The Little Red Blog

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.

Wednesday with Pascal: Separation of Church and Market

{Pascal the self-exiled existential Russian blue cat continues to submit his weekly posts. He is rumored to have settled somewhere in Montana’s famous “tri-city” area (Pony, Three Forks, and Willow Creek), also known as the “Tobacco Root Triangle,” after the nearby mountain range. Wherever he is, he continues to have a bee in his feline bonnet about capitalism, Christianity, and what he perceives as the unlikely and unholy alliance of the two.)

The British historian Richard H. Tawney (1880—1962) was a Christian Socialist ¹ whose work—including his two best known books, The Acquisitive Society and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism—was suffused with moral earnestness and a nostalgia for the Catholic integralism of the Middle Ages. ² According to Tawney, religion and moral values in medieval Europe were closely linked to economics and politics, and vice-versa; which is to say, markets were not exempt from morals. Modernity then ushered in the notion of “non-overlapping magisteria,” separate realms of authority that need not compete, argue, nor intrude upon each other’s claims, e.g., religion and science, but also religion and politics, and, crucially for Tawney’s argument, religion and economics.  

His argument was that what we might call “the separation of Church and Market” was as disastrous (morally and socially) as it was miraculous (economically). The retreat of medieval ecclesiastical authority was unquestionably a critical factor in the rise of modernity; among other things, it cleared the ground for economic expansion and for the accumulation and investment of capital. ³

Tawney believed the Reformation simultaneously weakened the Church (by turning it into churches) and strengthened the individual (“Every man his own priest”), with incalculable consequences for both:   

No one can read the economic discussions which took place between 1500 and 1550 without being struck by the constant appeal from the new and clamorous economic interests of the day to the traditional Christian morality, which in social organization, as in the relations of individuals, was still conceived to be the final authority. It was [for that reason] that the officers of the Church claimed to be heard on questions of social policy; and, however much Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, and Calvinists may have differed on doctrine or ecclesiastical government, they were agreed that social morality was the province of the Church, and they were prepared both to teach it, and to enforce it, when necessary, by suitable discipline.

By the middle of the seventeenth century all that was altered, [replaced by] a new world of economic, as well as of political, thought. The claim of religion to maintain rules of good conscience in economic affairs finally vanished. The attempt to maintain that there was a Christian standard of economic conduct was impossible, not only because of lay opposition, but because the division of the Churches made it evident that no common standard existed which could be enforced by ecclesiastical machinery. The doctrine that, as proved by the experience of Holland, trade and tolerance flourished together, had its practical significance in the fact that neither could prosper without large concessions to individualism.

The problem, of course, was that individuals were no longer protected, in the new dispensation, from greed and economic rapacity. The economic order was released (on its own recognizance) from the moral tutelage of the Ten Commandments and placed instead under the authority of its own newly discovered (or invented) “laws,” laws which made poverty inevitable (or so it was claimed) and amelioration of poverty impossible. The modern economy, like modern government, was conceived as “a machine that would go of itself” (the phrase comes from James Russell Lowell) so long as it was left to its own devices:

The ground which was vacated by the Christian moralist was quickly occupied by theorists of another order. The future for the next two hundred years would be not with the attempt to reaffirm the conception that a moral rule was binding on Christians in their economic transactions, but with the new science of Political Arithmetic, which asserted, at first with hesitation and then with confidence, that no moral rule beyond the letter of the law exists. Influenced in its method by the contemporary progress of mathematics and physics, it handled economic phenomena, not as a casuist concerned to distinguish right from wrong, but as a scientist, applying a new calculus to impersonal economic forces. Its method, temper, and assumptions were accepted by all educated men, including the clergy, even though its particular conclusions continued for long to be disputed. In short, there was a transition, and the intellectual and moral conversion which it produced was not less momentous than the effect of some more familiar intellectual revolutions.

Like any good Socialist, Tawney understood that man’s social environment helped form (and restrict) his ideas as well as his actions. Whatever “human nature” may be in the wild, it has long since been tamed and transformed by society and culture (including religion):

There is an evolution of ideas, as well as of organisms, and the quality of civilization depends on the transmission, less of physical qualities, than of a complex structure of habits, knowledge, and beliefs, the destruction of which would be followed within a year by the death of half the human race. Granted that the groundwork of inherited dispositions with which the individual is born has altered little in recorded history, the interests and values which compose his world have undergone a succession of revolutions. The conventional statement that human nature does not change is plausible only so long as attention is focused on those aspects of it which are least distinctively human. The wolf is today what he was when he was hunted by Nimrod. But, while men are born with many of the characteristics of wolves, man is a wolf domesticated, who both transmits the arts by which he has been partially tamed and improves upon them. He steps into a social inheritance, to which each generation adds its own contribution of good and evil, before it bequeaths it to its successors.

What we came to call Homo Economicus (Economic Man) was invented, not discovered, by capitalism’s priests and prophets, who solemnly instructed the masses that the business of modern man is business; that they must submit to the Invisible Hand; that there is no such thing as a free lunch; and that loafers and idlers, shirkers and malingerers, redistributionists and bleeding-hearted reformers are not welcome in the House of Mammon:

There is a moral and religious, as well as a material, environment which sets its stamp on the individual, even when he is least conscious of it. And the effect of changes in this environment is not less profound. The economic categories of modern society, such as property, freedom of contract and competition, are as much a part of its intellectual furniture as its political conceptions, and, together with religion, have probably been the most potent force in giving it its character. Between the conception of society as a community of unequal classes with varying functions, organized for a common end, and that which regards it as a mechanism adjusting itself through the play of economic motives to the supply of economic needs; between the idea that a man must not take advantage of his neighbor’s necessity, and the doctrine that “man’s self-love is God’s providence”; between the attitude which appeals to a religious standard to repress economic appetites, and that which regards expediency as the final criterion—there is a chasm which no theory of the permanence and ubiquity of economic interests can bridge.

If economic motives, needs, and interests are what matter most, then we modern Americans, for the past seventy years, have had our priorities in order. If we have been mistaken, however, we might want to consider re-ordering our lives accordingly.

_______________________________

R.H. Tawney quotes are from Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

H. Tawney - Wikipedia

¹ Critics who claim that “Christian Socialist” is an oxymoron demonstrate their ignorance of both Christianity and Socialism.

² “Integralism” is an ideology which advocates “the integration of religious authority and political power.” How this differs from theocracy is not altogether clear; in any case, integralism (in some modified form) has its champions even today—the legal scholar Adrian Vermeule of Harvard University, for one. Adrian Vermeule - Wikipedia

³ I am no scriptural exegete, but was not Jesus referring to “the accumulation and investment of capital” when he warned listeners not to “pile up treasure on earth”? Had Jesus been economically literate rather than merely divine, he could have included, in his Sermon on the Mount, the maxim, “A rising tide lifts all boats,” a phrase his closest followers, most of whom were fishermen, would certainly have understood.

Wednesday with Pascal: When Meaning Disappears

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat remains in hiding--from me, at least. Rumor has it he may be in eastern Ukraine; rumor also has it he may be in Pony, Montana, where he has been adopted as the mascot at the Pony Bar. In any case, he continues to submit his weekly essays. This latest submission references, for no apparent reason, the work of the late Canadian philosopher George Grant, of whom I for one had never previously heard. There is no accounting for Pascal’s reading habits; it is entirely possible that he found a copy of Grant’s Philosophy in the Mass Age discarded and forgotten in the back room of the Pony Bar.}

"Modern human beings have been moved by the faith that a mastery of nature would lead to a world-wide society of free and equal people." (George Grant, Technology and Justice)

Well before the advent of Jordan Peterson—Canadian psychologist and philosopher turned self-help guru turned right-wing crank—there was George Grant, also a Canadian and a philosopher, something of a conservative but never a crank. In his 1960 book, Philosophy in the Mass Age, Grant attempted to enlighten non-philosophers about the urgent need to grapple with moral philosophy. He believed that, despite our progress and our affluence, we moderns were increasingly unable to articulate values or to develop guidelines for the good life.   

What was the nature of the “progress” to which Grant referred? It was material progress, the product of science and technology, and man’s victory over nature. “Modern scientific civilization,” in Grant’s view, had brought into being a brand-new world: “Ours is the world of mass production and its techniques, of standardized consumption and standardized education, of wholesale entertainment and almost wholesale medicine. We are formed by this new environment,” Grant declared, “at every moment of our work and leisure—that is, in the totality of our lives.”

If, however, the modern environment (the “department store empire,” as Grant called it, meaning “the culture of late capitalism”) “creates the very fabric of our lives,” are we not then very different creatures from pre-modern women and men who were shaped by very different (and, sadly for them, materially deprived) environments? “So totally new is our situation in history, we are driven to try to redefine the meaning of human history itself—the meaning of our own lives and of all lives in general.” Citing the 19^th-century sage G.F.W. Hegel, Grant explained that such redefinition was unavoidable; “When an old system of meaning has disappeared and when we recognize that the new society raises new questions which cannot be understood under the old system,” then we must consider anew what it is to be human.

Grant was unequivocal on the point: “It is certain that in North America our old systems of meaning, which suited the world of a pioneering, agricultural society with small commercial centers, have disappeared with the world they suited. The more that people live in the new mass society, the more they are aware that the old systems of meaning no longer hold them, and the less they are able to see any relation between the old faiths and the practical business of living. For instance,” Grant continued, “the mass of people no longer find in the Bible that unambiguous meaning within which they can live their lives. This is truer than it was a generation ago,” he added; “it is truer this year than it was last year.”

For a man who was considered a “conservative” thinker, Grant was surprisingly insistent that “We cannot rest in old systems of meaning.” With our understanding of ourselves and of our world in flux, it was natural to feel “deeply insecure”; but, said Grant, we had to resist “the tendency to seek an answer to our insecurity by turning to the certainties of the past. Reactionary experiments are always vain. When meaning has become obscure, the search must be for a new authentic meaning which includes the conditions which make the search necessary.”

As important as the search for meaning might be, Grant warned that “society exerts a formidable pressure to keep us from that search.”  It was not just the economic structures and the necessity of work (and therefore of conforming to employers' expectations) that produced alienation.  Sounding much like a Frankfurt School theorist, Grant indicted mass culture: “Every instrument of mass culture is a pressure alienating the individual from himself as a free being. Modern culture, through the movies, the newspapers, and television, endlessly forces the individual into the service of the capitalist system around him. Television programs reproduce hackneyed scenes of family life; the American family is described and exalted as being perfectly adjusted to the world of life insurance, teenage dating, and the supermarket.” Television programming (and advertising), Grant noted, “glorifies our society as it is: ‘Here is the way all decent Americans live and here is the way all mankind should live.’ This exaltation,” lamented Grant, “helps to entrap us in the very reality it describes, helps us to accept our world and its system. Entertainment is used to keep people happy by identifying life as it is with life as it ought to be. Art in a commercial society is used to enfold us in the acceptance of what we are.”

A hallmark of modernity, according to Grant, was that “reason itself is thought of as an instrument to be used for the control of nature and the adjustment of the masses to what is required of them by the commercial society.” Acknowledging that instrumental reason was one of the driving forces behind modern progress, Grant nonetheless resisted its demands. “Our society increasingly forces on its members this view of reason,” he complained. “Thought which does not serve the purpose of the economic apparatus or of some established group in society is sneered at as ‘academic’. The old view of reason as the way in which we discover the meaning of our lives, and make that meaning our own, has almost entirely disappeared. In place of it we have substituted the idea of reason as a tool, helping us in production, in the guidance of the masses, and in the maintenance of our power against rival empires.” The entire purpose of education had been corrupted; “People educate themselves to get dominance over nature and over other men. For instance, we study ‘practical psychology’ in order to understand how other people’s minds work, so we can control them. The study of psychology thus comes less and less to serve its proper end, which is individual therapy.” ¹

But Grant managed to be optimistic, foreshadowing in a way the likes of Theodore Roszak. ² “The conquest of nature through technology means that human energy is liberated to attain objectives beyond those practically necessary. As this liberation increases, vast numbers of men have the possibility of devoting their time to the free play of their individual faculties. The constraints once justified by the fact of scarcity can no longer be justified on that ground.” Instrumental reason may have unwittingly “freed man from his enslavement to nature to he could pursue the life of reason as more than domination.” Credit where credit was due: “The world of mass production and consumption, and the idea of social equality, make this possible. Whatever we may say against our society, we must never forget that achievement.”

What Grant offered was a kind of dialectic: “Just as our industrial civilization creates the conditions of repression, it also creates the conditions of universal liberation.” With an almost Marxian enthusiasm, he added, “This liberation is not only in the economic sense that people who are free from the necessity of hard work have the leisure to pursue ends beyond the practical. It is also in the sense that an industrial society breaks down the old natural forms of human existence in which people traditionally found the meaning for their lives. In such a situation, many persons are driven by the absence of traditional forms to seek a meaning of their own.”

Did I mention that George Grant was considered a “political conservative”? He was also praised by (among others) Peter Lawler, a self-described “postmodern conservative,” as a “lapidary thinker,” i.e., a man of polished intellect. If the above excerpts are any indication, Grant’s conservatism was vastly different from his American contemporaries, who scorned modernity while praising the capitalist economy which helped create it. 

What, however, does any of this have to do with moral philosophy, the putative subject of Grant’s Philosophy in the Mass Age? That will be a subject for another time.

_______________________________________________

George Grant (philosopher) - Wikipedia

¹ Beginning in the 1920s, “applied psychology” became the forte of Madison Avenue. Modern advertising and marketing were shaped by psychological ‘insights’ and marked by ubiquitous psychological persuasion—colors and sizes of packaging, product slogans, catchy ad jingles, music in supermarkets, placement of items on store shelves. Before Hitler, American advertising was pioneering the art of propaganda. (See Edward Bernays - Wikipedia.)

² The comparison should not be pushed too far. Roszak, author of The Making of a Counterculture and Where the Wasteland Ends, was something of a techno-utopian and a believer that a new stage of human consciousness was dawning (with the help of psychedelic drugs). George Grant was unlikely to have supported such beliefs. On the other hand, he seems to have had a good deal in common with Paul Goodman, whose Growing Up Absurd was written around the same time as Philosophy in the Mass Age. 

 

 

Saturday Lecture: What the Right Got (and Gets) Wrong

{I have eschewed my usual 'Saturday Lecture" format in favor of sharing my unexpected but welcome discovery of a contemporary conservative voice deserving of attention. That voice belongs to Jonathan Askonas, and his message to his fellow conservatives amounts to, 'Something is happening, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?'} 

By way of prologue: in “We Need to Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives,” The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson offers a dreary and dystopian assessment of contemporary America. “In just my lifetime," he laments, "we have lost much: marriage as it has been understood for thousands of years, the First Amendment, any semblance of control over our borders, a fundamental distinction between men and women, and, especially of late, the basic rule of law.” Davidson’s essay is right-wing boilerplate, a call to arms that manages to be simultaneously melodramatic and tedious, featuring hoary messages like “Western civilization is dying” and fascist-lite threats along the lines of “The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life — and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.”  

Like most of what one encounters at The Federalist, Davidson’s polemic is not worth the pixels of which it is composed. So why do I bother writing about it? Because buried in Davidson’s screed is this intriguing reference:

Jon Askonas ¹ argues convincingly that the conservative project failed because “it didn’t take into account the revolutionary principle of technology, and its intrinsic connection to the telos of sheer profit.” Conservatives, he says, were too obsessed with “left-wing revolutionary politics” and missed the real threat, which was technological change so swift and powerful it fundamentally reordered society, swept tradition aside, and unleashed a moral relativism that rendered the conservative project obsolete.

Instead of questioning these technologies, asking whether they would contribute to human flourishing, conservatives acquiesced to their inevitability and focused instead on narrower issues. The result has been the transformation of society within the span of a single human lifetime, and with it the wholesale destruction of our traditions and the looming implosion of Western civilization. 

So, the villain wasn’t Cultural Marxism after all, but capitalism’s explicitly amoral thirst for profit, an insatiable thirst which accelerated technological changes which in turn destabilized communities, families, and traditional values? Shocking! It’s almost as if Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno were little more than Red herrings whose writings served mostly to distract conservatives from the truly radical, truly revolutionary, truly destructive force that is capitalism. ²

Far more interesting than anything John Daniel Davidson will ever have to say, Jon Askonas’ “Why Conservatism Failed” (at Compact) pulls no punches: “The conservative defense of tradition has failed,” Askonas declares, “not because the right lost the battle of ideas, but because technological change has dissolved the contexts in which traditions once thrived. A technological society can have no traditions.” Giving credit where credit is due, Askonas cites none other than Karl Marx himself for having recognized industrial capitalism’s implications:

This insight was first articulated by one of conservatism’s great nemeses: Karl Marx. “The bourgeoisie,” as he famously wrote, “cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.” Whereas in previous societies, the dominant class had had an interest in social stability that restrained technological innovation, the pursuit of profit removes social or political restraints on technology. Hence, the relentless “revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.”

Hence, too, Marx’s famous “everything that is solid melts into air.” Askonas continues:

Modernity liquidates traditions for the same reason that a firm might liquidate an underperforming factory: to improve the allocation and return of capital. “All fixed, fast-frozen relations,” as Marx put it, “with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.” Technology, for Marx, is the true revolutionary principle, destroying traditions by shifting their foundations faster than they can adapt.

“Make it new,” counseled the poet Ezra Pound in the 1930s, but capitalists had already staked out the territory of the “new”—as had politicians like Franklin D. Roosevelt ( the  “New Deal”). What tradition was to premodern society, novelty was to the modern era; “new and improved” became a ubiquitous catchphrase for advertisers.

Askonas understands that it didn’t (and doesn’t) require diktats from above, or subversive ideologies imposed by woke professors on gullible college students, to overturn the old ways of living and even the old ways of thinking and believing:

As new technologies enter a society, they disrupt the connections between institutions, practices, virtues, and rewards. They can render traditions purposeless, destroy the distinction between virtuous and vicious behavior, make customary ways of life obsolete, or render their rewards meaningless or paltry. If the institutions that shepherd traditions aren’t regenerated, and if no one adopts their practices, traditions will fade into nothingness.

While postwar conservatives defended “Western values,” the capitalism it staunchly (and blindly) championed was pulling the rug out from under them. Askonas argues that it was economic and technological developments, not ideological forces, that carried the day. His summary is worth quoting at length:

What defined modern conservatism was its attempt, against the onslaught of revolutionary ideologies, to set aside foundational questions in order to make common cause in defense of the actually existing human order. But the movement failed because it neglected the true revolutionary principle: technological transformation. Conservatives “lost the culture” not because they lost the battle of ideas, but because they lost the economy. Communists sought to transform society by transforming the organization of the household (the oikonomos, the etymological origin of “economy”)—but in the end, the efforts of political revolutionaries and party apparatchiks paled beside the impact of the Pill and the two-income trap.

When you descend from lofty rhetoric about “Traditions” and “Values,” it becomes apparent that a huge number of the actual practices and social institutions which built those virtues have disintegrated, not because of Progressivism or Socialism but because of the new environment and political economy generated by technology. For decades, sociologists have charted the decline of two-parent families, hobbies, local newspapers, churches, stable employment, women’s clubs, libraries, amateur sports, political rhetoric, neighborhood barbecues, Boy Scouts, small businesses, classical music, credit unions, and on and on. Even studies that catastrophize about the rise of loneliness, fatherlessness, economic precarity, and suicide, miss the bigger picture, which is that the social infrastructure conducive to human flourishing has shifted even for those fortunate enough to piece together a semblance of the average American life 50 years ago. ³

Having thus clarified the problem, Askanos offers a solution of sorts:

The radical alteration of the social environment and the strange new potentials offered by technology have rendered received wisdom obsolete, such that translating it into the new environment requires a deeper prudence than mere reception of tradition. Because the tools for modifying and mimicking humanity are getting better every year, and because all traditional cultures have been consumed by modern dynamism, we must once again return to the question of what constitutes human flourishing, and what is required for it.

Askonas’ idea of “human flourishing” may not be yours, or mine, but that is not what matters here. What matters is that we address ourselves to fundamental questions, questions about human purposes and even about human nature. What are people for? What are families for? What is culture for, or community, or money, or borders? What is technology for, what are gadgets for, what is this year’s model for? We will, of course, disagree about the answers; but unless we ask the questions, we are merely sleepwalking into the future.

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We Need To Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives (thefederalist.com)

Why Conservatism Failed | Compact Mag

¹ I had never heard of Jonathan Askonas; I have now learned that he is an assistant professor of politics at the Catholic University of America. I also recommend his articles (at The New Atlantis) on the death of consensus reality: What Happened to Consensus Reality? — The New Atlantis

² This is not to let Communism, Leninism, Bolshevism, or Stalinism off the hook; such ideologies were destructive and deadly in their own ways and to a frightful degree. But such ideologies never stood a chance of triumphing in America, and, while conservatives frightened themselves with the specter of left-wing bogeymen like Herbert Marcuse showing up at the door, the very real wolf of capitalism was already inside the house: tearing down walls, rearranging the furniture, jettisoning family heirlooms, shaking the foundations, and all but gutting the place entirely.  

³ Not that conservatives were happy with “the average American life 50 years ago,” a time when urban blacks were rioting, campuses were overrun with hippies and with New Left professors, the kids were all on drugs, sex was everywhere, and the only hope for the country was that “Someday, a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets” (“Travis Bickle” in the 1976 film, Taxi Driver). The only bright spot for conservatives in 1972 was that Richard Nixon won re-election by thoroughly trouncing George “Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion” McGovern.

 

Labor Day: A Better Way of Work

{To close out our Labor Day weekend seminar on the curse of labor, we turn to an essay from thirty years ago, in which L. Susan Brown made the revolutionary assertions that (a) workers are people, too; (b) labor cannot be a commodity because it cannot be detached from the person; and (c) under our current system, paid employment is wage slavery, which is better than the other kind but still not good.}

L. Susan Brown, from The Politics of Individualism (1993):

One of the first questions people often ask when they are introduced to one another in our society is “what do you do?” This is more than just polite small talk — it is an indication of the immense importance work has for us. Work gives us a place in the world, it is our identity, it defines us, and, ultimately, it confines us. Witness the psychic dislocation when we lose our jobs, when we are fired, laid off, forced to retire or when we fail to get the job we applied for in the first place. An unemployed person is defined not in positive but in negative terms: to be unemployed is to lack work. To lack work is to be socialIy and economically marginalized. To answer “nothing” to the question “what do you do?” is emotionally difficult and socially unacceptable. Most unemployed people would rather answer such a question with vague replies like “I’m between contracts” or “I have a few resumes out and the prospects look promising” than admit outright that they do not work. For to not work in our society is to lack social significance — it is to be a nothing, because nothing is what you do.

Those who do work (and they are becoming less numerous as our economies slowly disintegrate) are something — they are teachers, nurses, doctors, factory workers, machinists, dental assistants, coaches, librarians, secretaries, bus drivers and so on. They have identities defined by what they do. They are considered normal productive members of our society. Legally their work is considered to be subject to an employment contract, which if not explicitly laid out at the beginning of employment is implicitly understood to be part of the relationship between employee and employer. The employment contract is based on the idea that it is possible for a fair exchange to occur between an employee who trades her/his skills and labor for wages supplied by the employer. Such an idea presupposes that a person’s skills and labor are not inseparable from them but are rather separate attributes that can be treated like property to be bought and sold. The employment contract assumes that a machinist or an exotic dancer, for instance, have the capacity to separate out from themselves the particular elements that are required by the employer and are then able to enter into an agreement with the employer to exchange only those attributes for money. The machinist is able to sell technical skills while the exotic dancer is able to sell sexual appeal, and, according to the employment contract, they both do so without selling themselves as people. Political scientists and economists refer to such attributes as “property in the person,” and speak about a person’s ability to contract out labor power in the form of property in the person.

In our society, then, work is defined as the act by which an employee contracts out her or his labor power as property in the person to an employer for fair monetary compensation. This way of describing work, of understanding it as a fair exchange between two equals, hides the real relationship between employer and employee: that of domination and subordination. For if the truth behind the employment contract were widely known, workers in our society would refuse to work, because they would see that it is impossible for human individuals to truly separate out labor power from themselves. “Property in the person” doesn’t really exist as something that an individual can simply sell as a separate thing. Machinists cannot just detach from themselves the specific skills needed by an employer; those skills are part of an organic whole that cannot be disengaged from the entire person, similarly, sex appeal is an intrinsic part of exotic dancers, and it is incomprehensible how such a constitutive, intangible characteristic could be severed from the dancers themselves. A dancer has to be totally present in order to dance, just like a machinist must be totally present in order to work; neither can just send their discrete skills to do the work for them. Whether machinist, dancer, teacher, secretary, or pharmacist, it is not only one’s skills that are being sold to an employer, it is also one’s very being. When employees contract out their labor power as property in the person to employers, what is really happening is that employees are selling their own self-determination, their own wills, their own freedom. In short, they are, during their hours of employment, slaves.

What is a slave? A slave is commonly regarded as a person who is the legal property of another and is bound to absolute obedience. The legal lie that is created when we speak of a worker’s capacity to sell property in the person without alienating her or his will allows us to maintain the false distinction between a worker and a slave. A worker must work according to the will of another. A worker must obey the boss, or ultimately lose the job. The control the employer has over the employee at work is absolute, there is in the end no negotiation — you do it the boss’ way or you hit the highway. It is ludicrous to believe that it is possible to separate out and sell “property in the person” while maintaining human integrity. To sell one’s labor power on the market is to enter into a relationship of subordination with one’s employer — it is to become a slave to the employer/master. The only major differences between a slave and a worker is that a worker is only a slave at work while a slave is a slave twenty-four hours a day, and slaves know that they are slaves, while most workers do not think of themselves in such terms.

What would a better way of work look like? It would more resemble what we call play than work. That is not to say that it would be easy, as play can be difficult and challenging, like we often see in the spores we do for fun. It would be self-directed, self-desired, and freely chosen. This means that it would have to be disentangled from the wage system, for as soon as one is paid one becomes subservient to whoever is doing the paying. As Alexander Berkman noted: “labor and its products must be exchanged without price, without profit, freely according to necessity.” Work would be done because it was desired, not because it was forced. Sound impossible? Not at all. This kind of work is done now, already, by most of us on a daily basis. It is the sort of activity we choose to do after our eight or ten hours of slaving for someone else in the paid workplace. It is experienced every time we do something worthwhile for no pay, every time we change a diaper, umpire a kid’s baseball game, run a race, give blood, volunteer to sit on a committee, counsel a friend, write a newsletter, bake a meal, or do a favor. We take part in this underground free economy when we coach, tutor, teach, build, dance, baby-sit, write a poem, or program a computer without getting paid. We must endeavor to enlarge these areas of free work to encompass more and more of our time, while simultaneously trying to change the structures of domination in the paid workplace as much as we possibly can.

Does Work Really Work? | The Anarchist Library

The Politics of Individualism - Wikipedia

Please to enjoy the annual proletarian celebration, comrades. Now back to work!

Sunday Sermon: The Carrot of Happier Tomorrows

{Raoul Vaneigem’s 1967 ‘The Revolution of Everyday Life’ reads like an angry French version of Theodore Roszak. Quite honestly, General Electric did more to revolutionize everyday life than did Raoul Vaneigem; nevertheless, the spirit of Maynard G. Krebs lives on in Vaneigem’s quaint manifesto.}

“The cult of work is honored from Cuba to China; socialism is nothing but the perfected form of capitalism.” (Raoul Vaneigem)

Raoul Vaneigem, from The Revolution of Everyday Life (1968):

In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create. What spark of humanity, of a possible creativity, can remain alive in a being dragged out of sleep at six every morning, jolted about in suburban trains, deafened by the racket of machinery, bleached and steamed by meaningless sounds and gestures, spun dry by statistical controls, and tossed out at the end of the day into the entrance halls of railway stations, those cathedrals of departure for the hell of weekdays and the nugatory paradise of weekends, where the crowd communes in weariness and boredom? From adolescence to retirement each 24-hour cycle repeats the same shattering bombardment, like bullets hitting a window: mechanical repetition, time-which-is-money, submission to bosses, boredom, exhaustion. From the butchering of youth’s energy to the gaping wound of old age, life cracks in every direction under the blows of forced labor. Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live. The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry. Already the front against forced labor is being formed; its gestures of refusal are molding the consciousness of the future. Every call for productivity in the conditions chosen by capitalist and Soviet economy is a call to slavery.

In the nineteenth century, the misery of the working classes made the right to work the counterpart of the right to be a slave, a right claimed from the dawn of time by prisoners about to be massacred; it was a question of surviving, of not disappearing physically. The imperatives of production are the imperatives of survival; from now on, however, people want to live, not just to survive.

Labor means ’suffering’. At least the nobility never forgot their own dignity and the indignity which marked their bondsmen. The aristocratic contempt for work reflected the master’s contempt for the dominated classes; work was the expiation to which they were condemned to all eternity by the divine decree which had willed them, for impenetrable reasons, to be inferior. Work took its place among the sanctions of Providence as the punishment for poverty, and because it was the means to a future salvation such a punishment could take on the attributes of pleasure; basically, work was less important than submission. Today, the bourgeoisie does not dominate, it exploits. It does not need to be master; it prefers to use. The principle of productivity simply replaced the principle of feudal authority.

Why has no one even attempted to understand this? Is it because work ameliorates the human condition and saves the poor, at least in illusion, from eternal damnation? Today the carrot of happier tomorrows has replaced the carrot of salvation in the next world; in both cases the present is always under the heel of oppression.

Is it because work transforms nature? Perhaps, but what can we do with a nature ordered in terms of profit and loss, in a world where the inflation of techniques conceals the deflation of the use-value of life? Besides, organized labor transforms the surface of continents as a by-product, not a purpose. Work to transform the world? Tell me another. The world is being transformed in the direction prescribed by the existence of forced labor, which is why it is being transformed so badly.

Perhaps man realizes himself in his forced labor? In the nineteenth century the concept of work retained a vestige of the notion of creativity. Zola describes a nailsmiths’ contest in which the workers competed in the perfection of their tiny masterpiece. Love of the trade and the vitality of an already smothered creativity incontestably helped man to bear ten or fifteen hours which nobody could have stood if some kind of pleasure had not slipped into it. The survival of the craft conception allowed each worker to contrive a precarious comfort in the hell of the factory. But Taylorism dealt the deathblow to a mentality which had been carefully fostered by archaic capitalism. It is useless to expect even a caricature of creativity from the conveyor belt.

Nowadays ambition and the love of the job well done are the indelible mark of defeat and the most mindless submission. Which is why, wherever submission is demanded, the old ideology wends its way, from the Arbeit Macht Frei of the concentration camps to the homilies of Henry Ford and Mao Tse-tung.

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The Situationist International Text Library/The Revolution of Everyday Life (nothingness.org)

Raoul Vaneigem - Wikipedia

"Treatise on Good Manners for the Younger Generations"

Another Pleasant Valley Thursday

{Greed, gender, dystopian gloom, and hopeful pessimism: bring it on!}

At Current Affairs, which he founded and which he edits, Nathan J. Robinson debunks the idea that either the Invisible Hand of the Market, the Law of Supply and Demand, or any other impersonal economic force drives capitalism; capitalism is fueled by greed. As Robinson explains:

We must reject the idea coming from many wealthy people that, as Jag Bhalla puts it, “unbridled greed is just simple human nature.” (Bhalla says we have accepted a “greedocracy.”) We ought to acknowledge the simple fact that those who try to get more than they need to live a life of basic comfort, have accumulated their luxuries because they have deprived others along the way. This has been done by choice. Everyone could have had plenty, because there is plenty to go around, but decisions are made every day that prevent this outcome. Nobody makes the capitalist maximize profits, or pay their workers less than they pay themselves, and “the market made me do it” is an excuse that should make socialists highly dubious. It is crucial for socialists to understand that human beings are not mere billiard balls whose moral choices are dictated by the systems we are in. We have agency, and that agency confers responsibility. There are no excuses for enriching one’s self and exploiting others.

Is Capitalism Built on Greed? ❧ Current Affairs

In “Why Is the Right So Horrified by Drag Queens?” Nathan Robinson also weighs in on the latest moral panic on the Right. “Pedophiles” and “groomers” are the insults du jour, and conservatives are horrified that children are exposed to “men in thongs,” which leads one to assume that conservatives believe children should not be allowed to go to a public beach. Robinson observes:

It is very interesting that the Right, strict defenders of parental rights when it comes to preventing children from exposure to critical race theory, suddenly starts talking about using criminal law and taking people’s children away if parents take their kids to a drag show. Here we see something fundamental about right-wing politics exposed: it is not actually, despite the endless use of the word “freedom,” about freedom at all. It is about freedom within a very narrowly prescribed range. The moment men start wearing women’s clothes and dancing, we must cover the children’s eyes in case they get infected with unconventional notions about gender roles.

One is tempted to ask, what are these people so afraid of? The obvious answer is, everyone and everything that is not like them.

Why Is the Right So Horrified By Drag Queens? ❧ Current Affairs

At Aeon, Audrey Borowski discusses a modern social philosopher so obscure that even I had not heard of him. Gunther Anders (1902--1992), Borowski informs us, was “a German philosopher and essayist of Jewish descent, whose work bears testimony to some of the 20th century’s major disasters and their effect on the intellectual landscape of the time. Anders set out to theorize those disasters and the impact of technology on modernity and the human condition, in particular technology’s gradual domination over all aspects of human activity – the commodification, dehumanization and even derealization of the world that had resulted from that domination.”

In the shadow of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Anders—like his friend Theodor Adorno—grew ever more skeptical of the Enlightenment and the belief in “progress” that it spawned. His view, as Borowski explains, was that “Much of the recent technological takeover of our lives has been underpinned by the myth that it was synonymous with emancipation and progress – a conceit it was suspect to challenge even while that very imperative further contributed to the growth of inequalities, the destruction of nature and the waste of resources. ‘The real terrorists’ in this regard are the so-called experts in charge who were as ignorant as us but ‘who continuously frighten our common world with the threat of destruction.’ Rather than ‘enlightening’ man, the progress of technology had ended up further anchoring his obsolescence and placing him outside of history.”

Those who find this perspective too gloomy can be cheered by the fact that hardly any of Anders’ writings, including his two-volume The Obsolescence of Humankind, are available in English. Those who find Anders’ view of modernity thought-provoking can thank Audrey Borowski for calling the man to our attention.

Günther Anders, a forgotten prophet for the 21st century? | Aeon Essays

At Aeon, Mara van der Lugt considers the eternal question: Is life’s glass half-empty or half-full? Which is to say, ought we to side with pessimists or with optimists? “Just as the pessimists believe that optimists are deceived in their insistence on the goods of life, so too the optimists think the pessimists’ eyes are skewed towards the bad: each side accuses the other of not having the right vision. The question thus becomes: what is the right vision?”

In her entertaining and wide-ranging essay (from Voltaire to Greta Thunberg), van der Lugt rejects both sunny optimism and gloomy pessimism in favor of a third stance which she calls “hopeful pessimism,” of which she finds Thunberg an exemplar:

If there is hope, it’s a dark, bleak hope, full of rage and grief and pain for what is being lost – but infused also with insistence, perdurance, determination. It is clear that this activist, at least, will continue to strive even if her efforts are doomed to fail. This is not optimism: if anything, it is a hopeful pessimism, and I believe it has every right to be called a virtue in our age.

Hopeful pessimism breaks through the rusted dichotomy of optimism vs pessimism. It is this attitude, this perspective that is exemplified in Thunberg and other figures who by their example give an affirmative answer to the question posed by Paul Kingsnorth: ‘Is it possible to see the future as dark and darkening further; to reject false hope and desperate pseudo-optimism without collapsing into despair?’

In short, the philosopher we need today is Yogi Berra, who famously said “It ain’t over till it’s over.” He is also reputed to have said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” which applies perfectly to our contemporary American predicament.

In these dark times, the virtue we need is hopeful pessimism | Aeon Essays

Saturday Lecture: Markets and Morals

F.R. Hoare, from “The Fundamental Laws of Economics Are Moral Laws”:

When Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848, he pointed out the problems of capitalism and its disastrous effect on society. Marx correctly stated that capitalism was destroying family, property, and religious faith. Capitalism makes the individual the primary economic unit, rather than the family. Work outside the home, first the father and children and then the mother, pulls apart the family unit just as family work on the farm and in the workshop hold it together. Capitalism is the enemy of private property because unfettered competition takes property out of the hands of the many and concentrates it in the hands of the few. Capitalism is the enemy of religion because it requires an atmosphere that excludes moral considerations from economics in order to pave the way for the unfettered reign of “market forces.” The disaster that follows is left to the charity of others with no consideration to the injustices that caused the disaster.

We need nothing less than an economics that is itself a system of morals in its basic principles. At one time it was an accepted thing that economics was a more or less mathematical science, into which morals could only enter as a disturbing element. Even the philanthropists asked no more than that moral considerations should occasionally be allowed to temper the practical conclusions drawn by scientific analysis. Unhappily, practical experience showed that economic processes, and the men who worked them, having once been set in motion without regard to morals, did not easily admit the introduction of morals at a later stage.

Even those who by their religious profession acknowledged that morals should come first were generally willing to agree that the case of economics was "somehow different." They did this even when they had a sound system of moral philosophy to draw on. As for those who had no sound philosophy behind them, but only amiable intentions, their attempt to regulate economics by morals was foredoomed to failure. For they proposed to substitute for non-moral economics, not a system of economic justice, but selections from the Sermon on the Mount.

Now, in so far as it really brought back to the world a desire for economic justice and for bettering the lot of the dispossessed, Marxist Communism did a good and much-needed work. But in so far as it conceived of economic justice wholly in terms of a single class, even though the largest--indeed, in so far as it thought in terms of classes of any kind, to the exclusion of the individual and families--it could never give the world a universally satisfying justice or one founded on the true needs of human nature. And in so far as it made economic betterment an end in itself and taught that all the values of human life could be realized by an economic change, it made economic betterment worthless and human life a mockery.

When we speak of economic reconstruction on a moral basis it is not meant that the whole of economics can be comprised in a moral code. The view of economics as a non-moral, quasi-mathematical science contains this much truth: that a great part of it must always consist of technical description and analysis, since it has to determine what economic aims are technically practicable and what are the most efficient methods of attaining them.

But the subject matter of economics is, after all, a field of human activity, namely man's efforts to supply his material needs. Its material aims, therefore, must ultimately be judged by their conformity to the moral ends of human life, and its methods by the moral standards of human conduct. Men remain morally responsible for their deliberate acts in all circumstances, including their economic relations.

In the Middle Ages economists had no doubt that economics was, at bottom, the science of how men ought to behave to one another in the course of getting a living. Hence, they dealt primarily with men and their behavior, and only secondarily with goods and money and their accumulation. They emphasized the sinfulness of avarice and of taking advantage of another's urgent necessities; they held that the craftsman was under a moral obligation to do good work; they required that wages, prices, and rates of interest should be just and not merely competitive; and so forth. They rightly considered that to disregard these principles was bad economics.

In the second half of the 18th century economists began to teach openly that each man should pursue solely his economic self-interest. They tried to bring this into a system of morals by declaring that the economic uniformities resulting from this simplification of motives constituted a natural harmony; but the practical effect of their doctrine was to put economics into a separate compartment of life, outside morals, ruled by jungle law under slogans like "business is business."

In the next phase of Liberalism, the economic uniformities in question came to be regarded as inexorable laws of nature against which rebellion was as futile as against the law of gravitation. This determinism was used to prevent philanthropists from trying to mitigate the system. Marx gave a fresh turn to it by representing the existing economic system, and all economic change, as brought about entirely by a predetermined historical process. Our approach, far from admitting that moral considerations constitute a deviation from the strict path of economic truth, implies that maladjustments even on the strictly economic plane may be traceable to moral error.

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The ChesterBelloc Mandate: The Seven Principles of the New Radicalism (distributist.blogspot.com)

Frederick Russell Hoare (1888—1951) was an author, editor, and translator who specialized in classical antiquity and in the history of the Catholic Church. His best-known books include Eight Decisive Books of Antiquity, The Western Fathers, and The Papacy and the Modern State.

Saturday Lecture: Besotted by the Market

{Is it a good day for questioning capitalism? It’s always a good day for questioning capitalism!}

“And the man on the radio won’t leave me alone / He wants to take my money for something that I’ve never been shown…” (Gram Parsons, “Return of the Grievous Angel”) ¹

“I’m watching my TV, and a man comes on and tells me / how white my shirts should be / but he can’t be a man / ‘cause he doesn’t smoke / the same cigarettes as me.” (Jagger & Richards, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”)

Jerry Z. Muller, from The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought (2003):

We live in a world shaped by capitalism. In one or another of its ever-changing forms, capitalism has been with us for three centuries, and it will be with us a long time yet. In twentieth-century Europe, communism and fascism both failed to provide viable alternatives, and their non-European analogues have not proved any more successful.

Capitalism is too important and complex a subject to be left to the economists. In the 1970s, some of the most penetrating analysts of contemporary society put the subject of the moral, social, and political ramifications of capitalism on the front burner of cultural commentary. Some of these commentators, like Jurgen Habermas, were on the left; some, like Irving Kristol, were on the right; some, like Daniel Bell and Christopher Lasch, were in between. Their claims were many and diverse: that the familial hearth was being invaded by the forces of commerce; that civic virtue was disappearing; that the willingness to defer gratification upon which capitalism depends was in decline; that individualism and selfishness were destroying any sense of collective purpose; that work was losing its meaning; that men and women were besotted by consumer goods they did not need; that the international market was destroying particular historical cultures, leaving only a colorless syncretism or a hedonistic nihilism; that the spread of market values was eroding the very traditions and institutions on which capitalism depended; that the technological limits of growth had been reached; that the rich were getting richer while the poor were getting poorer—for all these reasons and more, capitalism was in crisis.

Such apprehensions had been on the minds of intellectuals for a long time, at least since the eighteenth century. Thinking about the ramifications of capitalism forms one of the great threads running through modern European intellectual history. Reflections on the cultural, moral, and political effects of capitalism had been central not only to economists like Adam Smith and Joseph Schumpeter, but to figures not usually thought of in connection with the market, from Voltaire through Hegel, from Edmund Burke through Matthew Arnold and beyond.

Does the market make people richer or poorer? If it does make people richer, is that necessarily a good thing? ‘I’ve been rich, and I’ve been poor. Believe me, rich is better,” declares the heroine of the film ‘The Big Heat’ (1953). But the deeply entrenched traditions of classical republicanism and Christian ascetism have claimed otherwise. In one way or another, a variety of modern thinkers from Rousseau to Marcuse have taken issue with the assumption that richer is better than poorer, arguing that material gain comes at the expense of moral loss. Then there are questions of capitalism and culture. Does the market create a society more oriented to this-worldly rather than other-worldly concerns, and is that a point in its favor or against it? Is there a characteristic mentality associated with the market? If so, does that mentality spill over to other realms, and if it does, is that spillover desirable or lamentable?

How the market affects the family has been another long-standing concern among analysts of capitalism, and whether the spread of market relations is conducive to the liberation of women. Does capitalism foster equality or create new inequalities? Might there be a tension between the emphasis on equality fostered by political democracy and successfully harnessing creative and industrious individuals to the capitalist machine? What is the affect of the market on premarket institutions—political, religious, social, familial, etc.? Does the market support, erode, or reshape them? How can counterweights be created to the values of the market? How is mindfulness to be cultivated, making individuals more reflective about the market and its effects? 

The market is now and ever has been a morally complex and ambiguous entity. Herbert Marcuse observed that the market is full of people trying to convince you to buy things you don’t really need and for the sake of which you might end up sacrificing your time, pleasure, and creativity. This is arguably one of the most important lessons that those who must forge a life within capitalist society must learn. On the other hand, F.A. Hayek argued that the market coordinates the manifold activities of individuals, allowing men and women with radically conflicting purposes to cooperate by focusing on shared means, thereby minimizing the need for consensus. Those sympathetic to Marcuse’s insight should reflect on Hayek’s, and vice-versa.

Even before the demise of the Soviet Union and its empire, it was becoming clear that the world, taken as a whole, was moving toward capitalism, not away from it. At a time when many European intellectuals and their American acolytes were referring to the current age as one of 'late capitalism,' political and economic forces were leading nations not beyond capitalism, but toward more market-oriented economies and societies. The quest of most nations, even in what was once the 'Communist bloc', is to join the international capitalist economy.

The argument that material prosperity is the prerequisite for the development of higher civilization has been repeated by virtually every advocate of economic growth; but contemporary analysts and critics can draw on a long tradition of asking what economic growth is for, and whether prosperity might be more adequately measured in terms other than Gross National Product. 

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¹ Although I suspect that Gram Parsons was referring not to commercial advertisements but to radio evangelists soliciting money in exchange for eternal salvation, I think the line works equally well either way.

Capitalism: a system that values nothing while putting a price on everything