The “new economics” of John Maynard Keynes and his legions of
academic acolytes was sold to the world on the basis of being a
scientific advance over the outmoded dogma of classical economics.
Keynes even titled his magnum opus The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in order to be reminiscent of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.
by Jerry Bowyer
As Forbes columnist Paul Johnson points out in the beginning of Modern Times,
Einstein’s scientific discoveries were widely popular and various
ideological movements attempted to tap into that popularity, portraying
themselves as being like Einstein, heroically following the empirical
evidence into the future, leaving superstition and primitive theory
behind.
The problem, as Johnson also points out, is that the new ideologies
were nothing like Einstein’s theory: They were based on pseudo-science;
they ignored, or even suppressed, contrary empirical evidence; and
Einstein’s well-grounded theory that space was relative in no way
vindicated fads that said truth, reason, foundational principles or
morality were likewise negative.
The great ideologues of the Victorian era, Marx and Freud, saw all
human action as either disguised economic self-interest (Marx) or
sublimated incestuous sexual desire (Freud and…ick!). Keynes chose
Freud, mostly, and saw economies as essentially being driven by
unconscious, pre-human impulses (animal spirits).
None of the three men, however, were what they represented themselves
as being: scientists ignoring outdated modes of philosophical
reasoning, following the evidence wherever it might lead. Keynes, as
Marx before him, chose his foundational worldview. He didn’t induce it
from the data, nor deduce according to the laws of logic, he adduced it. He chose the worldview which allowed him to be the kind of man he wanted to be.
Much has been made about Keynes’ homosexuality by both admirers and
detractors. The admirers held that his androgynous complexity allowed
him to tap into a masculine rationality and simultaneously a feminine
creativity. Some of his detractors, for example on the religious right,
used his lifestyle as a kind of ad hominum attack, arguing thus:
A more nuanced version of this argument has been made by other
critics — for example the supply-side pioneer Lewis Lehrman, who said,
“I have five children. I have a vision of the future. Keynes had no
children and no interest in getting involved in any relationship which
might make possible their procreation. He was inherently short-run in
his viewpoint.” Some Austrian economists have made the same argument.
But I think that there is a bigger issue here than
guilt-by-sexual-association or even the ways in which marriage and
family connect us with the future. Keynes’ sexual ethic was just a small
part of an overall life orientation.
He and his fellow members of the Cambridge Apostles were firmly
committed to an agenda of overthrowing every element of the Victorian
society from which they had sprung. The rejection of thrift, or of any
economic principles at all were of a piece with the rejection of any
system of objective truth, any objective moral code, any form of theism
and old-fashioned notions about standing up to the Germans, whether
under the Kaiser or later under the Führer. In other words, the whole
societal order was to be overturned.
G.E. Moore attacked traditional philosophy and theology, Lyton
Strachey’s job was to use literature to debunk Victorian principles of
self-restraint, and Keynes was to demolish classical economics, sound
money and the virtue of thrift. The sex was only a part of it, and
probably a subordinate part of it as well.
The apostles were committed to an ideology of the superiority of male
intimacy over male/female intimacy not because they were born gay (many
of them lapsed into heterosexuality once they were away from the club,
some members having feigned homosexuality in order to be included in the
group,) but because they saw all of Victorian society, which they
hated, as a coherent whole. The salient point here is that they were not
men who spent their professional lives following the evidence wherever
it led: They had decided where it was all going to lead by their
sophomore year of college! They chose the men they would be early in
life and went about justifying that decision for the rest of their
lives.
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