An excursion from the hills of Kentucky to a famous German play yields a feminist take on the economic importance (and vulnerability of) moral commitments.
A recent Wall Street Journal article describes a mother and daughter in rural Kentucky who turned down a $26 million offer to buy their farmland in order to build a data center. The women saw the planned construction as a blight and told the developer to go kick rocks. They were not just expressing distrust of the buyers. They were expressing concern for an environment with intrinsic value for themselves, their neighbors and for society as a whole.
Communities across the country are fighting the construction of AI data centers for good reasons: land and water are diverted to infrastructure whose benefits accrue somewhere else. Residents are told that their objections are obstacles to a progress that will supposedly benefit everyone. Little institutional machinery is available to them beyond local zoning fights and public protest. Gallup polling in 2026 found that seven in ten Americans oppose having a data center built in their own area; tracking by groups such as Data Center Watch counts about $130 billion in projects blocked or delayed in the first quarter of 2026 by exactly this kind of local resistance.
Pondering this, I am strangely reminded of my high school German teacher recounting Goethe’s Faust, the story of a man striving so hard to attain the deepest of knowledge and the grandest of worldly joys that he makes a wager with the devil. He bets his soul that he can never be fully satisfied, challenging the devil to give him everything he asks for. Toward the end of the story, Faust’s real estate development is threatened by an elderly couple who refuse to sell their property. The devil steps in to burn their house down with them inside. Faust is horrified. While it’s not what he intended, he enjoys the benefit.
The story of Faust as modern developer was a central theme in Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air, published in 1982. Marxist historian Perry Anderson challenged Berman in 1984, arguing that his timeless notion of “development” obscured the specific dynamics of capitalism. In my reading, the morality tale has a much longer history.
Goethe began writing Faust about the same time that Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, his paean to individual self-interest as a driver of economic growth. Both writers were eager to believe that good intentions would prevail. In Goethe’s account, God allows the Devil to tempt Faust into sin on the grounds that a good striver, even if prone to error, will seek the right path. Similarly, Smith argued in his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, that morality will often curb the temptation to selfish or destructive behavior. Christian doctrine expresses confidence in redemption. Some corruption is inevitable, but God’s judgment and love will countervail human failure.
Modern social science leans in a more skeptical direction, treating morality as a product of laws, norms and culture, a fragile institutional construction that is both necessary and susceptible to failure. Self-identified “humanists” have emphasized this construction for a long time, and in the U.S. of the 1930s, they sounded a lot like socialists. The fourteenth affirmation of the Humanist Manifesto reads as follows:
The humanists are firmly convinced that existing acquisitive and profit-motivated society has shown itself to be inadequate and that a radical change in methods, controls, and motives must be instituted. A socialized and cooperative economic order must be established to the end that the equitable distribution of the means of life be possible.
In subsequent years, the word socialist began fading from humanist discourse, a reflexive response to Soviet authoritarianism. Likewise, the word humanist began fading from socialist discourse, tainted by utopian sentiment. Times have changed. Many democratic socialists like me hug the humanist perspective. Much of what we have to say concerns the equitable distribution of the “means of life” rather than ownership of the “means of production.” More broadly, we reject the market-centric terms of debate in which the means of life connotes only access to market income and the means of production connotes only corporate capital. Our means are bigger, encompassing unpaid work, unpriced goods, and the sustainability of our natural and social environments.
These are public, rather than private goods, and their effective management requires cooperation. And cooperation is bolstered by concern for others, sometimes termed altruism or “pro-social preferences” and often implied by the word “care.” Many evolutionary biologists today, including David Sloan Wilson, describe in-group altruism as a contributor to teamwork that increases the chances of group success. Sadly, that success can include predation on (or exploitation of) those outside the group. So-called “parochial altruism” is hardly a public good in the larger meaning of the word.
Some social scientists, including James Coleman, Francis Fukuyama, and Robert Putnam have described generalized trust as a form of social capital that lowers the costs of exchange. Since its benefits often extend beyond those who created it, trust qualifies as a public good. But trust as a concept is more informational than motivational. While it’s obviously helpful to know if someone will do what they say they will do, not all cooperation is based on reciprocal exchange; much of it takes the form of gifts and transfers whose beneficiaries can’t be individually identified. People alive today can’t expect payback from those yet to be born. Concern for future generations—as distinct from trust in them—is an important motive for their protection.
Also, while some exchanges are transparent, in the sense that each party knows exactly what they are getting, others have elements of opacity and uncertainty. True reciprocity may require empathy as well as purely instrumental calculation. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is a far more powerful injunction than “Be trustworthy–don’t lie and cheat.” “Love thy neighbor as thyself” reaches even further, insisting that one should try to identify the needs of others by imagining oneself in their position. Whether or not these principles are taken to be God-given or human-made, they help coordinate peaceful social interaction. The strength of commitments to the well-being of others has economic consequences.
Yet the strength of such commitments may also be shaped by economic forces and social institutions. The relatively few economists and economic historians who worry out loud about the weakening of concern for others tend to blame it on the Faustian ambition associated with capitalist development. In The Great Transformation, published in 1944, Karl Polanyi argues that the growth of markets wears down the cooperative social fabric of traditional society. In Social Limits to Growth, published in 1976, Fred Hirsch argues that capitalism is depleting a moral legacy inherited from pre-market institutions. In The Moral Economy, published in 2016, Samuel Bowles explains how and why market dynamics can crowd out intrinsic motivation.
All three make a good case for worrying about the durability of concern for others in a global capitalist system that often extols greed-is-good thinking. They implicitly support the claim that morality itself is a vulnerable public good. But its vulnerability can’t be blamed on capitalist development alone. The historical record reveals pervasive patterns of military conquest, appropriation, and exploitation in many precapitalist societies, alongside patriarchal institutions that subordinated many women in many places for many centuries. As I explain in The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems, few pre-market societies fit the description of a golden age of cooperative mutual aid. We need to learn as much as we can from those that seem to have come close, but we cannot simply reclaim some lost moral legacy.
Goethe’s Faust offers a lesson that precedes the quarrel over real estate. Faust’s first moral violation in the play is his seduction, impregnation and abandonment of Gretchen, his young, defenseless lover. His actions lead to the death of her mother and brother; Gretchen herself, driven to desperation, drowns her newborn, is arrested and sent to prison. She accepts guilt and judgment when she refuses an offer of rescue from Faust and the devil. At the end of the play she reappears as an emblem of the Eternal Feminine whose boundless love draws Faust upward into Heaven despite his sins. Faust himself never explicitly repents.
Feminist theory has something to say about patriarchal institutions that undermine concern for others, a theme I’ll continue to explore in future posts.