Up to this point I have avoided tackling head-on the question of whether old banking as described in these conversations was a practice in MacIntyre’s specialised sense of the term (S5.5). There have been good reasons for deferring the issue. Similar questions about other occupations, for instance teaching (Dunne, 2003) or managerial work (Beabout, 2012), have attracted heated debate, and it is not always clear what their practical outcome is. If traditional bankers think they were engaged in a practice, and they talk and act like they were engaged in a practice, then it is perhaps incumbent on the theorist not only to have very clear theoretical reasons why that claim should be rejected but also to have some good practical reasons, for instance: Does denying old banking as a practice explain anything significant regarding its history or help to
understand its current state or possible futures? This section is an attempt to show that there is much to be gained by accepting that the practice-like talk of these bankers is indeed talk of a practice, and little to be gained by denying it. Once this discussion is in place, we can turn to the question of how practice and tradition relate to one another.
That the narratives of traditional bankers concern something practice-like should by now require no further argument, only a quick summary of the way in which such practice-like talk has already emerged in the findings of this research. Old banking was coherent, complex and cooperative in the sense that it required an identifiable group to develop and maintain a well-defined set of complex skills and knowledge, which worked together to meet similarly well-defined practical objectives such as the safe keeping of depositors’ savings and the provision of good advice. Those who speak on its behalf are able to explain the goods of the practice, its standards of excellence and the way in which those standards were developed and pursued. They are able to articulate the school-like characteristics of their profession, the way that apprentices were socialised into that way of life, learning those standards of excellence which gave the profession its identity. Most persuasively, these traditional bankers are able to articulate the virtues of their profession. They even articulate them in
Aristotelian ways, if in their own language, with clear understandings of the operation of justice and practical wisdom in traditional banking.
Denying the practice
What good reasons then might there be for driving a wedge between this practice-like talk and the idea that old banking really was a practice? One possible reason might suggest itself because MacIntyre himself is hostile to capitalism and to the finance industry at large (MacIntyre, 1994b). Some, in a spirit of solidarity with MacIntyre, might find the idea of banking as a practice somehow abhorrent. This line of thinking is problematic in two ways.
First it raises the question of MacIntyre’s reluctance in After Virtue to assert that there could be no such thing as an evil practice33. To reject banking as a practice on the basis that it is evil entails some severe judgements about the participants to these conversations, including denying that the internal goods which they describe really are goods. As MacIntyre (2007, p.196) puts it: ‘my thesis has empirical content in another way; it does entail that without the virtues there could be a recognition only of what I have called external goods and not at all of internal goods in the context of practices’.
Or, putting it another way, if we find good evidence of an appreciation of internal goods, then we have evidence also of the operation of the virtues.
Second, the kind of activities which MacIntyre berates in the financial sector at large are also the kind of activities which these traditional bankers berate. Both sides are appalled by the greed, the lack of truthfulness and the manipulation of others that characterise advanced capitalism in general and new banking in particular (MacIntyre, 1994b) (S4.4, C3: 55, C6: 124, C6: 127). We therefore need to be wary of lumping together the kind of traditional service provision described by these bankers with casino banking and programmes of mis-selling.
More technical reasons could be brought forward for denying that traditional Scottish banking was a practice. Perhaps it could be shown that it was really a pseudo-practice because, for instance, it lacked coherence. To argue each of these kinds of possible objection (that old banking was insufficiently coherent, insufficiently cooperative or complex and so on) would be an unhelpful detour here, and I cannot counter a
33 The question of whether a practice can be evil (MacIntyre, 2007) has caused some discussion, and Lutz (2004 and 2012) thinks that there are no such things as evil practices, partly because ‘evil pseudo-practices cannot have internal goods’. Part of the problem here is in making a judgement that there are no internal goods to an activity over against the views of those involved in the activity. MacIntyre refutes the idea that money management can be a practice (MacIntyre, 1994b), but I argue here for an understanding of traditional banking in Scotland as a distinct activity from the kind of money management to which MacIntyre refers.
There does not seem to be a similar question surrounding traditions. To take an extreme example, a religious tradition involving human sacrifice may be a bad tradition, but a tradition
potentially long list of arguments not yet made, but there is nevertheless an underlying objection to a broad feature of such arguments. All such arguments for old banking as a pseudo-practice rely on a denial of the common language claims of traditional
bankers that they were part of a practice, and so the wedge that must be driven will be either between their claims and their understanding of what they are claiming, or between their claims and reality.
These traditional bankers claim in their own term of profession34 (van de Ven, 2011) to have been part of a practice by articulating the practice-like features of old banking in detail and as a whole. One means of driving the wedge would be to argue that, when they are claiming standards of excellence and articulating these in terms of a coherent set of technical skills and virtues, they do not fully understand the nature of their claims: perhaps the goods that they claim or the coherence that they claim are not properly goods or not properly coherence. Such an argument is, I think, inherently implausible if we take seriously MacIntyre’s idea that practical reasoning is indeed practice based, because such a notion of practical reasoning automatically privileges the practitioner. If a group of lifelong turnip planters35 were to be found who could articulate their way of life as a practice, with all its complexity and its ranking of goods, its internal standards of excellence and arduous apprenticeships, then MacIntyre himself might need to recant his judgement of turnip planting as a non-practice, for the very good reason that those who are inside the practice are in a position to understand its goods in the way that those who are outside it are not. This is not to say that
contestation of those goods is not possible from the perspective of some other practice or some other tradition, but it does imply that for an outsider to deny the claims of insiders that they are participating in a practice at all requires an appeal to the ways of life of those same insiders; their claims must be in some way self-negating.
The second place to drive a wedge is between their claims and reality. The argument would be that these people talk a good talk - a practice-like talk - but the reality of their
34 Their preferred usage is the word profession. When the word practice is used explicitly, this is in the context of the matrix management structures of new banking (C9: 168), and is in fact symptomatic of the fragmentation of the practice in a MacIntyrean sense.
35 ‘Planting turnips is not a practice; farming is’ (MacIntyre, 2007, p.187). The point of this and other examples in the same passage is that turnip planting is a relatively simple component of a complex practice. Whilst recognising that there are limits to the concept of a practice, I think claims that this or that activity is in or out of the category should be approached with caution.
Within the overall practice of farming, shepherding would seem to be quite acceptable as a practice, and if shepherding, then so swineherding. If swineherding, then also the raising and keeping of chickens and so on. My argument is just that outsiders need to be careful how they draw such lines contra the claims of insiders.
own history was quite different: they didn’t really do the things they said they did, and the internal standards of excellence that they claim to have observed are a
self-justifying fiction. This argument is a substantive one and needs to be taken seriously: it could indeed be the case that a core group of traditional bankers have been
refashioning their history in a possibly unconscious programme of rehabilitating their own past, picking out occasional stories of virtuous behaviours and discarding those stories which show their professional lives to have been chaotic and competitive, without genuine goods, skills or virtues. However, to engage in such an argument or to counter it would be beyond the remit of this study, since it would require reference to a second set of counter-narratives or other reliable empirical evidence. As things stand there is only the evidence of these ten separate conversations, and these ten are consistent with each other. It should also be noted that although the practice of traditional banking in Scotland is largely a thing of the past and it is narrated in this thesis in the past tense, there are places where it survives, and one participant at least, P2, was speaking as the Chief Executive of a small savings bank where the practice was still alive as a community good (Smith 1999). ‘We still cling onto that here’ (C2:
36).
The above discussion is aimed at countering some possible reasons for wishing to deny the claims of old banking to be a practice. However, much the best argument for accepting old banking in Scotland as a practice is to see how it functioned as one, and this is the substance of the next section.