The –onomy of the oikos
–onomy is, of course, from nomos – which, as much as it is law, is custom. Astronomy is thus the observation of the customary behaviour of the heavenly bodies. It became a regular science with Isaac Newton and others who expressed that customary behaviour in terms of the mathematical relations between mass, length and time, and expressed a great many other matters in those terms as well. So far so good. Or not, as the case may be.
But it is another matter when we come to another –onomy, the nomos of the oikos–household and family, or economics. As a nomos it simply describes customary behaviour. If it is to graduate to a science, it must somehow give an account, a much more detailed account and perhaps even explanation, for the observed behaviour. Accounting for bodies governed by mass, length and time is one thing, and famously Newton was able to deal with the two-body problem, but three or more become immensely more complex.
In economics we are first and foremost dealing with people, and they cannot be reduced to mass, length and time. They are rich and poor, generous and miserly, altruistic, honest, deceptive, intelligent, dumb, skilled, clumsy, artistic, scientific, logical, poetic, and a range of other qualities that bewilder one by their variety and prove impossible of scientific treatment.
Economics thus made some gross simplifications. Under the influence of Ayn Rand, James Buchanan and their ilk, they decided to simplify the picture thus: humans are selfish, greedy and regard the rest of humanity as – if not their enemies – ‘others’ to be competed against and outwitted, if possible. Their leading thinkers were the mathematicians who were the theoreticians of game theory, John von Neumann and John Nash, and the game in question poker.
So convincing was the theory to the architects of the Cold War that they predicated their strategy on its basis. The problem was that John Nash underwent a psychotic breakdown, and would later admit that his work on game theory was shot through with his madness. All well and good, exact that it isn’t, because game theory and the psychosis it represents are the unquestioned underpinning of the nomos of the oikos.
The unquestioned assumptions of game theorists would transform society into precisely that which they had assumed: aggregates of self-seekers, nowhere more fully expressed than in the lunacy of the ‘markets’. Another John, John Carpenter, made an iconic film about them called They Live, although it could equally be about the cheerleaders of genocide and many other repugnant phenomena. ‘They’ are an alien life-form that has taken over the planet, a demonic force that pretends to be human. But they have one fatal weakness: once they are seen they are exposed and done for. The film uses the device of special types of spectacles that reveal them, but the truth is that it needs nothing so clever as that, nothing more than a seeing heart, which everyone has, whether or not they use it, and people choose either way.