Will the recession change us?

This was the question asked a few days ago by the Newsweek columnist, Julia Baird. The answer was implicit in the very title chosen by the editors for the article: ‘Seeking a moral compass.’

Now, where can we find a moral compass?

Ms. Baird indicated two deposits of truth, one credible, the other not at all. The former was the complex teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, especially those against the two social sins of wealth without work and commerce without morality. Clearly, nothing can be opposed to the Gandhi-derived indictment of aberrations like ‘debt-driven consumer spending’ and ‘channelling profits toward only those already on the top of the heap’. Who would lament that, according to Baird, ‘there is a hunger for change away from the empty and destructive maxims like ‘Greed is good’?

Instead, Ms. Baird’s hope that a moral compass can be found ‘in the inaugural address of Franklin D. Roosevelt’ is utterly fallacious. We remember that FDR slammed the practices of unscrupulous money-changers, and promised that ‘we may now restore the temple of our civilization to the ancient truths.’ FDR was no money-changer (although he possessed much money as did his lieutenants, like Bernard Baruch, W. Averell Harriman, Edward Stettinius and other financiers), but he was certainly  unscrupulous. In common with all master politicians of the world he was so good at guile as to win his third term, in 1940, by assuring fathers and mothers of America that their sons would not be sent to fight foreign wars.

In forcing World War II on his reluctant country, he coldly condemned to die a few million human beings (mostly non-Americans), so that the plutocratic order of the world would be upheld against its challengers, however wrong the latter may have been. FDR certainly annihilated bloodthirsty Adolf Hitler, but saved from defeat and imposed to many nations the dictator Stalin, who was no better than the Fuehrer. One day after Roosevelt died, Harry Truman, his successor, turned upside down the philo-Soviet policy of the US and the Cold War began. The nation totally disavowed the Machiavellian Commander in Chief, who trusted the USSR as a champion of freedom. The lofty oaths of the Roosevelt inaugural address can be no source of hope.

Such source we must find in ourselves, in our own ability to go back to values that are better that a greed that is now overpowering. Earning lots of money is not paramount. Reverting to the simple life is. The $19 cell phone I bought a few days ago is as good to make and receive simple calls as a $900 one. The vast additional capability offered by the latter is superfluous in practice to most people. The same is true for large houses, expensive cars, costly clothes, fat incomes. The Great Recession is hard to some segments of our rich societies. But its by-product, a simpler life, will be godsend. Ms. Baird is right, despite being a believer in FDR.

Massimo Calderazzi is member of the Société Européenne de Culture, to which many eminent
scholars and a few Nobel prizewinners belong.