The Little Red Blog

Saturday Lecture: The Worm in the Bud

“The disappearance of evil as a concept is one of the most extraordinary features of modern society.” (Alan Macfarlane)

“Money changes everything.” (From the eponymous song written by Tom Gray)

Alan Macfarlane (from The Culture of Capitalism):

Traditionally, the essence of evil lies in a combination of several features. First, it is shadowy, mysterious, covert, hidden, not fully understood, hence the association with night, darkness, black, secrecy. Secondly, it is an active, aggressive force. Evil tries to destroy the integrity, the happiness, and the welfare of ‘normal’ society. It is aggressively, if insidiously, undermining, the worm in the bud. Witches are evil because they attack society, causing illness and death. These attacks are not justified; either they are motive-less or the motives are perverted. God or the ancestors are not evil when they afflict man, for their ends are good: to improve the afflicted. They correct mankind as a loving father corrects a child. Evil is an inversion of good; the moral standards of society are turned upside down. Thus, when havoc falls out of a clear sky and strikes down an individual or a society, evil is at work.

The moral economy of peasant societies included the economy of evil. Life and happiness were thought to be constantly threatened, by women (witches), by death, by secret evil, by diffuse and invisible powers. There was a never-ending war, both within the individual and against external dark forces. In Catholic, Muslim, Hindu, and Confucian societies, a great amount of energy was spent in trying to hold back and defeat evil through the use of that ‘magic’ that is built into practical religion.

An archetypical example of such a world can be seen in much of continental Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout Catholic Europe, the Holy Office of the Inquisition set up an elaborate machine for seeking out and destroying evil. There was believed to be a vast conspiracy of Evil abroad: relapsed Jews, gypsies, freemasons, witches, Lutherans—all were sought out as agents of Evil, which was then purged from them by fire and the rack. The Devil was alive and well and hovered over much of Europe; few doubted the daily reality of Evil, the Evil One, and of evil beings. There was a Holy War for four centuries.

Contrast this with the world of industrial capitalism in the later twentieth century. Though ‘evil’ titillates in the films, television, science-fiction, and children’s stories, in ordinary life the concept and the reality have largely been banished. Most people live in a one-dimensional world that has expelled Satan, witches, the Evil Eye, and fairies. The supernatural dimension is dead, except as fantasy. How has evil, even temporarily, been banished?

Both the answer and the problem are encapsulated in St. Paul’s warning that ‘The love of money is the root of all evil.’ This dismissal of avarice is one of the central pillars of the Judeo-Christian tradition upon which western civilization is based. Yet it could also be argued that the love of money—the famous propensity to trade, barter, and accumulate—is an equally important part of this civilization. Adam Smith most famously exposed this foundation of modern society, a feature without which capitalist societies would immediately collapse. Modern economies are built on a propensity that is, in the ethical terms laid down by Christian theology, evil. The foundations are laid on individual acquisitiveness, the love of money, and the pursuit of profit. Good and evil are mixed in the roots of modern society.

Money, and all it symbolizes, is the root of all evil in an even deeper sense. It subtly and insidiously eliminates the very concept of evil, or, rather, it makes it impossible to discriminate between good and evil. Money—which is a shorthand way of saying capitalistic relations, market values, trade and exchange—ushers in a world of moral confusion. Money disrupts the moral as well as the economic world. Money complicates the moral order, turning what was formerly black and white into greyness. Money, markets, and market capitalism eliminate absolute moralities. As Georg Simmel wrote:

‘By being the equivalent to manifold things in one and the same way, money becomes the most frightful leveler; it expresses all qualitative differences of things in terms of ‘How much?’ Money becomes the common denominator of all values, it hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific gravity in the moving stream of the economy.’

It became clear that what was considered to be the root of all evil was also the root of all that was good—the marketing, bargaining principle of Adam Smith. This paradox was so horrifying in its implications that, when it was pointed out, there was fierce condemnation. Out of vice and evil came forth wealth and goodness; evil lay at the heart of good in a capitalist society. Private vice, passions, and interests merged into public good.   

[All this] represented the culmination of a trend towards ethical relativism which argued (from growing evidence) that every civilization had its own appropriate moral system. Pascal had summarized this view in the seventeenth century: ‘We hardly know of anything just or unjust which does not change its character with a change of climate. Three degrees of polar elevation overturn the whole system of jurisprudence. A meridian determines what is truth. There is not a single law that is universal.’

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Alan Macfarlane - Wikipedia

Wednesday with Pascal: An Augury of Beatitude

{Eugene McCarraher, a critic of capitalism and a skeptic about ‘disenchantment’ narratives of modernity, is one of Pascal the existential Russian cat’s favorite authors. It should go without saying, yet it must be said, that the modern West worships Mammon, the god of greed, avarice, and envy. And do not get Pascal started about the demonic business of advertising, the stated purpose of which is to promote dissatisfaction and perpetual desire…}

“Business runs the world. The world gets civilized just as fast as men learn to run things on plain business principles.” (John Cotton Dana, 1909)

While we generally associate utopian schemes to “immanentize the eschaton” with the modern political left—Socialists, Progressives, and Communists—we should not overlook the utopianism inherent in capitalism. In Eugene McCarraher’s “The Enchantments of Mammon,” he notes how, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, following decades of violent labor unrest, “evangelical clerics of capital” sought to transform the workplace (or at least the public’s perception of it) and to imbue corporations with soul and personality. ¹ According to McCarraher:

As the minister and journalist Nicholas Paine Gilman wrote in 1899, the source of industrial unrest lay in the “personal alienation of the employer from his fellow men who work for him.” Businesspeople needed to seek “the sagacious application of ideal justice and righteousness to the employer’s function.” Gilman imagined the industrial workplace as a beatific site of production, a factory pervaded by “humaneness, kindness, and fraternity.”

Enter “scientific management theory,” as epitomized by Frederick W. Taylor, famous for   time-motion studies which have been, says McCarraher, “rightly vilified as a form of social engineering and a program for dehumanization. They marked a pinnacle—or perhaps a nadir—in the development of the modern superego, the bourgeois quest to bring desire and impulse under systematic, rational control. Just as others sought to bring sexual life and erotic fantasy under the authority of reason, Taylor extended reason’s empire into the smallest details of the workplace.” Taylor, however, “believed that his science of work was a blueprint for brotherly love.”

Taylor did not spare himself from the regimen of efficiency. While still a student, “Taylor sought to acquire complete control of his mind and body. Rather than wander pleasurably in the woods, he measured the length of his walking stride so as to cover the greatest distance with the least expenditure of energy. Afraid of nightmares he thought were caused by lying on his back, he slept in a harness rigged with sticks to prick him when he would recline. Before he arrived at dances, he would carefully categorize all the girls in terms of their relative attractiveness.” With that in mind, McCarraher comments, “Fearful and trembling in the valley of the wonderful—forests, slumber, women—Taylor relied on reason, stripped of imagination and reduced to technology. Longing for ecstasy, Taylor rued the uncontrollable.”

Who better, then, to articulate, as did Taylor, “The Principles of Scientific Management”? Despite an abundance of critics who decried “Taylorism” as dehumanizing, “The aim of scientific management was to ‘make men’ and rebuild their character; indeed, as Taylor and his disciples often pointed out, the reconstruction and even redemption of men was the primary goal. Taylor’s ominous pronouncement that ‘In the past, man was first. In the future, the system will be first,’ was, to his mind, an augury of beatitude. In a visionary gesture to the end of alienation, Taylor imagined a corporate self, a moral personality constructed on the basis of labor and scientific knowledge, a workplace where ‘each man possesses his own individuality and loses none of his originality and proper personal initiative, while at the same time agreeing to be ‘controlled by, and work harmoniously with, many other men.’”

Testifying before Congress, “Taylor expounded with prophetic ardor on the prospects for industrial amity. Productivity, he crowed, would increase with frictionless class relations: ‘The size of the surplus created by their joint efforts is truly astounding.’ But then Taylor dwelled on the broader moral and spiritual renovation made possible by scientific management,” which would usher in, said Taylor, ‘a great mental revolution, the substitution of peace for war, of hearty brotherly cooperation for contention and strife, of mutual confidence for suspicious watchfulness, and of becoming friends instead of enemies.’

Whereas Taylor himself was “indifferent to conventional religion,” his disciples exhibited “the zeal of converts and the haughty self-assurance of clerics” while preaching “a ‘new gospel’ of scientific knowledge and industrial peace. The new manager trusted that the truth of the gospel would overcome [resistance]. One advocate “maintained that the new management theory was ‘a course in character-building,’ a regimen of virtue akin to the wisdom of antiquity. Surveying the empire of business with ‘Stoic calm,’ the scientific manager was ‘an industrial Marcus Aurelius.’”

Religious allusions proliferated. McCarraher notes that, in 1913, members of the “Efficiency Society” declared themselves ‘apostles of a single faith, a faith so large, so universal, that it benefits all fields, and in varying guises inhabits all nature, animate and inanimate.” To paraphrase Gerard Manley Hopkins, the world is charged with the grandeur of Scientific Management! Morris Cooke “asserted that Taylor had taken the Sermon on the Mount and turned it into ‘a practical, profitable, working formula.’ Cooke quoted a French priest who had sermonized that ‘the love of God is the Taylor system of the inner life.’ In 1919, H.L. Gantt traced a direct line from Christ to Taylor. Christ, Gantt explained, was the real founder of scientific management, ‘the first great Economist.’ Indeed, scientific management was merely ‘applied Christianity’. Taylor and his disciples were the heirs of medieval clerical authority; but if medieval clerics and Protestant proprietors had awaited the fullness of redemption at the end of time, scientific managers bore witness to a consummation on this side of paradise. Harrison Emerson [praised] the capacity of scientific management to confer on modern civilization attributes formerly attributed to divinity: ‘infinite goodness, infinite wisdom, infinite power’. W.L. Mackenzie King, a Canadian politician and industrial relations consultant, exhorted businesspeople to bring ‘the economy of God’ to earth.” ² 

Call it, perhaps, the Age of Hubris. The fin de siècle, the Great War and its aftermath: to quote Bob Dylan, “There was music in the cafes at night / and revolution in the air.” Stairways to heaven were in vogue for Bolsheviks and capitalists alike; the eschaton was in sight, or so we all thought. As it happens, we have now learned that the road to the eschaton is paved with the same materials as the road to Hell. 

-------------------------------------------------------

Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (Belknap/Harvard Press, 2019)

¹ Insert Mitt Romney reference here.

² Insert Eric Voegelin reference here.

Each worker is a skilled craftsperson who takes pride in his or her work...

 

Wednesday with Pascal: No Alternative

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has had to scramble to meet the deadline for this post; he was distracted, apparently, by his research into moral, cultural, and epistemological relativism—which subject, thankfully, did not make its way into the following essay.}

Liquid Evil and TINA is a book-length conversation between Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, both of whom were philosophical observers of Modernity. Bauman, of course, is known for the phrase “liquid modernity,” which he found so popular that he subsequently wrote about “liquid fear” and, in this book, “Liquid Evil”. The enigmatic “TINA” of the title is the acronym that has been given over the years to the phrase “There Is No Alternative”—meaning, no alternative to neoliberal capitalism, a phrase uttered by Margaret Thatcher at the time she was attempting to dismantle Britain’s social welfare state.

In Donskis’ opening essay, he acknowledged that Thatcher was on to something:

We live in a world without alternatives. It's a world that proposes a single reality and a world that labels as lunatics – or, at best, eccentrics – all those who believe that everything has an alternative, including even the very best models of governance and the most profound ideas (not to mention business and engineering projects). The world has probably never been so inundated with fatalistic and deterministic beliefs as it is today; alongside serious analyses, as if from a horn of plenty, flow prophecies and projections of looming crises, dangers, downward spirals, and the end of the world. In this widespread atmosphere of fear and fatalism, the conviction arises that there are no alternatives to contemporary political logic and to the tyranny of the economy or to attitudes towards science and technology and the relationship between nature and humanity.

Events may prove otherwise, but it does seem to be the case that our political, economic, educational, and cultural institutions have solidified their place and have proven resistant to all but cosmetic changes; that is, they resist efforts to turn the clock back and efforts to turn the calendar ahead. Those dissatisfied with neoliberal capitalism have yet to put a dent in its armor, despite financial crises and pandemic catastrophes, both of which seemed to present opportunities for substantive (if not radical) reforms. 

What is wanting today, wrote Donskis, is optimism, which, he explained, is “Not the foolish exultation that we are here in this place and that our surroundings are warm, fuzzy, and comfortable; rather, [optimism is the] belief that evil is transitory and does not vanquish humaneness (or only briefly when it does). Furthermore, optimism means a belief that hope and alternatives do indeed always exist.”

Optimism, then, depends on imagination, on the ability to conceive alternatives and to find ways to realize them; but a fundamental aspect of the postmodern perspective is distrust of utopian schemes founded on grand narratives of human possibility, a distrust shared by social and political conservatives who have long scoffed at the hubris of “social engineering”.   

Pessimism is by no means specific to the modern and postmodern eras; it is deeply rooted in human experience. Sages from disparate ancient cultures independently concluded over the centuries that life is suffering, death inescapable, and this world a vale of tears in which all flesh is grass and all our efforts in vain. Donskis claimed that Christianity had once been an antidote for such fatalism:

The conviction that a pessimist is an all-round loftier and nobler being than an optimist is not simply a relic of the modern, Romantic sensibility and worldview – it is something greater. This situation goes all the way back to the monumental conflict between Christianity and Manichaeism. Christians held evil to be a state of errant or insufficient goodness that could be overcome, while Manichaeans held good and evil to be parallel but irreconcilable realities. Optimism is, above all, a Christian construction – it's based on the faith that good can overcome evil and that unexplored possibilities and alternatives can always be found. But we live in an age of pessimism. The twentieth century was excellent proof evil was alive and well, and this has reinforced the positions of modern Manichaeans. They saw a world that could be temporarily abandoned by God, but not by Satan.

That thought is enough to stop a person in their tracks. We often speak of a deus absconditus, an absent God who has left us to our own devices; but add to that the possibility, at least, that the devil remains with us, diabolus nobiscum.

Oh, for the good old days, when the world made sense:

What does the concept of liquid evil signify? How can it be best understood? I would argue that liquid evil, contrary to what we could term ‘solid evil’ – the latter being based on a black-and-white social perspective, in which we can easily identify the resilience of evil in our social and political reality – assumes the appearance of goodness and love. ¹ More than that, liquid evil parades as a seemingly neutral and impartial acceleration of life – the unprecedented speed of life and social change implying the loss of memory and moral amnesia. In addition, liquid evil walks in disguise as the absence and impossibility of alternatives. A citizen becomes a consumer, and value-neutrality hides the fact of disengagement. Individual helplessness and forsakenness go along with the heavenly marriage of neoliberalism and state bureaucracy, both insisting on the individual's responsibility for their life and choices in a free-choice-free world.

Stalin was evil. Hitler was evil. Mao and Pol Pot were evil. The Soviet Union was “the locus of evil in our world,” and then Iran, Iraq, and North Korea bonded in an “axis of evil”. That was then and this is now; our leaders now exchange “love letters” with murderous dictators and praise the likes of Vladimir Putin.

Donskis summarized:

Evil is not obvious and self-evident anymore. Low-intensity political oppression and human rights violations, as well as low-intensity military conflicts, obfuscate and obliterate the dividing line between war and peace. War is peace, and peace is war. Neither good news nor bad news are un-ambivalent and clear nowadays: even if there is no war or any other calamity going on, it becomes impossible to discuss the world without scaremongering by the fear industry. Good news is no news. Bad news is the news by definition. Therefore, when I refer to liquidity of evil, I mean that we live in a deterministic, pessimistic, fatalistic, fear-and-panic-ridden society, which still tends to cherish its time-honored, albeit out-of-date and misleading, liberal-democratic credentials. The absence of dreams, alternatives, and utopias is exactly what I would take as a significant aspect of the liquidity of evil.

Contra Donskis’ claim, I would suggest that evil has always been liquid, fluid, chameleon in nature, able to transform itself into pleasing but deceptive shapes, to cloak itself in good intentions, to claim divine sanction for its deeds, and to seep, little by little, into our souls. To say that evil was once “obvious and self-evident” is only to say that we were fooled by its disguises. We were so much older then, we're younger than that now; maybe we won’t get fooled again.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

¹ “Sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace,” according to Bob Dylan.

 

Wednesday with Pascal: Conserving Capitalism

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has chosen briefly to suspend his investigations of William of Occam, Blaise Pascal, and Lucien Goldmann so that he might turn his gaze to a question that keeps him, and no doubt many others, awake at night: Who stole conservatism?}

“America is in peril. The welfare of American men and women and the future of our youth are at stake. We dedicate ourselves to the protection of their political liberty, their individual opportunity, and their character as free citizens, which today are threatened by Government itself.” (Republican Party platform, 1936)

In his 2016 book, Who Stole Conservatism, Mario Di Nunzio did a superb job of demonstrating how, and why, the American Right became unmoored from anything resembling conservatism. Because I agree with Mr. Di Nunzio’s thesis—that conservatism was undone by its blind allegiance to capitalism—I will be quoting him at some length.

“Classical conservatism,” as Di Nunzio explains, was represented by the likes of Edmund Burke, Henry Adams, Richard Weaver, and Russell Kirk. While there were of course variations on the larger theme, “This kind of conservatism [featured] a great respect for tradition, enduring moral values, religion, and skeptical attitudes towards popular (especially political) enthusiasms.” Moreover, “It insisted not that novelty in society was bad but that core social, cultural, and political values should not be lightly sacrificed to passing fashion or self-interest. Community interest and community responsibility should reflect a society’s traditions, religious and ethical values, cultural heritage, artistic legacy, concern for others, political programs, and economic life.” This, claims Di Nunzio, was a conservatism “intended to serve stability, order, organic development, and the common good,” while avoiding “uncontrolled and unpredictable social upheaval.”

Set aside, if you will, your opinion of classical conservatism as described above; focus instead on how little it resembles anything offered by American “conservatives” in the last fifty years—or, if one accepts Di Nunzio’s framing, in the last hundred and fifty years. “An American conservative movement emerged,” he asserts, “during the post-Civil War Gilded Age; it directed its energies toward a defense of capitalism even at the cost of muting, altering, or even abandoning” what were thought to be essential tenets of a conservative worldview.

Before proceeding, we should distinguish between “conservatism” as temperament and “conservatism” as ideology. The former represents an ingrained resistance to change and an attachment to, or even a fondness for, existing cultural mores, social structures, and institutions—some more than others, of course. The latter comprises a political agenda based on so-called “first principles” (strong military, low taxes, devotion to the Second Amendment, and seething hatred of liberalism) and characterized increasingly by brashness, truculence, and sheer adolescent delight in giving offense.

The older conservative temperament was articulated in the 20th century by such writers as Joseph Wood Krutch, the Southern Agrarians, Richard Weaver, and Russell Kirk (who insisted that conservatism was not an ideology). The new conservative ideology has been spelled out since then by Newt Gingrich, Patrick Buchanan, Milton Friedman, and their many followers; it has also been spewed into the public square by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson.

As noted, Di Nunzio traces the bifurcation of conservatism back to the 19^th century. “Since the Gilded Age, conservatism in America has included an amalgam of sometimes incompatible ideas about politics, culture, and morality, but it has been dominated by its blind support for unregulated business enterprise.” Few things evoke cognitive dissonance more than the conservative support for capitalism, which, as Di Nunzio writes, “has been a dominant influence for change in society with little regard for preservation or continuity and much distortion of culture and values.” To hear capitalism--the socio-economic equivalent of Shiva, a destroyer of traditions and communities--being praised for its “creative destruction” and heralded (by conservatives!) for its endless innovations, is to experience an intellectual vertigo from which it is difficult to recover. “Capitalism,” as Di Nunzio says in the book’s introduction, “stole conservatism and holds it captive without apology.”

He offers select examples:

The right of an undiscriminating capitalism to invest in virtually any enterprise, however sordid or socially damaging, without interference or oversight by public authority, has been defended [by conservatives] as essential to the survival of human freedom. Conservatives have mounted no campaigns to protest the sleaziness of so much advertising or the constant drumbeat to stimulate consumerism. The modern American conservative offers impassioned support for the unchallenged right to buy arms without limits and does not [support] even the most limited restraints on the killing power of high-caliber assault weaponry. Witness, too, decades of virtually blind support for military expenditure and the blending of genuine patriotic support for the troops at risk with a blank check for the military/industrial complex (President Eisenhower’s warning about this may have inspired the more avid on the Right to accuse him of Communist sympathies). The sum of these parts composes a portrait of American conservatism fully out of touch with its roots.

Irrevocably committed to its defense of capitalism, the American Right has had to look elsewhere to account for the ills of Modernity--individualism, rootlessness, secularism, alienation, lowering of cultural standards, relativism, etc. The usual suspects include various European philosophers (e.g., Rousseau, Nietzsche, Marx, Derrida, Foucault, Gramsci, Marcuse) and the tenured professors who indoctrinate naive, servile students with their doctrines. Conservatives insist that our difficulties all stem from liberal arts students being taught to question authority—except, of course, the authority of their instructors and the iconic, subversive figures they invoke.

One suspects that if Adam Smith were to return from the grave and observe the world that the market’s Invisible Hand has created, he might call for Invisible Handcuffs with which to restrain it. Modernity’s “pervasive materialism” stems from the dominance of the market; its consequences “cannot be reconciled with and are, in fact, inimical to” classical conservatism. What passes for conservative thought in the 21^st century “is so intimately wedded to the pecuniary objectives of corporate capital [and] so tainted by capitalist distortions” that it is a travesty to call it “conservative”; it is “thoroughly materialist, perversely individualist, and narrowly focused on adjusting all political and economic policy to serve the manipulators of capital.” The new conservative discourse “shows little concern for the differences between [private] wealth accumulation and the pernicious social consequences of undisciplined enterprise. Public squalor, urban and rural, draws little conservative outrage, but taxes and government expenditures are assaulted as intolerable evils. Legislative efforts toward insuring access to healthcare or establishing an economic safety net for the neediest in society are dismissed as profligate public expenditure on behalf of the undeserving.”

Di Nunzio’s assessment preceded the American Right’s recent turn towards a faux populism led by a vulgar, cretinous billionaire, but that turn does not represent a break with conservatism’s pro-capitalism stance. America’s white working class has been mobilized to vent its “economic anxiety” against various imagined oppressors—Marxist professors and Critical Race Theorists on college campuses, transgender persons attempting to live their complicated, confusing lives, globalists and elitists, bureaucrats working for the Deep State, Hunter Biden—rather than against Wall Street and the Fortune 500. MAGA Republicans block attempts to raise the minimum wage, make it harder for workers to unionize, promote unpaid overtime and unsafe working conditions; but their populist rhetoric and their willingness to demonize all sorts of social and political “others” stokes their base. So long as the mobs, with their torches and pitchforks, don’t come for the plutocrats, the venture capitalists, the inheritors of wealth, and the despoilers of the planet: modern conservatives can stand a little anarchy.

America no longer has a conservative movement; it has instead “a perverse, adulterated, grossly distorted” ideological contraption that would horrify the likes of Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver. What this country needs is a good five-cent conservatism; where is Robert Taft when we need him?      

-----------------------------

Mario Di Nunzio, Who Stole Conservatism? (Praeger Publishing, 2016)

What hath Capitalism wrought?

Veiled Ignorance

Writing at Aeon, the philosopher and legal scholar Colin Bradley makes the case that liberalism and capitalism are strange bedfellows at best:

A contradiction seems to lie at the heart of liberalism. On the one hand, the promise of a liberal society is of a society of equals – of people who are equally entitled and empowered to make decisions about their own lives, and who are equal participants in the collective governance of that society. Liberalism professes to achieve this by protecting liberties. Some of these are personal liberties. I get to decide how to style my hair, which religion to profess, what I say or don’t say, which groups I join, and what I do with my own property. Some of these liberties are political: I should have the same chance as anyone else to influence the direction of our society and government by voting, joining political parties, marching and demonstrating, standing for office, writing op-eds, or organizing support for causes or candidates.

On the other hand, liberalism is usually uttered in the same breath as capitalism. Capitalism is a social system characterized by the fact that private persons (or legal entities like corporations) own the means of production. Combined with liberalism’s protection of rights and liberties, this means that, just as I get to decide what to do with what I own (a 2004 Hyundai with a busted A/C unit and squeaky wheel bearings), so did the legal entity US Steel get to decide what to do with what it owned: the Youngstown Works. ¹

Liberalism’s apparent commitment to capitalism threatens to prevent it from delivering on all that it promises. To see this, it is important to remember that formal political processes do not exhaust the way our society governs itself. One of the main tasks for a society is to organize economic production. We humans are a species that makes stuff. We make tools, dwellings, food, art, culture, more little humans, and much else. Moreover, we usually do this together, as a joint activity. Such cooperative production inevitably produces a division of labor: some hunt while others gather; some fish while others sow; some design artificial intelligence while others squeegee windows at the stop light.

When societies industrialize, achieving economies of scale and the capacity to purchase cutting-edge technologies needed for profitable production becomes extremely expensive. So expensive, in fact, that it is possible only for a relatively small number of people or entities to do it. This leads not just to a division of labor, but to a class-stratified society. Some people – capitalists – own the materials or technologies that produce society’s wealth, while other people – workers – have to work for the capitalists in exchange for a wage. In such a class-stratified society, capitalists not only make the important investment decisions that guide society’s overall direction, but they are also effectively private dictators telling their workers what to do, when to do it, what to wear, when to pee, and what to post online. Given liberalism’s defense of the capitalists’ rights to do all this, it is hard to see how liberalism might reliably achieve its goal of bringing about a society of equals in which we all have a share in our collective governance. Hence the contradiction at its heart.

Bradley goes on to invoke the ideas of philosopher John Rawls, best known for his book A Theory of Justice and for proposing a ‘thought experiment’ in which the governing rules of a social order are established from behind “a veil of ignorance” so that those making the rules have no way of knowing what their place or status will be in that social order. ² In other words, what if slave owners, in drawing up a constitution, had to consider the possibility that they themselves might be among the enslaved in the new society? Under those circumstances, might they add a provision outlawing slavery? ³

While Bradley acknowledges the objection that “abstract political philosophizing is perhaps interesting, but ultimately useless,” he nonetheless insists we find a use for it. We must change the current economic order, he says, or admit that liberalism has failed.

I suspect that the latter outcome is more likely—but I could be wrong, especially with this veil of ignorance over my eyes.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

What can we learn from John Rawls’s critique of capitalism? | Aeon Essays

¹ Bradley had begun his essay by reviewing “a fiercely contested lawsuit in 1979-80 filed by 3,500 steelworkers laid off by United States Steel Corporation’s Youngstown Works plant – part of a wave of closures across what we now call the Rust Belt. The lawsuit was an avowedly desperate effort to compel US Steel to sell the company either to the city or else to the workers who, hopefully with federal loans, would continue to operate the plant and keep sending paychecks to the thousands of families depending on them.” Naturally, the lawsuit failed, because corporations are people, too.

² One could argue (but why would one bother?) that the current Republican Party operates from behind a veil of ignorance; and please do not get me started on Fox News.

³ The answer, of course, is, "No, because men of property and social stature are incapable of imagining their position to be otherwise. God, after all, has ordained their eminence." 

The Great Refusal: Usury, Purgatory, and the Rise of Mammon

{Returning to our theme of the Great Refusal, we consider how Christianity’s original refusal to embrace Mammon gave way, after a thousand years or so, to a reluctant acceptance of Mammon’s role in this worldly vale. From there, it was but a short step to full-on worship of the god; it is no trivial thing that U.S. currency now bears the motto, ‘In God We Trust’.}

“Christianity had traditionally placed God in opposition to money.” (Jacques Le Goff)

According to historian Jacques Le Goff, “Usury was one of the major issues of the thirteenth century. The sudden eruption and spread of the monetary economy threatened old Christian values. The great controversy surrounding usury constitutes what might be called ‘the labor pains of capitalism’.”

The Church’s strictures against money and profit, however inconsistently followed and however fitfully enforced, endured for over a millennium. As Jesus had made clear to his followers, the possession of money might make one’s mortal life more comfortable, but the pursuit of it, and the burden of it, endangered one’s immortal soul.  

Salvation of the soul, of course, was the entire purpose of life, according to Christianity; everything else was secondary at best and sinful at worst. Jacques Le Goff cites Karl Polanyi, “The facts of the [medieval] economy were originally embedded in situations that were not in themselves of an economic nature, neither the ends nor the means being primarily material.”

Le Goff and Polanyi agree that the medieval economy (12^th and 13^th centuries) was embedded in a culture for which economic gain was not primary. Modern culture, on the other hand, is embedded in the economy, the growth of which has become our primary pursuit. And whereas “Medieval Christians formed a fraternity in which the poor, above all, had special rights,” anyone suggesting this today (“the preferential option for the poor”) is immediately castigated as a Marxist.

The rehabilitation of Mammon depended first on getting rid of restrictions on usury—that is, lending money at interest or charging interest to those buying on credit. Jesus had not expressed much concern for profitable lending: “If you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what merit is there in it for you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. Love your enemy and do good; lend, without expecting to be repaid in full.” That cavalier attitude was fortified in the early Middle Ages by “the Church’s fear that society would be disrupted by the proliferation of usurious practices.” That fear would prove to be prophetic.

For centuries, then, usury was condemned as a form of sloth, one of the seven deadly sins. Man was supposed to live by the sweat of his brow, not by the magical properties of moneylending. Le Goff offers numerous quotations from medieval Christian authorities about the evils of usury. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “Money was invented chiefly for exchanges to be made, so the prime and proper use of money is its use and disbursement in the way of ordinary transactions.” St. Bonaventure declared, “Money is intrinsically unproductive.”  Money is infertile; it cannot reproduce itself nor bear fruit. Pope Leo said bluntly that “Usurious profit from money is the death of the soul.” ¹

Usury was also condemned as the sin of “cupidity” (greed) and as a crime against justice, as Le Goff explains: “A preoccupation with justice became a dominant idea in the economic domain, which was steeped in religious ideology and ethics. The ‘just price’ and the ‘just wage’ were the fundamental themes for economic activity and for the marketplace then beginning to take shape. Even though the ‘just price’ was, to be accurate, merely the market price, demand for justice was present. Usury was seen as a sin against the ‘just price,’ a sin against nature.”

Price gouging and windfall profits, even when not expressly prohibited, were subject to social censure and to the loss of civic reputation.

Where there is a will, however, there is a way; and the will to put money to work—that is, to earn interest from it and to employ it as investment capital—became more and more insistent as the medieval economy grew. Since strictures against usury kept Christians out of the moneylending business, Jews were enlisted to provide the necessary financial service; and, as moneylending became associated with Jews, a new anti-Semitic libel (“Shylock”) was added to the ancient blood libel (“Christ-killer”). Jacques Le Goff acknowledges, “The parallel censure of Judaism and usury contributed to fueling nascent anti-Semitism and to blackening further the image of the usurer, who was now seen as more or less indistinguishable from the Jew.”

Medieval Christians believed they were struggling upwards on a ladder towards heaven; bags of money or loads of material possessions were seen as impediments to that advancement. ² We moderns instead ascend a ladder of success that leads to worldly wealth and possibly to worldly acclaim. Our progress is visible, measurable, tangible, and accomplished here on earth; Christians in the Middle Ages could only hope and pray for their spiritual progress, entrusting themselves to the Church and to God’s mercy for eternal salvation in the world to come.

Concluded Le Goff:

The usurer was the precursor of capitalism, an economic system that, despite its injustices and failings, is part of the West’s trajectory of progress. But from traditional points of view, the usurer was a man in disgrace. The early Middle Ages had disapproved or looked down upon many trades and professions, forbidding them first to clerics and then, in many cases, to laymen, or in any case denouncing them as pathways to sin. Appearing most often on this index were innkeepers, butchers, acrobats, actors, magicians, alchemists, physicians, surgeons, soldiers, pimps, prostitutes, notaries, and wholesale merchants; and also fullers, weavers, harness makers, pastry cooks, shoemakers, gardeners, painters, barbers, bailiffs, constables, customs collectors, moneychangers, tailors, perfumers, tripe sellers, millers, and so forth.

Aside from assigning contaminating monetary transactions to perfidious Jews, how did Christians break free of the anti-Mammon trap? According to Jacques Le Goff, it was the invention of Purgatory that set Christians free to engage in usury while retaining hope for Heaven. “Purgatory was just one of the complicitous winks that Christianity sent the usurer’s way during the 13^th century, but it was the only one that gave him assurance of Paradise. Purgatory was hope, the hope (and soon the quasi-certainty) of being saved, of a man’s being able to have both his money, here below, and his life, his eternal life beyond the grave.”

It was not the earthly consequences of the Church’s condemnation of usury that had restrained Christians, on the threshold of capitalism; it was the agonizing fear of Hell. The hope of escaping Hell, thanks to Purgatory, permitted the usurer to propel the economy and society of the thirteenth century toward capitalism. ³

Necessity is widely credited with being the mother of invention; it appears it was also the mother of Purgatory, whose role in setting the stage for Modernity is rarely acknowledged.   

_______________________________________________________

Jacques Le Goff quotations are from his Your Money or Your Life and his The Birth of Purgatory. For more on his life and work: Jacques Le Goff - Wikipedia

¹ Edward Abbey, on the other hand, claimed that “Sentiment without action is the death of the soul.” I assume that he and Pope Leo I are debating the issue in the afterlife.

² “I don’t know, but I’ve been told / it’s hard to run with a weight of gold.” (The next line of the song is “On the other hand I’ve often heard it said / it’s just as hard with a weight of lead.”)

³ Following the invention of Purgatory, the Church also discovered the utility of “papal indulgences,” that is, reduction of purgatorial sentences in exchange for (what else?) money. In fairness, indulgences could be earned by other means as well, such as going on pilgrimages or participating in crusades against infidels; in the long run, however, it was easier and more common just to buy them. In the even longer run, of course, papal indulgences helped to shatter Catholic Christendom and to bring Europe’s medieval era to a close.

Alien Nation (Part Two)

The most popular explanations of Man’s alienated state are: Original Sin—we are estranged not only from God but from our originally created nature, i.e., we are literally not what we were before the Fall; Civilization—as we have read from the likes of Stanley Diamond and Christopher Ryan, we sold our birthright as wild and free foragers in exchange for the (alleged) security of permanent settlements and a (supposedly) reliable source of food; and Capitalism, of course, Karl Marx’s bete noire, if you will, or his bogeyman, if you won’t.

As to that last: Marx was not so naïve as to believe that alienation began with capitalism. Erich Fromm, in his invaluable Marx’s View of Man, points out that “For Marx the history of mankind is a history of the increasing development of man, and at the same time of increasing alienation. His concept of socialism is the emancipation from alienation, the return of man to himself, his self-realization.” Capitalism did not invent alienation; rather, as it did with so much else, it merely commodified it, thus providing a lucrative market for a variety of panaceas (including, to be sure, Existentialism). Alienation was a byproduct of the assembly line and the office cubicle, of repetitive piecework and monotonous paperwork, but although capitalism certainly mass- produced alienation, the thing itself pre-existed capitalism by millennia.

Or so Erich Fromm claimed on Marx’s behalf, and I will quote Fromm at length:

The whole concept of alienation found its first expression in Western thought in the Old Testament concept of idolatry. The essence of what the prophets call "idolatry" is not that man worships many gods instead of only one. It is that the idols are the work of man's own hands -- they are things, and man bows down and worships things; worships that which he has created himself. In doing so he transforms himself into a thing. He transfers to the things of his creation the attributes of his own life, and instead of experiencing himself as the creating person, he is in touch with himself only by the worship of the idol. He has become estranged from his own life forces, from the wealth of his own potentialties, and is in touch with himself only in the indirect way of submission to life frozen in the idols. 

Paul, in his letter to the Romans, had a slightly different take—“Men worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator” (by which Paul, of course, meant God)—but he was nonetheless talking about estrangement and alienation. Like Paul, Fromm condemned idolatry (“The deadness and emptiness of the idol is expressed in the Old Testament: ‘Eyes they have and they do not see, ears they have and they do not hear’ etc.”) but his concern, and Marx’s, was not to reconcile man to God but to reconcile man to himself. From the dawn of human history, things have somehow acquired totemic status, or have had such status attributed to them; as Emerson phrased it, “Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.” If Narcissus saw his reflection in the water and fell in love with himself, Homo faber (“Man the creator”) gazes upon the work of his own hands and promptly becomes smitten, not with himself, but with it. Nor does that apply only to material objects; man idolizes ideas and institutions of his own devise, submitting himself to them as though they possessed power of their own.

Fromm elaborates:

“The more man transfers his own powers to the idols, the poorer he himself becomes, and the more dependent on the idols, so that they permit him to redeem a small part of what was originally his. The idols can be a godlike figure, the state, the church, a person, possessions. Idolatry changes its objects; it is by no means to be found only in those forms in which the idol has a so-called religious meaning. Idolatry is always the worship of something into which man has put his own creative powers, and to which he now submits, instead of experiencing himself in his creative act.

Here is where Fromm offers the most acute insight (whether his own or taken from Marx, I do not know):

Among the many forms of alienation, the most frequent one is alienation in language. If I express a feeling with a word, let us say, if I say "I love you," the word is meant to be an indication of the reality which exists within myself, the power of my loving. The word "love" is meant to be a symbol of the fact love, but as soon as it is spoken it tends to assume a life of its own, it becomes a reality. I am under the illusion that the saying of the word is the equivalent of the experience, and soon I say the word and feel nothing, except the thought of love which the word expresses.”

The word is not the thing; the map is not the territory. We live under what Wittgenstein called “the bewitchments of language,” so smitten by them we forget that words are only words and have, again, no power that we do not give them.

Fromm:  

The alienation of language shows the whole complexity of alienation. Language is one of the most precious human achievements; to avoid alienation by not speaking would be foolish -- yet one must be always aware of the danger of the spoken word, that it threatens to substitute itself for the living experience. The same holds true for all other achievements of man; ideas, art, any kind of man-made objects. They are man's creations; they are valuable aids for life, yet each one of them is also a trap, a temptation to confuse life with things, experience with artifacts, feeling with surrender and submission.

As someone who loves words—reading them, writing them, speaking them, listening to them—but who has spent a good deal of his lifetime failing to connect with other people or with the world around me, I can vouch for both the allure and the danger of words. The map is not the territory, but it may be the only world that the mapmaker knows.

_____________________________________

Marx's Concept of Man by Erich Fromm 1961 (marxists.org)

 

Sunday Sermon: The Cruelty of Men of Greed

{I admit to having cherry-picked excerpts from this 1891 encyclical, the bulk of which is an argument against socialism. However, even as he condemned socialism’s solutions, Pope Leo XIII did not deny the very real problems inherent in 19^th-century capitalism, nor did he simply consign the working poor either to God’s tender mercies or to the mercies (such as they might be) of the Market.}

Pope Leo XIII, from Rerum Novarum (1891):

We clearly see, and on this there is general agreement, that some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient workingmen's guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, practiced by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself. 

It is the business of a well-constituted body politic to see to the provision of those material and external helps "the use of which is necessary to virtuous action." Now, for the provision of such commodities, the labor of the working class - the exercise of their skill, and the employment of their strength, in the cultivation of the land, and in the workshops of trade - is especially responsible and quite indispensable. Indeed, their co-operation is in this respect so important that it may be truly said that it is only by the labor of working men that States grow rich. Justice, therefore, demands that the interests of the working classes should be carefully watched over by the administration, so that they who contribute so largely to the advantage of the community may themselves share in the benefits which they create-that being housed, clothed, and bodily fit, they may find their life less hard and more endurable. It follows that whatever shall appear to prove conducive to the well-being of those who work should obtain favorable consideration. There is no fear that solicitude of this kind will be harmful to any interest; on the contrary, it will be to the advantage of all, for it cannot but be good for the commonwealth to shield from misery those on whom it so largely depends for the things that it needs.

The first thing of all to secure is to save unfortunate working people from the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for money-making. It is neither just nor human so to grind men down with excessive labor as to stupefy their minds and wear out their bodies. Man's powers, like his general nature, are limited, and beyond these limits he cannot go. His strength is developed and increased by use and exercise, but only on condition of due intermission and proper rest. Daily labor, therefore, should be so regulated as not to be protracted over longer hours than strength admits. How many and how long the intervals of rest should be must depend on the nature of the work, on circumstances of time and place, and on the health and strength of the workman. Those who work in mines and quarries, and extract coal, stone, and metals from the bowels of the earth, should have shorter hours in proportion as their labor is more severe and trying to health. Then, again, the season of the year should be taken into account; for not infrequently a kind of labor is easy at one time which at another is intolerable or exceedingly difficult.

As a general principle it may be laid down that a workman ought to have leisure and rest proportionate to the wear and tear of his strength, for waste of strength must be repaired by cessation from hard work.

______________________________________

Rerum Novarum (May 15, 1891) | LEO XIII (vatican.va)

 

The Great Refusal: "Acres of Diamonds"

{The Good News of the Christian gospel got even better in late 19th- and early 20^th-century America, when Russell Conwell, a Baptist minister who founded Temple University, put the Lord’s stamp of approval on the getting and spending of money. Pastor Conwell delivered his “Acres of Diamonds” lecture to audiences across the country, setting at ease the consciences of the wealthy and of those with aspirations to wealth; his Christianity could have been labeled “the preferential option for the rich.” Conwell’s lecture qualifies as a “Great Refusal” in that, despite being a minister, Conwell refused to take the Christian gospels seriously.}

(Note: In the following excerpt, I have taken the liberty of appending my own commentaries and scriptural paraphrases.)

Russell Conwell, from “Acres of Diamonds”:

I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich. How many of my pious brethren say to me, ‘“‘Do you, a Christian minister, spend your time going up and down the country advising young people to get rich, to get money?” ‘‘Yes, of course I do.” They say, ‘‘Isn’t that awful! Why don’t you preach the gospel instead of preaching about man’s making money?” ‘‘Because to make money honestly is to preach the gospel.”’ That is the reason. The men who get rich may be the most honest men you find in the community.

The LORD has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives, sight to the blind, and reassurance to those who do His work by piling up treasure on earth.

‘‘Oh,” but says some young man here tonight, “I have been told all my life that if a person has money he is very dishonest and dishonorable and mean and contemptible.” My friend, that is the reason why you have none, because you have that idea of people. The foundation of your faith is altogether false. Let me say here clearly, and say it briefly, though subject to discussion which I have not time for here, ninety-eight out of one hundred of the rich men of America are honest. That is why they are rich. That is why they are trusted with money. That is why they carry on great enterprises and find plenty of people to work with them. It is because they are honest men.

We know they are Christians because ninety-eight percent of them are honest and can be trusted with money.

My friend, you take and drive me out into the suburbs of Philadelphia and introduce me to the people who own their homes around this great city, those beautiful homes with gardens and flowers, those magnificent homes so lovely in their art, and I will introduce you to the very best people in character as well as in enterprise in our city, and you know I will. A man is not really a true man until he owns his own home, and they that own their homes are made more honorable and honest and pure, and true and economical and careful, by owning the home.

Blessed are the homeowners, for they are truly men; and blessed are the magnificent homes, with their gardens and flowers and art, for they are sources of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

For a man to have money, even in large sums, is not an inconsistent thing. We preach against covetousness, and you know we do, in the pulpit, and oftentimes preach against it so long and use the terms about ‘‘filthy lucre”’ so extremely that Christians get the idea that when we stand in the pulpit we believe it is wicked for any man to have money—until the collection-basket goes around, and then we almost swear at the people because they don’t give more money. Oh, the inconsistency of such doctrines as that!

Thou hypocrite, denouncing money in one breath yet filling baskets with it the next! You are whitewashed bank vaults, pristine on the outside but filled with Mammon on the inside, not that there is anything wrong with that.

Money is power, and you ought to be reasonably ambitious to have it. You ought because you can do more good with it than you could without it. Money printed your Bible, money builds your churches, money sends your missionaries, and money pays your preachers, and you would not have many of them, either, if you did not pay them.  The man who gets the largest salary can do the most good with the power that is furnished to him, if his spirit be right to use it for what it is given to him.

Man does not live by spirit alone, but by the power of money too. All things are possible for Mammon. Mammon is my shepherd; I shall not want.

You ought to have money, and if you can honestly attain unto riches, it is your Christian and godly duty to do so. It is an awful mistake to think you must be awfully poor in order to be pious. Some men say, “‘Don’t you sympathize with the poor people?’’ Of course I do; I sympathize with the poor, but the number of poor who are to be sympathized with is very small. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins, to help him when God would still continue a just punishment, is to do wrong, and we do that more than we help those who are deserving. While we should sympathize with God’s poor—that is, those who cannot help themselves— let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings, or by the shortcomings of someone else.

Blessed are some of the poor, for they deserve sympathy, but most of them get what they deserve.

A gentleman gets up back there, and says, “Don’t you think there are some things in this world that are better than money?” I do, but I am talking about money now. Of course, there are some things higher than money, some things higher and grander than gold. Love is the grandest thing on God’s earth, but fortunate the lover who has plenty of money. Money is power, money is force, money will do good as well as harm. In the hands of good men and women it could accomplish, and it has accomplished, good. I heard a man get up in a prayer-meeting in our city and thank the Lord he was ‘‘one of God’s poor.” Well, I wonder what his wife thinks about that? She earns all the money that comes into that house, and he smokes a part of that on the veranda. I don’t want to see any more of the Lord’s poor of that kind, and I don’t believe the Lord does.

Thou shalt not smoke on the veranda unless thou hast money to burn.

Thus endeth the sermon.

___________________________________________

Russell Conwell - Wikipedia

Wednesday with Pascal: The Triumph of Mammon

{As I understand the provenance of the following, Pascal the existential Russian blue cat found excerpts from R.H. Tawney’s ‘Religion and the Rise of Capitalism’ stuffed into a bottle that had washed up on the banks of the Madison River near Three Forks, Montana. Who placed the pages into the bottle? How long had it been floating down the river? Where did it originate? We simply cannot know, and Pascal seems uninterested. Unusually for him, he has appended no commentary to what follows, thereby tacitly endorsing (perhaps) Tawney’s observations on the fundamental incompatibility of Christianity and Capitalism.}  

“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” (Gospel of Matthew)

From the conclusion of Richard H. Tawney’s classic Religion and the Rise of Capitalism:

Economic efficiency is a necessary element in the life of any sane and vigorous society, and only the incorrigible sentimentalist will depreciate its significance. But to convert efficiency from an instrument into a primary object is to destroy efficiency itself. For the condition of effective action in a complex civilization is cooperation. And the condition of cooperation is agreement, both as to ends to which effort should be applied, and the criteria by which its success is to be judged.

Agreement as to ends implies the acceptance of a standard of values. In a world of limited resources, where nature yields a return only to prolonged and systematic effort, such a standard must obviously take account of economic possibilities. But the standard cannot itself be merely economic, since the comparative importance of economic and of other interests—the foregoing, for example, of material goods in order to extend leisure, or develop education, or humanize toil—is precisely the point on which it is needed to throw light. It must be based on some conception of the requirements of human nature, to which the satisfaction of economic needs is evidently vital, but which demands the satisfaction of other needs as well, and which can organize its activities on a rational system only in so far as it has a clear apprehension of their relative significance.

The most obvious facts are the most easily forgotten. Both the existing economic order, and too many of the projects advanced for reconstructing it, break down through their neglect of the truism that, since even quite common men have souls, no increase in material wealth will compensate them for arrangements which insult their self-respect and impair their freedom. A reasonable estimate of economic organization must allow for the fact that, unless industry is to be paralyzed by recurrent revolts on the part of outraged human nature, it must satisfy criteria which are not purely economic. A reasonable view must recognize that natural appetites may be purified or restrained, as, in fact, in some considerable measure they already have been, by being submitted to the control of some larger body of interests. The distinction made by the philosophers of classical antiquity between liberal and servile occupation; the medieval insistence that riches exist for man, not man for riches; Ruskin’s famous outburst, “there is no wealth but life”; the argument of the Socialist who urges that production should be organized for service, not for profit; are but different attempts to emphasize the instrumental character of economic activities by reference to an ideal which is held to express the true nature of man.

Of that nature and its possibilities, the Christian Church was thought, during the greater part of the period discussed in these pages, to hold a conception distinctively its own. It was therefore committed to the formulation of a social theory as a vital element in a creed concerned with the destiny of men whose character is formed, and whose spiritual potentialities are fostered or starved, by the commerce of the marketplace and the institutions of society. Stripped of the eccentricities of period and place, the Church’s philosophy had as its center a determination to assert the superiority of moral principles over economic appetites, which have their place, and an important place, in the human scheme, but which, like other natural appetites, when flattered and pampered and overfed, bring ruin to the soul and confusion to society. Its casuistry was an attempt to translate these principles into a code of practical ethics, sufficiently precise to be applied to the dusty world of warehouse and farm. Its discipline was an effort, too often corrupt and pettifogging in practice, but not ignoble in conception, to work the Christian virtues into the spotted texture of individual character and social conduct. That such a practice was often a sorry parody on theory is a truism which should need no emphasis. But in a world where principles and conduct are unequally matched, men are to be judged by their reach as well as by their grasp—by the ends at which they aim as well as by the success with which they attain them.

Circumstances alter from age to age, and the practical interpretation of moral principles must alter with them. Few who consider dispassionately the facts of social history will deny that the exploitation of the weak by the powerful has been a permanent feature in the life of most communities that the world has yet seen. But the quality in modern societies which is most sharply opposed to the teaching ascribed to Jesus consists in the assumption that the attainment of material riches is the supreme object of human endeavor and the final criterion of human success. 

Such a philosophy—plausible, militant, and not indisposed, when hard pressed, to silence criticism by persecution—may triumph or may decline. What is certain is that it is the negation of any system of thought or morals which can, except by a metaphor, be described as Christian. Compromise is as impossible between the Church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of capitalist societies, as it was between the Church and the State idolatry of the Roman Empire.

“Modern capitalism,” writes Mr. Keynes, “is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.” It is that whole system of appetites and values, with its deification of the life of snatching to hoard, and hoarding to snatch, which now, in the hour of its triumph, seems sometimes to leave a taste as of ashes on the lips of a civilization which has brought to the conquest of its material environment resources unknown in earlier ages, but which has not yet learned to master itself. It was against that system, while still in its supple and insinuating youth, before success had caused it to throw aside the mask of innocence, and while its true nature was unknown even to itself, that the saints and sages of earlier ages launched their warnings and their denunciations.

The language in which theologians and preachers expressed their horror of the sin of covetousness may appear to the modern reader too murkily sulphurous; their precepts on the contracts of business and the disposition of property may seem an impracticable pedantry. But rashness is a more agreeable failing than cowardice, and, when to speak is unpopular, it is less pardonable to be silent than to say too much.