the not-so-dismal science

what the etymology of economics says about the family

One of my favorite rhetorical techniques is when speakers get to the bottom of an idea through etymology. At a wedding I attended over the weekend, the priest explained the meaning of “sincerity.” During the Renaissance, Spanish sculptors who made mistakes while carving expensive marble often patched their flaws with “cera,” wax. A statue that had no flaws and required no patching was hailed as a sculpture “sine cera” — a sculpture "without wax.” The phrase eventually came to mean anything honest or true.

Sine cera. Sincerity.

The other morning, I was reading the transcript of Erika Bachiochi’s incisive remarks for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s American Economic Forum, when it struck me that economics, a field that historically has dealt heavily in abstraction, could use this kind of clarity. The word "economy" is derived from the ancient Greek word oikonomos: οἰκο- “house” and -νόμος “rule, law.” In short, the word once meant "household management."

Bachiochi writes:

That our economics and politics will reap the “dividends” of “investing” in social “capital” gives the impression that human sociality is merely instrumental to econometric or democratic ends. ... But that framing doesn’t get human nature quite right, it seems to me. And the question of nature is an essential starting place for conservatives; for though we certainly aren’t looking, as progressives are, to create out of whole cloth the ideal regime, we do want to orient our politics and economics toward the real goods of human flourishing …

Too often, policymakers think in terms of the individual, the market, and the state. And even if “mediating” institutions are remembered, as with [Robert] Putnam, it’s not the work of nurture and care in the family that is given pride of place in our political imagination; no, that work, that work of the “private sphere,” has been far too often taken for granted. But if human beings really are to flourish, then … the health of our families where infants are nurtured — and both children and their parents are formed — must be at the very center of our politics and economics.

I think the excessive abstraction in modern political discourse to which she refers comes from, but also reinforces and enables, a failure to remember first things.

Part of it is natural. The bitterly ironic heartbreak of mothers everywhere is that the places and people in life we most easily take for granted are also the formative ones. In order to be formed in a space by another person, in a certain sense, the space and the person must be taken for granted. It is the nature of a foundation to support without credit, as a matter of course—to provide the stability and permanence that make higher-minded activities possible. And it works the other way around, often enough: children of disorder and disorganization suffer arrested development, and suffer again by not being able to a point to a reason why. Our formative years become the air we breathe.

Happening on the macro and micro levels, you could call this tendency toward abstraction a spirit of the age. Bachiochi is a legal scholar, and rightfully insists we shift our political orientation to remember first things—most importantly, the family. But that abstractive tendency is reflected in many other areas of life. And in all its forms and technologies (offshoring, globalization, automation, the internet) abstraction has the same, flattening effect on the memory. We forget how things are made from the ground up.

My husband works in utilities. He describes the aging boomers remaining in the industry as living encyclopedias—the last people on earth who know how the IRL technologies really work. Millenials learned process from the perspective of pushing a button on their laptop. But our grandfathers built the actual infrastructure. And our grandfathers are dying.

Abstraction is, among other things, a prioritization of process over people. Forgetting how things function is directly downstream of forgetting the people who make things work. In that same industry, the old white guys who quietly do the work of maintaining pipelines have been slowly edged out of positions of authority and influence, partially because of their identity (which is another story), but often enough because of their resistance to the technological enclosure itself. We forget the mundane exercises and habits that form good things when we forget people, often people who come short of cutting edge technological literacy: babies, the elderly, moms displaced from the workforce, etcetera.

Homo economicus does not emerge ex nihilo as a rational being. He was a child who sprang from a womb and was formed by a family. In the words of Katrine Marcal, “Adam Smith got his dinner because his mother made sure it was on the table every evening.” The home is the first place where we learn to be human. It is also a place where memories are formed, stored, and recalled. I think these have something to do with one another.

One cannot demand gratitude from children for the things they do not yet understand. But just as a parent’s duty is to support their children until they understand, it is an adult child’s duty to remember his father and mother.

Despite the promise (sometimes fulfilled) of sublime clarity, unbounded abstraction ultimately confuses us about who we are. Bachiochi implores conservatives to remember the mothers à la Abigail Adams. If conservatives cannot be motivated by what may immediately resonate as a feminist position, maybe we should remember that patriotism itself springs from the same piety that impels adherence to the fifth commandment.