Socrates: Let me suggest some points that attempt pull all this together. Let's go back to the point that there is something about the international economy that is at the bottom of what is passing as a moral crisis. The question that you raised on the outset is not simply a moral crisis, but a moral crisis in the very fabric of society. That is what lead us in the direction, it seems to me, of talking about institutions. And then we started talking about government. But what of the other institutions? What about the market institutions?

I am old enough to have two children who are now in their 40s, part of the protest movements of the 1970's that held the view of institutions that they were morally illegitimate, that they were oppressive as in a jail.

Coming from my generation, I felt such cynicism was dangerous; it is fixed in its style and so uneducable because you trash the noble as well as the trivial and reduce everything to rubble. And, so I thought it would be good for her to go to a school where she would be with teachers that she could respect and in an institution that she could respect and so forth, so she went to a fine traditional values school, a private school that gavedirection for her frustrations. And everything turned out all right.

So, what do I see now? My daughter now said to me the other day, and I thought it was very interesting; she said, Dad, in your day, institutions were permanent and people felt temporary. And, so a person could latch onto some institution where he or she would find the meaning of life through education, job, career, income etc..

But, she said to me, I think in my generation it is not simply the individuals who are temporary, it is the institutions themselves that are temporary. Look at business where most people found careers and a sense of security. The takeovers of the 80's and the massive job layoffs has compounded the anxiety, in the sense of precariousness of the individual, because the institution itself has no permanence to it.

This is a crisis of faith in the institutions, not just the government institutions but the market institutions, not trusting them to provide a secure place to work.

Where in the 60's it was the question of the moral legitimacy of the institutions; in the 90's it is simply the utter precariousness of institutional life.

And yet, these people in thir 40's are also trapped in a sense within it, not fully clear how to get out or where you could go if you did.

Parmenides: Trapped, how is this being trapped?

Socrates: You can quibble with the metaphor "trapped", that it may say something or it might not. But if you are on a sinking ship, you are effectively trapped, you can either jump into the briny deep or you can hope that some other leaky vessel will pick you up.

Gorgias: Let me give a specific example of this feeling of being trapped. The executive who finally spoke against the tobacco companies. He couldn't afford to simply quit the tobacco business. One of his children has a serious chronic medical condition. His medical costs will be major. We all know the health care system; it's job based. That creates the lack of sense in the ability to move and in his case to speak out honestly. If you had the social safety net in the form that it ought to take with respect to a fundamental good like health care, you would feel somewhat more freedom to move in the market place world. But if you owe everything to your market place position, and it is precarious and, at the same time, it does not allow you the kind of freedom to move, then you get fear and despair.

Plato: Then is it simply an economic precariousness and the feeling of being trapped that makes one feel like she is in a crisis? Shouldn't we ask in what ways this is a moral crisis?

Gorgias: I was getting to that. I find it very interesting that where in the 60's it was anger and rebellion now I see a lot more fear.

Plato: Without the moral evaluation of the institution?

Gorgias: Yes, and that is the point. The language is not moral rejection and repudiation. There is the language of fear and despair, of being trapped and no access to groups that are organizing to express

Plato: Now, you say he doesn't feel access to any conversation or movement which could help him take stock of what is happening to a large group because of the changes in the international economy?

Gorgias: No, I think that is part of the difficulty. He has, of late, gone to church for the first time. He originally rejected the church. But of a larger movement there is no evidence of a gathering of the disaffected or of any maoral critique on which a gathering might be based.

The Vietnam generation, however outrageous the language and all the rest, they felt part of a movement, with a moral basis of sorts. That is totally absent in the current environment. Now, that may be partly function of age. One must focus on the small world that you end up directly responsible for, that's where the civic virtue tends to fade and all those personal values tend to become very important.

Socrates: The question I wanted to put is should there be a radical moral evaluation of the market institutions just as there has been of government institutions? The market institutions seem to be at the bottom much of the fear and despair among many in the younger generation -- who, by the way, are the yuppies that everyone who is older assumes to be doing so well? Clearly not my children, although their income would suggest otherwise it is hard to imagine a less secure environment.

And instead of market institutions, it is the government that is primarily being criticized.

Gorgias: You get a lot of outrage expressed towards politicians and government. It is the despised profession in our world, American vocation in the 20th century is predominately political and we have contempt for politics as a vocation.

But, companion to that is a surprising tolerance for the cruelties of the marketplace. I mean that seems to me is the real magic of the marketplace - that it is not held responsible for it's cruelties. If the government closes up an Army base, people immediately focus. But, if it is a layoffs by a corporation. There may be anger at the companies that move out, but it vanishes. It doesn't have to stay around the way a politician does to face the question of re-election.

Parmenides: And you might argue that the resentment and bitterness registered in the 1994 Congressional election was that kind of frustration with the directions of the financial and international marketplace. The voters couldn't very easily target the partial perpetrators in the economic order so they displaced their frustration and focused on the political order.

Gorgias: The whole political order becomes a scapegoat.

Parmenides: Yes, a scapegoat. I do think that this goes a long way in terms of explaining why this onslaught of criticism of the political order.

Socrates: It is hard to focus this criticism with regard to the marketplace. Although Pat Buchanan seemed to be changing this a little with his attacks on Wall Street. He doesn't have any love lost for government either, of course.

Gorgias: The book, Jihad versus MacWorld, makes quite plain how the political institutions end up taking their lumps for what is going on in the markets. The book's point is that economic organizations, the firms and so on, simply have no responsibility for the things like full employment and unequal distribution that the states have to keep worrying about. The company can simply take off. If there is a better market to go to, the corporation doesn't have to care a hoot about those questions. That creates an enormous pressure on local governments in the United States and all around the world for that matter to replace the jobs and keep the social services flowing.

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