each generation that is willing to accept a certain level of dependency, and how is it possible to educate children to see cheap consumption as a reward for doing without? The managing of society by stewardship extends to the furthest corners within families, requires trade unions to preserve a final self-determination right of labor, and presupposes the existence of banks who enable the managing of time itself by means of deposits and loans. It therefore comes as no surprise that Max Weber uncovered the most important preconditions of capitalism in his studies on the sociology of religion (Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, Tübingen 1920), and that it is thanks to Karl Marx (Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, Hamburg 1867) that we have come to the understanding that only a social theory of the economy can ever be a complete economic theory. Weber developed the concept of the behavioral premium, which explains the religiously motivated reasons why people engage in work and entrepreneurship. And Marx described the social conditions under which goods and services, but also labor and credit, initially take the form of commodities, thereby making them manageable.

It is worth recalling this classic literature because recently the perspective has shifted again. We have discovered that we not only steward society, but also the Earth. This is nothing new insofar as even the earliest reflections on agriculture were centered around the cultivation of fields, gardens, stables, meadows and forests. And it is worth noting that Xenophon summed it up perfectly in his book Oikonomikos (written between 390 and 355 B.C.) in which he stated that the management of a household begins and ends with encouraging not only the head of the household, but also the wife, children and servants, to practice self-restraint so that enough can be earned to make a reward possible later. This is the birth of sophrosyne, the art of self-control, without which antiquity would have been unthinkable and without which there would be no bourgeoisie. Moreover, this was based on the ancient Greeks’ understanding of culture, which was characterized by great respect for the Earth. Cultivating the Earth meant first and foremost caring for it, even worshiping it and, moreover, thanking the gods whose grace made the grain grow, the wine ripen and the livestock stay healthy. In the best ecological sense of the word, one did not subjugate the Earth, but submitted to the conditions under which the Earth could be cultivated.

This idea is being rediscovered in the environmental movements of our days. Stewardship of the Earth is not just a question of agriculture and fisheries, but a question of managing an entire planet. We know that we are consuming more Earths than we have available in renewable resources alone, not to mention non-renewable resources. We are living on a planet that is being managed by a society that is beginning to realize that it cannot go on like this. By introducing concepts of sustainability, we are trying to exit the fatal path of destruction. The way we manage has turned out to be blatant mismanagement.

That is why any attempt at rethinking life must start anew right here. The institutional framework of the economy, its markets and companies, its labor force and trade unions, its economic, monetary and financial policies, is not set in stone, but is the historical result of a transient approach to managing the Earth and society. We cannot be satisfied with the result. However, we must also appreciate how many billions of people can be nourished at a decent level. This would have been impossible before the industrialization of the production of goods, services and financial instruments. From t-shirts to fertilizer, from bank accounts to vaccines, we owe our lives to this industry. And yet we need to rethink it and act differently. We have to manage differently.

The stewardship perspective enables us to see both sides of the coin at the same time: the ecological threat to the Earth as well as the sophistication of a complex economy. Only when we realize how much intelligence has gone into managing society, despite all the deficiencies that still exist, such as inequality, famines and unemployment, can we think about what sustainable management of this Earth and our society could look like. Managing is a process in time. It takes place here and now because and insofar as it makes provisions for the future. It does not simply consist of some of us making profits and others barely eking out a living. Rather, it consists in an art of managing to provide the resources for the present in order to make provisions for a yet unknown future. It is important to think about how these resources – including the willingness to work, to engage in entrepreneurial activity, to consume, and to incur debt – can be kept sufficiently mobile so as not to allow powerful interests to emerge that could block them.