The Little Red Blog

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

Saint Scrooge: The Humbug Hypothesis

{‘Tis the season and all that, and what better way to cultivate the Christmas spirit than by taking a contrarian look at Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”?)

Although Michael Levin’s Christmas classic, “In Defense of Scrooge,” was written in 2000, its message is timeless: What doth it profit a man to gain the affection of his fellow men, if he should thereby disturb the law of supply and demand?

Mr. Levin was writing for the Mises Institute, an organization founded in 1982 to spread the economic gospel of Ludwig von Mises and the “Austrian school” of economics. Mises and his followers promoted “a free-market capitalist economy and a private-property order that rejects taxation, monetary debasement, and a coercive state monopoly of protective services.” Levin, who in 2000 was teaching philosophy at City College of New York, was entirely serious in defending Charles Dickens’ ‘Ebenezer Scrooge,’ a character whose name has become synonymous with miserliness; Scrooge’s critics, wrote Levin, failed to understand basic economics and the way in which wealth serves the public good regardless of the motives of the wealthy. ¹  

In reframing “A Christmas Carol,” Levin asks us to set aside our sentimental concerns and face the cold, hard facts of economic life:  

Let's look without preconceptions at Scrooge's allegedly underpaid clerk, Bob Cratchit. The fact is, if Cratchit's skills were worth more to anyone than the fifteen shillings Scrooge pays him weekly, there would be someone glad to offer it to him. Since no one has, and since Cratchit's profit-maximizing boss is hardly a man to pay for nothing, Cratchit must be worth exactly his present wages. No doubt Cratchit needs—i.e., wants—more, to support his family and care for Tiny Tim. But Scrooge did not force Cratchit to father children he is having difficulty supporting. If Cratchit had children while suspecting he would be unable to afford them, he, not Scrooge, is responsible for their plight. And if Cratchit didn't know how expensive they would be, why must Scrooge assume the burden of Cratchit's misjudgment? 

Levin could have added that Scrooge did not cause Tiny Tim’s medical issues and therefore has no obligation to help alleviate them. Moreover, even if Tiny Tim had been in perfect health, Bob Cratchit, economic illiterate and chronic complainer that he was, would still have bitched about being underpaid and overworked. Cratchit, like so many workers, preferred to curse the darkness rather than to save enough money to buy a candle:

As for that one lump of coal Scrooge allows him, it bears emphasis that Cratchit has not been chained to his chilly desk. If he stays there, he shows by his behavior that he prefers his present wages-plus-comfort package to any other he has found, or supposes himself likely to find. Actions speak louder than grumbling, and the reader can hardly complain about what Cratchit evidently finds satisfactory. 

Scrooge, as Levin sees it, is the only sensible person in Dickens’ maudlin tale, the only one who understands that the social safety net must not become a cushy hammock for congenital idlers, lest they continue to idle:  

More notorious even than his miserly ways are Scrooge's cynical words. "Are there no prisons," he jibes when solicited for charity, "and the Union workhouses?" Terrible, right? Lacking in compassion? Not necessarily. As Scrooge observes, he supports those institutions with his taxes. Already forced to help those who can't or won't help themselves, it is not unreasonable for him to balk at volunteering additional funds for their extra comfort. Scrooge is skeptical that many would prefer death to the workhouse, and he is unmoved by talk of the workhouse's cheerlessness. He is right to be unmoved, for society's provisions for the poor must be, well, Dickensian. The more pleasant the alternatives to gainful employment, the greater will be the number of people who seek these alternatives, and the fewer there will be who engage in productive labor. If society expects anyone to work, work had better be a lot more attractive than idleness. 

Holiday or no, “he who does not work, neither shall he eat” (except perhaps a few scattered crumbs of cake):

The normally taciturn Scrooge lets himself go a bit when Cratchit hints that he would like a paid Christmas holiday. "It's not fair," Scrooge objects, a charge not met by Cratchet's patently irrelevant protest that Christmas comes but once a year. Unfair it is, for Cratchit would doubtless object to a request for a day's uncompensated labor, "and yet," as Scrooge shrewdly points out, "you don't think me ill-used when I pay a day's wages for no work." Cratchit has apparently forgotten the golden rule. (Or is it that Scrooge has so much more than Cratchit that the golden rule does not come into play? But Scrooge doesn't think he has that much, and shouldn't he have a say in the matter?) 

Dickens attempted to shame Scrooge by comparing him with “good old Fezziwig,” Scrooge’s first employer, who “was a lot freer with a guinea,” as demonstrated by his throwing his employees a lavish Christmas party. Michael Levin notes, “What the Ghost of Christmas Past does not explain is how Fezziwig afforded it. Did he attempt to pass the added costs to his customers? Or did young Scrooge pay for it anyway by working for marginally lower wages?” An employer’s profit is sacrosanct and not to be tampered with; all costs, even holiday festivities, must therefore come out of wages or be added on to prices.  

Despite the calumnies heaped upon him by Dickens and by Dickens’ readers, Scrooge is a veritable paragon of citizenship, contributing to the common good while asking for nothing in return save what the market’s Invisible Hand gives him:

The biggest of the Big Lies about Scrooge is the pointlessness of his pursuit of money. "Wealth is of no use to him. He doesn't do any good with it," opines ruddy nephew Fred. Wrong on both counts. Scrooge apparently lends money, and to discover the good he does one need only inquire of the borrowers. Here is a homeowner with a new roof, and there a merchant able to finance a shipment of tea, bringing profit to himself and happiness to tea drinkers, all thanks to Scrooge. Dickens doesn't mention Scrooge's satisfied customers, but there must have been plenty of them for Scrooge to have gotten so rich. 

Levin concedes that Scrooge may not exude much in the way of charm or geniality; but “in his undemonstrative way, Scrooge is productive and satisfied with his lot, which is to say happy.” In short, judges Levin, “Scrooge is an entrepreneur whose ideas and practices benefit his employees, society at large, and himself.”

God bless us, everyone! As they say at the Mises Institute, and as Michael Levin concluded his essay, “Bah! Humbug!”

In Defense of Scrooge | Mises Institute

¹ My assertion that Levin’s article was “entirely serious” is entirely based on the observation that, to my knowledge, neither Ludwig von Mises nor his followers ever displayed a sense of humor.   

Bob Cratchit, Bolshevik agitator, haranguing the saintly Ebenezer Scrooge

Saturday Lecture: Back to the Muck?

{Note: What has this blog come to? I am as surprised as anyone to find myself giving a platform to Jonah Goldberg, author of (among other things) Liberal Fascism, a shallow, tendentious, and ahistorical screed. The following expresses a point of view with which I do not agree, but it is not a mere hit-piece; it thereby demonstrates a modest improvement in Goldberg's manners, if not his thinking.)   

Jonah Goldberg, from Suicide of the West (2019 edition):

Humans are animals who evolved from other animals who in turn evolved from ever more embarrassing animals and before that from a humiliating sea of ooze, slime, meats, and vegetables in the primordial stew. We pulled ourselves out of the muck, not some Garden of Eden; indeed, if the Garden of Eden ever existed, it was a slum. We humans created the Miracle of modernity all on our own, and if we lose it, that will be our fault too.

The crisis that besets our civilization is fundamentally psychological. Specifically, we are shot through with ingratitude for the Miracle of liberal capitalism. The startling truth is that almost all of human progress has taken place in the last three hundred years (and for many of the billions of non-Westerners lifted out of crushing poverty thanks to capitalism, it’s happened in the last thirty years). Around the year 1700, in a corner of the Eurasian landmass, humanity stumbled into a new way of organizing society and thinking about the world, a way to lift themselves out of the endless cycle of poverty, hunger, and war that defines most of history.

Liberal democratic capitalism is truly miraculous in myriad ways. It is superior to every other system ever conceived of—never mind implemented—at fighting poverty, improving health, and unleashing the creative spirit of every human being. It has only one hugely significant drawback: it is unnatural. If humans were meant to live cheek by jowl with strangers and engage in commerce rather than violence with them, we would have started doing precisely that hundreds of thousands of years ago. But we didn’t. If democracy, individualism, and the free market were humankind’s destiny, they should have appeared and taken hold a bit earlier in the evolutionary record. But they didn’t. The emergence of freedom and prosperity was nothing short of a miracle.

As Americans we are doubly blessed, because the radical ideas that made the miracle possible were written not just into the Constitution but in our hearts, laying the groundwork for our uniquely prosperous society. Those ideas are: Our rights come from God, not from the government; the government belongs to us, we do not belong to it; the individual is sovereign--we are all captains of our own souls, not bound by the circumstances of our birth; the fruits of our labors belong to us. Yet our schools and universities, to the extent they teach the Western tradition at all, do so from a perspective of resentful hostility toward our accomplishments. By turning the Founders into nothing more than greedy white racists, by decrying Columbus as nothing more than a genocidal murderer, by arguing that slavery is a uniquely Western and American sin, by claiming that ‘Western Civilization’ and ‘American exceptionalism’ are nothing more than euphemisms for racism and imperialism, the ressentiment-drenched intellectuals at the commanding heights of our culture seek to make the story of the Miracle into a Curse, leaving them as the only legitimate storytellers of our civilization.

A majority of Americans, I believe, are ungrateful for what the Miracle has brought us. Sometimes this ingratitude manifests itself as simply taking one’s good fortune for granted. And that is enough to destroy a civilization. Because maintaining a civilization takes work. If we don’t teach people to hold what they have precious, they simply won’t bother defending it against those who think what we have is evil. We as a society are ungrateful for our collective inheritance.

The fads for socialism and nationalism today are both expressions of a crisis of meaning in liberal democracies. That crisis is a real one. But the remedy is not to replace the Miracle of liberal democratic capitalism with a system that denies people the freedom to find their own sources of meaning and belonging. “How should we live?” is still a question—perhaps the crucial question—but the only system that will guarantee that most people will find an answer that works for them is one that protects the individual right to look for that answer. As we are increasingly taught to view our traditions as a system of oppression, exploitation, and privilege, the principles of liberty and the rule of law are under attack from left and right. For the West to survive, we must renew our sense of gratitude for what our civilization has given us and rediscover the ideals and habits of the heart that led us out of the bloody muck of the past—or back to the muck we will go.

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Readers interested in Goldberg's Suicide of the West should be careful not to confuse it with James Burnham's 1964 Suicide of the West or with the 2002 Suicide of the West by Richard Koch and Chris Smith. The West has been on suicide watch for so long that it's easy to overlook its continued survival.

Saturday Lecture: We Are All Arminians Now

{ Arminianism is an offshoot of, and a challenge to, Calvinism:  “Of or relating to the theology of Jacobus Arminius and his followers, who rejected the Calvinist doctrines of predestination and election and who believed that human free will is compatible with God's sovereignty." In Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Benjamin Friedman claims that the development of modern market economies was accompanied by, influenced by, and to some extent justified by a shift in European and American religious thinking. Friedman says that theological dissatisfaction with the Calvinist doctrine of predestination led to a diminished emphasis on Original Sin and to the triumph of what some have called ‘modern Pelagianism’. Friedman notes that it was Protestant theologians, not secular philosophes, who brought about the shift.}

Benjamin Friedman, from Religion and the Rise of Capitalism:

Economics, as an intellectual discipline, remains at its core a child of Enlightenment thinking, with all the optimism about the human enterprise that that epochal movement entailed. In particular, the American ethos has from the beginning been one of progress, specifically including improvement in material living standards. And for most of the nation’s existence, the combination of technological advance and physical expansion—at first expansion of agricultural land under cultivation, and later expansion of the stock of factories and machinery—has delivered on that promise. (At times when it has not, the public has dramatically manifested its disappointment, often with predictably unfortunate social and political consequences.) Far from becoming immiserated, America’s growing workforce doubled its standard of living roughly once every forty years over nearly two centuries.

Along the way, economic thinking has mostly reflected the expansive vision of human possibilities that this experience of growth and improvement has validated, together with an optimism about the world’s future that the dominant religious thinking of the English-speaking world has imparted to it ever since the time of Adam Smith and David Hume. The historical image of economics as a product of the Enlightenment is accurate. The idea that because of this parentage economics has been uninfluenced by religious thinking is not. The era in which Smith and Hume lived, and from which modern Western economics sprang, was also one of fundamental transition in the religious presumptions shared by much of the population. Especially during the extended period while this transition in religious thinking was in progress, the contention surrounding it was sufficiently fierce to attract the attention of the public at large, including those like Hume and Smith who self-consciously took little interest in such matters. The basic religious ideas at issue in these debates profoundly affected their view of the world. What they thought about economic questions reflected that influence.

Even the very notion of economic policy, as we know it today, is in large part a consequence of these ongoing changes in religious thinking. The point of any public policy is, consciously and deliberately, to change aspects of society for the better. But the idea that such improvement is even possible rests on very basic presumptions about the world in which we live, and our capacity to shape it by the actions we collectively choose. The new religious thinking of the late seventeenth and then the eighteenth century, and in America on into the nineteenth, provided the cultural soil in which men and women could contemplate such possibilities. That creative thinkers would then extend this endeavor to such a central feature of everyday life as the economy in which they lived and worked and earned their livelihood was only natural. With the passage of time, and ever greater availability of information and every broader opportunities for public participation, it was natural as well that the general public took up an interest in the debate. But that engagement has likewise rested in part on a worldview shaped by the era’s prevailing religious presumptions. It does so today.

Because economics emerged from the Enlightenment, and because the conventional image of the Enlightenment downplays the importance of religion in favor of humanistic thinking, the commonplace assumption is that economics in turn likewise stands apart from religious ideas. This is not true, nor has it been, ever since the inception of economics as a modern intellectual discipline. Taking account of the influence of religious thinking is essential to a full understanding of one of the great areas of modern thought.

And because practical matters of economic policy are so pervasively important for most citizens, today far more so than in Adam Smith’s time, public engagement with the ongoing debate over whatever are the economic policy questions of the day—taxes and government spending, support for industry and job creation, incentives to undertake research, impediments to international trade, regulation of the workplace for purposes of safety and of products for purposes of consumer protection, environmental restrictions, what degree of economic inequality is acceptable and what to do when prevailing inequalities are excessive, even how to preserve economic activity in the face of a disease pandemic—is increasingly central to modern political life in a democratic republic.

Ordinary citizens bring to this debate whatever worldview they hold. Whether consciously or not, that worldview too rests on presumptions that originate in the religious thinking of either today or sometime in the past. Understanding the substance and origins of the worldview that underlies our fellow citizens’ participation in this essential part of our democracy is sure to make it work better.

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Books Report

{It turns out that the brand-new Missoula Public Library, in addition to having lots of open space, big windows, natural light, meeting rooms galore, and a 3^rd-story patio with a lovely view of the Clark Fork River, still has books—old-fashioned books, that is, the kind you can hold in your hand. The future may belong to e-books, but trees are still being pulped into paper so that you and I can read books the way we always have. Anyway…}

Benjamin Friedman’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism is a new look at an old subject on which Max Weber and R.H. Tawney have long been deemed the experts (though they essentially disagreed in their conclusions). Friedman argues that “our ideas about economics and economic policy have long-standing roots in religious thinking. The influence of religious beliefs on modern Western economics has been profound, and it remains important today.” Friedman is not asserting that the early modern economists (e.g., Adam Smith) “were religiously dedicated men who self-consciously brought their theological commitments to bear on their economic thinking.” Rather, he claims that “the creators of modern economics lived at a time when religion was both more pervasive and more central than in today’s Western world” and that theology was integrated into intellectual life in a way it no longer is—Adam Smith, for instance, taught “natural theology” in his role as a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow. Unavoidably, then, the religious atmosphere of the time (the 18^th century) influenced the creation and development of what was then called “political economy”.

Friedman contends that this is far more than an academic issue; he says that “Our way of looking at the world of which markets and incentives and economic behavior are an essential part” cannot be properly understood without historical perspective. In particular, “The belief in the efficacy of market mechanisms as a way to harness our individual economic energies for our own good and that of others too” arose from, and is dependent on, a certain kind of religious belief; the Invisible Hand of the market is merely a secularized version of what once was known as “divine providence”.

[I note, without having read past Friedman’s brief Introduction, the absence of three names from either the book’s index or its bibliography: Robert H. Nelson (author of Economics as Religion); Eugene McCarraher (Enchantments of Mammon); and Deirdre McCloskey, staunch defender of bourgeois capitalism and its moral foundations (Bourgeois Virtue, Bourgeois Equality, and Bourgeois Dignity). I note those not to criticize Benjamin Friedman, but to alert interested readers who might want to delve further into the topic.]   

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Andrew Marantz, with whose work I am not familiar, has written a timely book titled Anti-Social: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. Marantz chronicles the ways in which America’s “alt-Right” has exploited the new social media platforms to “flood the zone” with misinformation, unsourced claims, absurd rumors, and conspiracy theories. (To those who reflexively insist that “both sides do it,” I would point out that, since the mainstream media is, as we have been told time and again, reliably liberal, there is no need for liberals to undermine it with “alternative facts”.)

Marantz’s book was published in 2019. He confesses to having followed the alt-Right’s online antics for several years without taking the phenomenon seriously; the ascendancy to the White House of “a pop culture punchline,” the sight of neo-Nazis parading through American streets, and the October 2018 attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue by a notionally “alt-Right” gunman, changed Marantz’s perspective. What had been either ironically amusing or mildly annoying, depending on your point of view, was becoming dangerous; and there is no reason to think it will get less dangerous any time soon.

The bigger story here is “how the boundaries between technology, media, and politics have been erased, resulting in a deeply broken informational landscape.” Cultural Marxists (who, as we know, are lurking everywhere) would claim that this is not a new development at all; what is new, however, is the increasing ubiquity and the increasingly invasive reach of technology. Gresham’s Law (“Bad money drives out good”) applies to the currency of information as well: bad information drives out good, and a Big Lie, as Mark Twain said, can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.

“The culture war is being fought daily from your smartphone,” Marantz quotes a right-wing culture warrior as saying. We can only hope that the microchips Bill Gates has imbedded in the COVID-19 “vaccines” can neutralize the threat of truth-tellers like QAnon; obviously, the decades-long project of fluoridating the public water supply has not worked.   

Something About Nothing

{NB: Today's post is more confused than usual. I had trouble coming up with a title for it because, frankly, I had no idea what it was about--capitalism? Commodification? Christianity? Nihilism? Caveat lector and all that...} 

Complaining that “meaning has been commodified,” Wendy Syfret (at The Guardian) recommends we choose nihilism instead. It has apparently escaped her attention that nihilism, too, has been commodified, along with everything else: e.g., John Cougar’s 1980 album, Nothin’ Matters and What If It Did. To complain about commodification in the 21^st century is akin to complaining about gravity: you may not like it, but you cannot escape it.

Commodification, for those coming late to the discussion, is “the assignment of economic value to things not ordinarily thought of in economic terms”; examples of this include human labor, clean air and water, health care, national and civic pride, children, marriage, love, spirituality, ad infinitum. In a capitalist economy, anything can be commodified, which simply means that anything can be mass-produced, packaged, marketed, and sold. You cannot put a price on happiness, for instance, but you can put a price on self-help books and videos that promise you happiness (or that promise to explain to you why happiness is a myth and/or the futility of chasing after it); you cannot put a price on patriotism, but you can manufacture little flag lapel pins and shame people into buying and wearing them; and, while money can’t buy you love, lord knows it will buy you myriad love-substitutes, love manuals, love potions (i.e. alcohol), “love” t-shirts and bumper stickers, and endless helpful hints on loving yourself even when no one else will. ¹

In fairness, the reign of commodification pre-dates the rise of capitalism. The 16^th-century Protestant Reformation was at least partly motivated by the widespread hawking of “papal indulgences”: “the reduction or commutation, in exchange for money, of punishments to be inflicted in the afterlife for sins committed on earth,” in other words, time off from Purgatory for those who coughed up to Rome the necessary do-re-mi. This system of spiritual extortion—which, as venal as it was in its very conception, was further corrupted in practice by unscrupulous (and sometimes unlicensed) indulgence-peddlers—merely formalized the classic Christian notion that the provision of charity to the poor and of care to the sick would earn heavenly recompense; beggars, by the grace of God, were opportunities for the wealthy to give alms and thereby to ensure their entrance into the Kingdom. Could salvation literally be sold? Why not, in a religious system based on the idea that “You were bought at a price”? ¹

To return to Wendy Syfret’s complaint about the commodification of meaning: “There’s a game I like to play,” she writes: “spot the meaningless meaning. It refers to the increasing desire for every brand, product, or service to present itself as somehow meaningful. Sometimes it’s a podcast advertisement that talks about community, memory, nostalgia, and values for two minutes before revealing it’s talking about mortgage insurance. Or a pharmacy-brand mascara that positions itself as a radical weapon of self-expression. At first this obsession with meaning is little more than annoying. But dig a little deeper, and you’ll realize how noxious it can be.”

Well, yes; and that noxiousness goes beyond the commodification of meaning to its trivialization, accompanied by the debasement of both language and thought upon which modern advertising depends. Why do Americans fall for nonsensical scams like the current “Horse de-wormer cures COVID”? Because they have been lied to every waking moment of their lives and they have given up trying to muck out the Augean stables of mendaciousness; they have been exposed to so much s—t they can no longer tell it from Shinola. The simple presentation of facts is now treated as just another sales pitch, and reality itself has become an exercise in branding—which do you prefer, Trump Reality or Fauci Reality, Mainstream Media Reality or Fox News Reality?

I can’t blame Wendy Syfret for proposing Nihilism as an antidote to commodified Meaning, but she needs to understand that Nihilism is just another product; it needs to be marketed. I suggest she market it as an over-the-counter non-FDA-approved supplement; it could be placed on the shelf right next to my personal favorite non-prescription medication, Placebo—and don’t forget New Improved Placebo, with more inert ingredients than ever!

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Nihilism can make you happier, even in the Covid era. No really, let me explain | Philosophy books | The Guardian

¹ While one could argue for or against the Beatles' proposition that "Money can't buy me love," there was no disputing the wrongness of their claim that "Fun is the one thing that money can't buy." Ah, but they sold a lot of records that way--didn't they?

² 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, “You are not your own, for you were bought at a price,” repeated in 1 Corinthians 7:23, “You were bought at a price, therefore, do not become slaves of men.” The Book of Acts insists (Acts 20:28), “Be shepherds of the church of God, which He purchased with His own blood.” In early Christianity, one of the most common theological interpretations of Jesus’ death was the “ransom” theory, the idea that Jesus had given himself up as a ransom; that interpretation eventually foundered on the question of to whom the ransom was being paid—to God? To Satan? To Death? No one knew.        

Saturday Lecture: To Redeem, Not To Destroy

“Everywhere one could hear the sound of chisel and hammer, and not even darkness could quell the eagerness of those who were having splendid mansions built for themselves. All along the streets you could see wood being polished, marble being cut. Floors were being raised upon floors, as though to create a rampart against death.” (Unnamed medieval source cited by B. Groethuysen, The Bourgeois)

"The bourgeoisie is the carrier of the chromosome of banality." (Jean Baudrillard)

James Matthew Wilson, from “Conservative Critics of the Bourgeoisie” (2013):

The creative destruction of bourgeois capitalism and the secular individualism of bourgeois liberalism have been the primary causes of the disintegration of traditional communities and customs. And to the extent that the radical Left has at times wreaked even greater destruction, the conservative recognizes that the Left constitutes the exasperation and extension of bourgeois notions rather than a sui generis ideology. To the extent that liberalism is a bourgeois philosophy, the conservative will necessarily appear antibourgeois. And yet [that statement] may seem to conceal a nonetheless stubborn fact: the conservative is almost invariably bourgeois himself and bears as a conscious duty the preservation of the institutions and sensibility by means of which he lives in and understands the world.

I am conscious of the risk the conservative must always run of waxing nostalgic for the preindustrial aristocratic society that nurtured and developed the great intellectual and spiritual achievement of Western civilization. The genius of the West was first conceived within the aristocratic polis of Athens; it in some ways developed in the custody of the gentleman, soldier, farmer of ancient Rome; and it flowered with almost unrepeatable brilliance in the growth of the mystical body in medieval Christendom. Cultural historians have made it a truism that the rise of the first middle classes in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries sowed the seeds of decay of this tradition. By [the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries], the modern bourgeoisie had become sufficiently powerful and conscious of itself that it could be at once the object of ridicule as small-minded, obtuse, and usurious—and the object of ridicule as the locus of nostalgia for an age before its pragmatic, bustling enterprises came to dominate public and private life in the emerging states of Europe and America.

Many of the most significant modern conservative writers and scholars have cast a critical gaze upon the legacy of the West and its ostensible decay at the hands of a rising tide of acquisitive middlemen—butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers (as W. B. Yeats demeaned them), bankers, merchants, and manufacturers (as we know them). The career of most of these figures spans the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth—that period when antibourgeois feeling was so widespread that it produced myriad alternatives to the bourgeois liberal order, including the formulation of modern Catholic social doctrine, on the one hand, and the ideologies of communism and National Socialism on the other. It would be remarkable were one to read with admiration and awe the work of so many great thinkers and not inherit their distaste for the advent of bourgeois society.

Still, the most severe critics of bourgeois culture have been, with certain major exceptions, members of the bourgeoisie. The most perceptive critics of the American middle class have been, like Russell Kirk, its own members. In some instances, this criticism has amounted to a kind of self-hatred, a death wish, but by and large such critics have faulted the modern middle class for harboring suicidal tendencies of its own. To attack bourgeois liberalism has been, then, part of an effort to save the West not only from decay but from suicide. Presumably, then, it has been a project undertaken out of charity rather than contempt.

For example, Jacques Maritain insisted that the bourgeoisie was decadent not because it was sensible and restrained but because it leveled the ancient edifices of the sacred and the traditional to subject all things to acquisitive appetite and worldly power. For Maritain this moral materialism demanded secularism—endless acquisition and endless progress; and so a return of the monarchy, and with it an aristocratic society, seemed but one possible element in his larger quest to reconvert France to its ancient faith. His 1925 book, Three Reformers, was a work of destructive intellectual history, dissecting the thought of Martin Luther, René Déscartes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the sources of modern egoism, rationalism, and emotionalism. With a curious irony, Rousseau had originated the philosophical critique of the bourgeois order as lukewarm, oppressive, and disenchanting, favoring instead the noble savage born free of the civilization of professions and counting houses. But Maritain had transformed that critique: it was not civilization he opposed, only the secular bourgeoisie that had sought to destroy the church as an obstacle to greed and thoughtlessness.

With the rise of the totalitarian ideologies in the 1930s, Maritain became the first and most influential theorist of Christian democracy. His Integral Humanism (1936) maintained his critique of secular liberalism and of the Left more generally, observing, “Atheist communism is only bourgeois deism turned the other way round.” But he also sought to affirm the bourgeois morality that made modern democracy tenable, calling for a new sanctity or asceticism that would leaven rather than lighten bourgeois self-discipline. Liberal individualism was destructive, he argued, but it contained a potent seed of truth regarding the dignity of the human person. Maritain began to advocate Christian personalism, which held that it was “essential to the temporal common good to respect and serve the supratemporal ends of the human person.” An adaptation of certain corporate theories of the economy and state found in Italian fascism and the craving for justice for the poor supposedly inspiring communism could serve as means of reforming the laissez-faire liberal state so that it would be a place hospitable to the supernatural destiny of every human being. From the beginning, Maritain’s mission was to redeem rather than to destroy the bourgeois order.

conservative_critics_of_the_bourgeoisie_in_ma.pdf (jamesmatthewwilson.com)

Bonus Track: Bourgeois Baby - YouTube

Bourgeoisie 'R' Us (Part Five)

{Here at The Little Red Blog, it is "three for one" Friday, as I wrap up my ruminations on the rise of the bourgeoisie and its impact on Christianity, based mostly on Bernard Groethuysen's book The Bourgeois. I have here combined three separate posts into one lengthy post--because I felt like it and because, as I said, it is "three for one Friday".}  

The War on the Clergy

“The clergy’s campaign against incredulity was in vain; the bourgeois would not give up his rights. Gradually, disbelief became respectable. It acquired a moral character. It became an expression of collective life.” (Bernard Groethuysen)

From the standpoint of the respectable bourgeois, the commoners and peasantry were not well served by their faith. Groethuysen cites a contemporary account: “They go to the sacraments, we are told, but honesty and integrity are rare among them. They wouldn’t miss a service, they go to all the processions, they belong to all the confraternities; but they get up at night to pillage our gardens, to steal our fruit, to harvest our vines. They are devout in church, they pray at length, they clasp their hands, they kiss the ground; but on leaving they go to the bars, get drunk, and have nothing but oaths and vile language in their mouths.”

Fides simpliciter may have suffused the lives of the people, but it had not (or so it was charged) made either the people or their lives any better. It had provided structure and solidarity, but it was a solidarity of misery; it promised much in the next life but delivered little in this one. Therefore, the bourgeois Catholics—that is, they considered themselves Catholics despite their disagreements with the Church’s hierarchical authority, with its doctrine, and with its rituals—took aim at the clergy. “The bourgeois,” wrote Groethuysen, “was ruthless. The struggle against the clergy was the first one he undertook to prove his superiority. He pitted himself against the servants of the Church, preparing himself for great conquests. Scoffing at priests who were hard put to answer his mockery, he became conscious of his own worth. Were the servants of God better or more intelligent than he? For the bourgeois, it was much better to be an honest man than to try to be a saint.”

‘They are boorish men, of little intelligence, no education, and no manners,’ the bourgeois said, referring to the country clergy.” True or not, and relevant or not to actual clerical functions (dispensing the Eucharist, performing baptisms, marriages, and funerals, comforting the sick, the dying, and the bereaved), the accusations symbolized a change in relationships between clergy and the new bourgeois congregants. “Bourgeois and priest belonged to two different and necessarily competing worlds.”  You cannot, after all, worship both God and Mammon, much less devote six days a week to the one while reserving only the Sabbath for the other. Groethuysen quoted again the Pastor of Gap: “Those who have made money have a marked aversion for the ministers of the church.” It may also have been the case that those who had made money suspected that the ministers of the church wanted to get their hands on it, for the Lord, of course. ¹

By the late eighteenth century, on the eve of the French Revolution, “the bourgeois had achieved its autonomy vis-à-vis the Church and had developed the moral code which ensured his independence. This might be called the social aspect of the religious emancipation of the eighteenth century. But when the bourgeois attacked the Church, denied the faith of the simple, or jeered at the clergy, they were doing so not like the philosophes, speculating on problems of metaphysics and arriving at conclusions different from those contained in the theology manuals; they were defending their own cause, demanding their rights, creating the new man.”

Was the “new man” even Christian anymore? The answer would depend on whom you asked, and on how “Christian” was defined. “The bourgeois,” explained Groethuysen, “believed less strongly and believed fewer things.” Sometimes a “new man” would retain, above all else, the fear of Hell; he might doubt miracles, scoff at rituals, and dismiss most Church dogmas, but he was unable to shake the fear of Hell. Such a “believer” “was a curious product of eighteenth-century religious revolution; though all he retained of the wealth of legend and mystery which made up the former Catholic universe was a single and somber vision,” it was enough to keep him, formally at least, as a member of a Church for which he otherwise had little use. “Such faith,” Groethuysen observed, “made up of fear and cut off from all the other insights formerly derived from those mysterious depths so disconcerting to the modern believer, could not subsist for long, isolated in the midst of the ideas and sentiments of the modern world.”

It is hard, as both Augustine and Bruce Springsteen noted, to be a saint in the city.

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Immanentizing the Eschaton ²

And so, wrote Bernard Groethuysen, “the bourgeois continued on his way. Jansenists, Jesuits, and philosophes battled for his mind,” but whichever of them may have seemed from time to time to have the upper hand, his heart belonged to Mammon. “In fact,” Groethuysen asserted, “in the years immediately preceding the Revolution, he was no longer inclined to hear ill of the Church. He was bored with discussions on God, matter, or the origins of the world. He seemed quite disposed to make his peace with the Church, now that he was sure of being sufficiently emancipated [from it] to be able to live his life as he chose. To go farther, he feared, would be to act contrary to the interests of his class, for disbelief, by spreading among the people, might eventually endanger the principles of the social order which the bourgeois needed to establish its domination.” It has been a continuing concern of social arbiters, even to this day, that the lower orders might imitate the gentry’s religious and/or sexual habits. Emancipation from authority and from customs should only go so far.

According to Groethuysen, the 18^th-century French bourgeois sought “to turn the gospels into a manual of ethics,” thus revealing “his ignorance of religion.” Liturgy, ritual, sacraments, and devotions were all deemed irrelevant, excessive, even superstitious; the important thing, for the bourgeois, was to be “a disciple of Jesus in the matter of morals”. The possibility that his effort toward moral discipleship would be strengthened by sacraments, rituals, and Christian fellowship, or even that it was impossible without them, was dismissed by the bourgeois, who had learned self-reliance in other aspects of his life and was not going to abandon it when it came to morality. ³

It was too much for the Church to overcome, “this discordance between the Christian life and the bourgeois life, between the man of tradition and the new man. How should the bourgeois have continued to belief in mystery, legend, and miracle if all his effort was to excise from his life any vestige of the nonrational? How should he still have acknowledged a Divine Providence and persuaded himself that God ordered all things, when confidence in his own powers and prudent foresight were the guiding principles of all his action? How should his imagination still have rendered the invisible visible to him and aroused in him a nostalgia for another world, which was in perpetual negation to this world, when everything inclined him to establish his dominion here below and not to give overmuch thought to death?”

In the 18^th century and in the early decades of the 19^th century, even before Marx and long before Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the eschaton was being immanentized, slowly but surely, by the growth in prosperity, education, literacy, science, and technology. Whatever philosophy or theology to which the bourgeois claimed to subscribe, he was for all practical purposes a materialist—and, for the bourgeois, what else were there besides “practical purposes”?

It is both a commonplace and an understatement to say that, throughout the 19^th century, Christianity was on the wane in western Europe. Matthew Arnold wrote the eulogy: “Dover Beach,” a poem in which he lamented that “The Sea of Faith,” once full, was now “retreating, to the breath / of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear / and naked shingles of the world.” He could hear, he said, the Sea’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” and he saw once-Christian Europe become “a darkling plain / swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / where ignorant armies clash by night.”

After which, of course, came the 20^th century.   

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The Triumph of Mammon and the Death of God

“Do not store up for yourself treasure on earth, where moths and vermin destroy and where thieves break in and steal.” (Jesus, speaking, unfortunately, without the benefit of knowing anything at all about free-market economics or neoliberal capitalism)

The rest of the story played out, then, throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Kierkegaard openly scorned bourgeois Christianity; Nietzsche declared God dead; Marx dismissed God as a pipe dream; Feuerbach tried to salvage God by revealing him to have been Man all along. David Strauss and Ernst Renan turned “historical-critical” methods on the scriptures, demythologizing the New Testament narratives and reducing Jesus to an inspiring, if possibly delusional, role model. Late in the 19^th century, Albert Schweitzer conducted his own systematic and thorough quest for the historical Jesus, who, Schweitzer said, could not be found; Christians would have to settle for the “Christ” given to them by the Church. Schweitzer followed that with a psychiatric study of Jesus, and then a book about St. Paul and his many interpreters. By the beginning of the 20^th century, Christianity had been reduced, it seemed, to a shadow of its former self. Wordsworth’s “We murder to dissect…” turned out to apply to the historian’s scrutiny as well as to the scientist’s lab.

Twentieth-century Christian theologians responded to the challenge: Karl Barth and “neo-Orthodoxy,” the “social gospel” of Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Christian realism,” every variety of Christian existentialism and Christian “personalism” imaginable, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “man come of age,” Teilhard de Chardin’s “cosmic Christ,” the American evangelical movement, and more, culminating, perhaps, in the so-called “death of God” movement in the 1960s, represented by the writings of Thomas Altizer, William Hamilton, Gabriel Vahanian, and others, a movement also referred to as “Christian atheism”. ⁴

One does not have to be a doctrinaire Marxist—I am certain that Bernard Groethuysen was not—to understand that economics plays a role in religion, as it does in politics and in culture. If economics and economic relations are not necessarily decisive, neither can they be ignored. The problem with the story we are usually told about the decline of Christianity (or its being watered down into what some call, dismissively, “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”) is that blame for that decline is always imputed to philosophes (Voltaire and Rousseau), to intelligentsia, to Marxism, and to left-wing intellectuals, all of whose influence on the faith of ordinary Christians was negligible; the truth, though, is that the “death of God” was as much an economic and social phenomenon as it was an ideological one. The market economy which spawned the bourgeois gave birth to capitalism, an unabashedly amoral economic system which is applauded by its acolytes for its relentless “creative destruction,” but which is rarely given the credit, or blame, that it deserves, if not for killing God, at least for making God increasingly irrelevant.    

To repeat, and I am not making this up: you cannot serve God and Mammon too, not even if you put In God We Trust on your currency. ⁵ Those who criticize liberal Christianity and its compromises with modernity, and who see those compromises as a betrayal of the orthodox Christian faith, need to recognize the root of the problem: material prosperity and the bourgeois mindset and ethic that accompany and enable it. Christian critics of modernity should stop worrying about putting God back into the schools; they would be better served to work on allowing Him access to the marketplace.

That would be the true test of faith and of Christian conviction.    

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¹ The Acts of the Apostles, chapter five, is instructive in this regard; a man named Ananias and his wife Sapphira sell their land and give the proceeds to Peter and the other apostles—but they secretly hold back a portion of the money for themselves. Ananias, confronted by Peter and accused of having lied “not to man but to God,” drops dead on the spot; three hours later, Sapphira, unaware of her husband’s demise, meets a similar fate. The moral was clear: Do not screw with the Lord thy God or with his designated representatives.

² The phrase “immanentizing the eschaton” comes from Eric Voegelin, who accused Communists of doing just that—of attempting to create for themselves the Kingdom of God on earth (or the Kingdom of Man, or Utopia), rather than waiting, like decent Christians, to get their pie in the sky when they died. Bolsheviks can be compared to the biblical builders of the tower of Babel, who, since God would not come to them, decided they would construct a means to get to Him; in the Bolsheviks’ case, of course, construction required first killing anyone who got in their way.

³ Easy as it is to mock the tendency to reduce religious mystery to a set of moral rules, we should remind ourselves that no less than Thomas Jefferson, one of the great minds of the American Enlightenment, did just that in his idiosyncratic “Jefferson Bible”; eliminating the miraculous, the obsolescent, the legalistic, and the excessively punitive, Jefferson produced a Christianity reduced to bourgeois morality. In this, Jefferson was no different than the 1^st-century rabbi Hillel, who, when asked to explain the Torah while standing on one foot, replied “What is hateful to you, do not do to others.” Regaining his balance, he said, “All the rest is commentary.”

⁴ None of this, I hasten to add, is in Bernard Groethuysen’s The Bourgeois, nor is it in any way an adequate summary of two centuries of theological disputation and development. Those interested in the disputations might read A.N. Wilson’s God’s Funeral, Michael Harrington’s The Politics at God’s Funeral, Eugene McCarraher’s Christian Critics, or, for those who prefer first-hand sources, any of the theologians and philosophers mentioned above. I can also recommend Peter Watson’s The Age of Atheists, which offers a non-theist’s view of the process, and Terry Eagleton’s Culture and the Death of God. There are, you may be sure, many others.

⁵ The motto “In God We Trust” has been mandated on all US currency since 1957, a legacy of the Cold War (like adding “under God” to the Pledge of  Allegiance) designed to distinguish “us” from the godless Soviet Union. It may constitute the single most blasphemous act in the history of Christianity.

Bourgeoisie 'R' Us (Part Four)

{Having taken some fifteen hundred years to develop, European Christianity was transformed in surprisingly short order by economic, social, and political factors it could not control. Whether the transformation was for the better or for the worse is still hotly contested; perhaps, as the late Chinese leader Zhou Enlai was reputed to have said about the French Revolution, it is too early to say.}

4. The Road to Deism

“The Church could not prevent the influence of the middle class from affecting the attitude of the common people.” (Bernard Groethuysen)

As medieval faith foundered and as bourgeois influence increased, the Catholic Church might have promoted education, so that previously unlettered “implicit” believers could have countered the arguments they would hear from the literate, skeptical bourgeois; but the Church did not trust learning for the common people. Groethuysen quoted a medieval source (“the Pastor of Gap”) voicing opinions about education reminiscent of Russian conservatives as late as the first decade of the 20^th century: “Your children have been to school; they have learned to read and write. Does that make them more proficient in tilling the soil? Do those who have been to school frequent the bars less often than others?” All education accomplished was to encourage doubt: “After surveying the situation carefully, I find, as do my colleagues, that the largest part of the least Christian element in our parishes is made up of those who have been to school; whereas the simplest, the most innocent, the most Christian can neither read nor write.” ¹

At the same time, some of the Church hierarchy despaired of the ignorance and superstition of the European peasantry: “You have to know the people of our rural areas,” writes a contemporary observer, and especially the peasants of our remoter regions, to get a true picture of the ridiculous superstitions and prejudices of all kinds which their ignorance and simplicity cause them to adopt and to believe.” The Archdeacon of Evreux, speaking of the poor villagers, deplored the fact that “They don’t know God, they know Him less than they know their household animals.”

Groethuysen defended the idea of fides simpliciter:

But this divinity whom the peasant represented to themselves was nevertheless recognizable [even] under the often outlandish images they used; it lived with them, it was their God. Continuing to enjoy unlimited power over them, God dispensed rain and fair weather; he caused the crops to grow and accomplished other marvels in a world which was still His.

In the bourgeois’ world, on the other hand, although his concepts of God were often much loftier, neither God nor his age-old antagonist, the devil, were at home. The devil was ridiculed, and, if some respect was shown to God, it was on condition that he in turn would respect the general laws governing the universe and refrain from acting contrary to the plans of the middle class, who used their reason and demanded their share in the government of the world.

The road to Deism was paved by well-intentioned bourgeois before philosophes set foot upon it:

The bourgeois had taken away heaven and hell from the God of the Christians and conceived of him without his legendary power. A divinity without a name of his own and without personality, his role was increasingly reduced to that of an abstract and colorless principle in a world which he was supposed to have created but which he could no longer inhabit.

Thus, within the framework of the Christian religion, two worlds evolved, whose inhabits, while often using the same terms, no longer spoke the same language. In the language still spoken by the humble, all words signified mystery; in the modern language of the enlightened bourgeois, everything that was said meant something different.

The emerging bourgeois, wrote Groethuysen, incurred the ire of traditionalists, who charged it with “treating with contempt, and turning to ridicule, certain practices authorized by the Church, as [being] fashioned only for the [common] people.” Examples of such practices included “the good woman telling her beads [the rosary], the husbandman who plants crosses in his fields, the humble believer who attributes to the sound of [church] bells the virtue of warding off storms, [and anyone] who carries on his person, or respectfully keeps in his house relics, crosses, images, or other objects consecrated by the prayers and blessings of the Church.”

“The enlightened bourgeois,” according to Groethuysen, “would have nothing to do with things of this kind. He had managed to put a certain distance between himself and heaven, thereby preventing excesses. The bourgeois had arranged a religion for himself which did not require much thought or imagination.” ²

What Groethuysen called “the drab religion” of the bourgeois lacked, above all, the “colors” and the “vitality” of medieval Christianity, “the adoration of mystery and a zest for life which combined in a single sentiment all the emotions which transcend the monotony of the daily round.” Faith informed the whole life of the peasantry; for the new bourgeois, it was only one item on a list of “things respectable people do”. “In the world which the bourgeois had built for himself,” wrote Groethuysen, “there was no longer any room for the marvelous. It was a world closed to miracle and to mystery as such.”

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¹ The Pastor of Gap could have added “the most credulous” as well.

² But was it not the bourgeois who insisted on applying “much thought” to previously unchallenged practices and doctrines? Yes, but he did so only to clear the ground for a faith untroubled by what he considered superstitions, scholasticism, and unjustifiable (not to mention, inconvenient) dogmas. Once those were out of the way, the bourgeois was happy to enter the Church once a week with his mind at rest and his conscience untroubled; although, when the collection plate came around, he could not help feeling that his pocket was being picked.