Outline
I. Introduction
II. Origins: Foundational American Values and the Origin of
Capitalist Religion
A. The concept of value
B. The meaning and limits of religion in Christian life
1. The Place of Religion in early Christianity
2. Religion in subsequent history and Protestantism
C. Religion for the Founders
D. The place of religion and Value for other Americans
1. Work and value
2. The private geography of religion
3. The locus and limits of religious discourse
E. Synthesis: Constitutionalism and Protestantism
III. Consequences: The Nature of Capitalist Religion
A. Non-economic value subordinated
B. Tenets, Goals, and Function of the capitalist religion
C. Priests and Laity of the capitalist religion
IV. Conclusions: Problems and Solutions?
This paper is not the first to argue that the capitalist/ corporatist/ consumerist1 system is in some way a religion established in the geography of American life.2 Yet I seek to develop the idea further, pushing it beyond metaphor and arguing instead that the consumerist religion is one with a history and a definable creed. If it is the case that corporatist structures "set the ethical agenda," it is worth asking how this state of affairs came to be, whether it endemic to Americanisms or not.
Part II of this paper thus attempts a (necessarily attenuated) historical and cultural analysis of religion and value in the American idiom. The gist of the argument is that consumerist "religion" did not appear in a vacuum. Or rather, that it did; that the valuational space previously occupied by religion and morality was vacated by the time American capitalism began to (literally) gather steam, the mid-19th century. Yet the vacuum filled by capitalism has very deep roots, perhaps -- this paper suggests -- in the founding not just of America but of Christianity itself. Both the enlightenment tradition that animated America's founding elites and the popular Protestant traditions that shaped its capitalist pioneers had a curious circumscribing of the purview of religious teaching, suggesting that some activities are outside the realm of ethical value entirely.
With the rise of American capitalism, these "outside" activities came to dominate public life, concurrent with a Protestant self-limiting of the religiously relevant array. As a result of these joint processes, religion and value systems generally became less and less relevant to more and more of American life. In its place, Part III attempts to describe, arises a value structure that develops from the economic realities of the consumerist marketplace, whose creeds, rather than imposing their norms a priori on economic realities, are themselves shaped by the contingencies of those realities. Consequently, "capitalist religion" comes to promote in its value structures those activities which engender continued consumption (for the masses) and production (for the elites): economic growth and efficiency, valuation of material success, and so on.
Faced with this somewhat uneasy state of affairs, the paper then concludes, as one might expect, with some normative perspectives on the merits of capitalist religion, and perhaps less expectedly suggests that the self-perpetuating nature of the religion is such that fighting it from "within" with the ultimate aim of integration of the working life with whatever outside value is prized -- self-actualization, for example -- may be a doomed enterprise. Rather, I conclude that strategies for alternative valuation systems may in today's geographical context be forced to recognize the separateness of the economic and other-valued zones of life-activity, and opt for maximizing the quantity and quality of "other" valued regions of life at the ultimate expense of the capitalist-religious economic. That is, in a post-capitalist world, we ought to accept that we may only be "human, all too human" part of the time, and work to increase that 'part' if capitalism's religious hegemony is ever to be challenged.
Obviously, value does not inhere in things apart from our recognition of it. Even intrinsic and inherent value, which we say attaches to human beings, perhaps to other living things, and possibly to some conceptions of the good (such as freedom), can only have without human participation a sort of tree-falling-in- a-forest ambiguity. Bluntly, even if we claim that some value derives itself from intrinsic qualities, humans surely are the measurers thereof, and value is contingent upon them (us).
As such, it makes little sense to speak of one value or set of values as more intrinsically foundational than another, with the possible exception of deriding those value systems which are internally contradictory. We must note the contingency of any values, fundamental or not. For example, many of today's "civic religion" public-sphere values are said to shape American social norms: that all private legal persons are equal, that free pursuit of capital wealth is desirable amongst all these individuals, and that value concerns such as religious and ethical ones are "externalities," outside the concern of government. Yet opposing value systems cannot be defended in this postmodern age on any other than pragmatic grounds.3 What sort of metaphysics can justify one set of people suffering for another? In a post-holocaust age of justified wariness of rationality's ability to enforce power structures, we do well to remain ironically skeptical of even those value claims which may be more appealing than the distasteful (to this writer) roster just enumerated.4
For our purposes, the question may become somewhat more concrete. Noting the historicity of value in the American context, we may identify sources within American history (and intellectual history) that have abdicated the ground of public value to the market's set of value orientations, and try to grapple with what those orientations may be. To be sure, much moralizing occupies public attention, yet it is decoration around the edges. Capitalism's grammar absorbs moralism, rendering it another vocabulary term within the overall ethics sentences the economic system proposes. Far from an actual competition of discourses, capitalism and moralisms (be they rightist- fundamentalist or leftist-idealist or what-have-you) exist more in a relationship of substance and rhetoric than one of legitimately competing value structures, so much so that it may at first seem bizarre to conceive of capitalism as a value structure rather than as "something else."
Yet capitalism obviously has its values -- the separation of "church" and "state" (the latter term including the economic apparatus of the state, not only its public institutions), the status of life-goal held by wealth acquisition, and the subsequent need for a "free" market in order to accomplish this life-goal, and so on. In fact, this paper seeks to present a historical and intellectual continuum between the separation of "church" -- morality and religion together -- and "state" -- governance and power -- and the de-moralization of public discourse which continues today, right-wing rhetoricians notwithstanding. Indeed, it is perhaps because public action has been so dramatically disaggregated from espoused ethical norms that said norms are trumpeted so loudly by those who would trample on liberties today. There are thus two processes at issue here: the separation of ethics from politics, and the "natural" filling of that vacuum by a value-structure of ethics- blind capitalism.
While it would be tempting to fit these processes into one narrative applicable to all Americans, to do so seems somewhat careless. Historically, there is no reason to assume that the same values motivated the Enlightenment-grounded Founders and the religiously-motivated "masses" out of whom sprung the leaders of early capitalism such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, and the like. Indeed, there is evidence to the contrary, as discussed below. Thus, the paper will proceed first by tracing the intellectual history the elite Founders and the less-educated colonists have in common -- Christianity and Protestantism -- and then treat separately the developments of enlightenment and "traditional American" conceptions of value, religious and otherwise.
"Limited" religion was a radical departure from contemporary Near Eastern ideas of what "religion" meant, if we can even use the word. Prior to Christianity, religion inasmuch as we may today understand it was identified with nationhood; one worshipped Hittite gods as a Hittite, Roman gods as a Roman.6 Judaism problematized this accommodation by asserting the existence of only one God, and the primacy of the Israelite nation; no one could convert to Judaism without taking on, as it were, the whole burden. In addition to adopting harsh restrictions in diet and economic activity, a convert to Judaism would thus have to reorient his national and cultural identity. Moreover, Pharisaic Judaism during the time of Jesus was unified with civil law, at least to the extent Roman rule permitted Judaean institutions such as the Sanhedrin to administer justice.7 Being a member of one nation or another involved civil/political as well as religious commitments. And finally, those religious commitments in the Jewish tradition covered every aspect of human life: economic transactions, diet, even personal hygiene. Such burdens proved too heavy for Christian proselytizers to ask their audience to lift. With a segregated religion, one that was practicable without wholesale change, a convert could obtain whatever benefits Christianity was seen to offer without fundamentally reordering his life or practices. Christian syncretism8 was a stunning success.
Whatever its consequences, it seems relatively clear that a secular polity cannot be said to have any autonomy if those expressions not confined to some essentially 'religious' purpose are still privileged or protected within that polity. The issue was not as much a live one for the Founders who, it has been well demonstrated,11 considered the religious zone the protected sphere. For most of the Founders, what influenced motives and actions took place in the "secular," political realm were not of central concern to the First Amendment; these were almost universally acknowledged to be bound up with religious affiliations and concerns.12 Rather, the motives and actions in the religious realm were of central concern, and it was seen as centrally important that the State not interfere in that protected area. The principle of separationism is not self- evident, however; as we have attempted to show, it relies on certain theological and historical developments of Protestantism for its coherence, and was of course an attractive position for Enlightenment thinkers such as those that influenced the Founders.13 Of course, it was more than merely tenable for many involved in Enlightenment projects of self- and polity- legitimation: it was essential.
Whatever its particular goals, the American experiment put to practical test a frequently asked question of Enlightenment philosophers: absent religion, what the source of legitimizing, foundational values would for the new polity. However questionable such foundationalist enterprises seem for contemporary postmodern theorists, two immediate value-questions presented themselves for the young American polity. First, the state required some justification for its existence absent religiously-based platitudes such as "divine right." And second, the state required some constitutive values to ground its identity.
The latter question remained answered in religious terms: to nearly all of the Founders, the source of American values remained the Bible, as read by Protestants.14 Yet the Bible is read not collectively, with an authorized interpretation from a hierarchical church, but individually. The Bible, to be sure, is the backbone of the polity's values for most Founders, but the Bible as read by each person individually. Obviously, the picture is far more complex than this, and we should not pretend that the early Puritan and other communities in America consisted of free-thinking interpreters of holy texts. Of course, power structures still defined the boundaries of what was acceptable morality, as well as what was an acceptable reading of the Bible. Yet the point of this narrative has been to suggest that inherent in American conceptions of the State, even prior to the First Amendment, contain the seed of some kind of separation of public and private morality, which will become central in the latter portions of this paper in which the rise of a public market morality is suggested.
The most compelling evidence for the secularity of the early American state is how it sought to publicly legitimize itself, our first question of a page ago. Certainly, many felt America was a product of divine providence, from the first Pilgrims to the proponents of 'manifest Destiny' to the Billy Grahams and others of today who still see America as "God's Country." Yet in Founding American documents, the question of legitimation was answered for Founding American documents by enlightenment political philosophies such as that of John Locke. The Declaration of Independence, for example, grounded America not in Divine mission but in response to offenses against basic, inalienable rights on the part of the Throne.15 The publicly stated democratic ideals upon which the United States was founded are likewise more a result of the Enlightenment than of an institutionalized religious teaching. And throughout, these ideals, steeped as they are in the Enlightenment's conception of the individual subject, are of an individualistic nature. Though today, few defend the coherence of the modern idea of the self, individualism of a Lockean variety blended well with a separation of communally-oriented religious norms from the political and economic areas of American interaction. Pursuit of one's own life-project is in such a view a wholly personal decision, at least in theory, with the normative precepts of traditional religion relegated to a circumscribed "sphere" of individual human life.
These American ideals of liberty had economic as well as ideological worth. We need not normatively address the merits of having either freedom of thought or freedom of contract to note their phenomenological kinship. Just as one's religiosity became a matter of (relatively) personal choice, for the early American elites, so too did the pursuit of one's desired life objectives take on the status of fundamental liberty. For Locke, of course, economic liberty was a separate category entirely: life, liberty, and property were seen as inalienable. With the church-set norms of value and purpose of life removed, and a conception of the self that allowed the individual to arbitrate for himself the propriety of life goals,16 Enlightenment elites were well equipped to freely choose their highest values for themselves, within the rights packages their legitimation theories provided.
To be sure, people have been "making money" and amassing property for millennia prior to the Enlightenment.17 Yet because the Founding of America was an intensely self-reflexive enterprise, and unlike earlier foundation projects which legitimized themselves by Divine myth or Divine "right," it required some explicit ideological apparatus to justify itself. The apparatus it chose was one tightly linked to particular notions of individualism and freedom, which continue to shape American values even today. Religious values circumscribed, Enlightenment freedoms -- held by Americans to be "inalienable" -- make the invasion on any economic activity ipso facto suspect. Both the Jeffersonian ideal of independent economic actors free from governmental tyranny and the Hamiltonian concern for property preservation contain this seed of economic proto-libertarianism.
The Weber controversy thus bracketed, let us take a working definition of the Protestant ethic the one which we have received from these sources and which is practically a truism: a spirit of this-worldly calling or vocation, an ascetic veneration of hard work and determination, and some basic standard of ethical behavior.25 Interestingly, these ethics themselves reveal a this-worldly humanistic orientation of American protestant worldviews.26 The Protestant ethic, as Weber discussed, contains within itself its own undoing, not only because it invites the overthrow of its God but also because the mechanism of that overthrow is the very mechanism proposed for Its instantiation. Salvation is either out of our control (in predestination-based soteriological systems) or something accomplished by faith; in the mean time, the task of the human is to work.27
As an ironic side-note, the so-called Protestant ethic contains within itself not only embryonic capitalism (and the Weberian dereligionization that implies) but an embryonic critique of any capitalism not "engaged" with the "real" world, i.e., the prototypically Jewish non-labor of banking -- or, in today's idiom, lawyering.28 Although we shall not return to the valuation of the world of work until the end of this paper, it is enough for now to notice that the simple veneration of hard work and the potential for material self-improvement is not so simple at all. It presumes that the "world of work" can be a locus of merit, and consequently attaches neo-religious value to that zone.
Indeed, when one looks at the early histories of the men who
would become America's industrial tycoons,29 this separation of church and public
economic behavior is striking. Many of the nineteenth century's
most ruthless capitalists, who ruined careers and manipulated
public power for their own gain, were simultaneously devout
Protestants who would go to church every week and who grew up in
extremely religious homes. One might expect the allure of the
material world to have erased this religious conviction, and some
of the early capitalists did indeed lessen the import of religion
on their lives. Yet this was not usually the case.30 Religion and religious ethics
continued to be, for most, "centrally" important. Thus we find
that even as Daniel Drew, for example, engaged in ruthless, and
one might think, "unchristian" behavior in building his empire,
he continued to attend Sunday church regularly. And one finds
written of John Rockefeller the following:
[T]he traits which his mother had bred in him, of piety and
the economic virtue--worship of the "lean goddess of
Abstinence"--were of one cloth. The pale, bony, small-eyed
young Baptist served the Lord and pursued his own business
unremittingly.31
Nor were the early capitalist successes in America stingy or
hypocritical; in some cases, they personally bankrolled entire
religious institutions, making some churches real estate moguls
in their own right.32 It is too easy
to say that early American capitalists, raised in Protestantism,
simply kept aspects of their upbringing available for convenience
or habit. There seems a more serious compatibility of the new
possibilities of American riches and the theoretically timeless
ideals of American religion.
Simultaneously, there must be some accommodation of the old lares of American religiosity, which have never been renounced even in our own day. Like the lares themselves, the Christian gods become privatized: their place is in the home. The Protestant ethic, separated from religious power structures, permits religion to be a zone of (some) value that is discontinuous with the public economic sphere. We need not be Christians seven days a week: being a Capitalist is of value enough, and we may go to Church on Sunday.
Nonfundamentalist, nonradical religion, however, seems quite comfortable within the capitalist system because it seems to have learned its place.38 Capitalism assimilates value-ideals not by incorporating them but by relegating them to a place of honor. Like women placed on a pedestal located in the kitchen, religion within capitalism is venerated and kept within church walls. A split between the public economic life and the privatized religious life, embedded in both the constitution and the developed Protestantism of the first American century, effectively neuters religious discourse insofar as it would critique the consumerist norm. Only those systems which reject the consumerist structure entirely -- fundamentalisms most notably -- seem able to forcefully critique it. Within the "co-option" of the dominant economic space, religious voices seem out of place.
The critical turning point for this investigation to proceed is the generalization from religion specifically to value as a category. I have attempted to show ways in which religious discourse marginalized itself even while remaining a vital element of Americans' lives. Now I wish to suggest that this value/polity vocabulary is one not dependent on the term 'religion' but rather applies to any placeholder put into the 'value' space in the sentence. Put more simply, just as religion is a somewhat impotent critic in the capitalist/consumerist model, so too is any voice for non-economic valuation.
The theory is that as religion declines in importance for many Americans, other value-generating systems have simply taken its place in the pews (not the altar) of the capitalist cathedral. What might be called (although today, it seems, only pejoratively) a liberal humanist position fares no better, runs the argument, than religion did in effecting intra-systemic change in the consumerist matrix.
In the following section, I hope to develop this argument inductively, from critiquing some of the effects of the value/polity split in American life. The seeds for the present condition have already been sown: at American capitalism's birth, the realms of religion and economy were clearly demarcated. As capitalism grows up, the latter realm asserts not just hegemony but omnipresence.
America, as I have tried to describe in Part II, may well be a "Christian nation"40 but its Christianity speaks to an increasingly limited set of concerns, divorced from the economic activity which comes to dominate American society, culture, and time. In this separation between a system that claims to have ultimate value and the actual zone of most importance lies the potential for the befuddling talk of "spheres" to have some meaning as some reconciliation must occur between the competing value claims of each. That is, it becomes possible when religion and the economy/state/community are separated to speak of two sets of values, and perhaps, of one conditioning the other. While it may have been the case at one time that religious or ethical values did indeed shape economic life, such Arcadianism is not our concern. The narrative here will suggest that with religion marginalized, some values must replace it, and those values are to be the ones of the capitalist market itself. The "capitalist religion"41 is more than a euphemism: it is a placebo, a pseudoreligion which provides the rewards and answers of religion with "no mess" and easy malleability to whatever self-determined acquisitive project is chosen.
Of course, it would be quite curious for a liberal to criticize this state of affairs. After all, it is exactly what freedom of conscience demands. And the alternative, some form of power-imposed norms of behavior that cover all aspects of life, is surely contrary to most liberal theories. Yet without passing normative judgment, it is possible to note the reorientation of ethical value and ethical subject that the liberation of religious thought represents. Moreover, if we recall that religion may be thought of as a place-holder for any non-economic ethical system in the value structure of an individual or society, the consequences of religion's marginalization may become clearer.
With this inversion and marginalization, what might be thought of as the "natural" function of ethics is reversed. Instead of ethical norms judging conduct, we have conduct selecting ethical norms. There are no grounds upon which to evaluate conduct except conduct itself. Conduct which engenders more likable conduct is positive; that which seems not to is negative. Thus norms of fair play and self-reliance and not cheating can remain intact. Norms of communal support and valuing the aesthetic, however, are unlikely to endure.
Such ethical antinomianism finds its contemporary academic form, predictably enough, in various schools of law and economics, which determine the justness of an act by its effect on efficiency, rather than determining the efficiency of an act by its effect on justice.42 Even if we were to systemically correct for the vast distributional and valuational inequities such an approach necessarily entails, the value inversion would remain. Ethics' role is not to guide economic behavior, but rather to extrapolate from successful economic behavior rules for its continued implementation.
Thus it would make no sense to a capitalist religionist to speak of ethical norms that should be imposed upon an efficiently-run business: the efficiency of the business is itself of paramount concern. Of course, some norms continue to trump even this concern; only a few people really believe that businesses may kill (at least without some form of subterfuge) in order to attain a profit.43 If I have tried to show anything in the foregoing pages, it is that this inversion is not an ahistorical phenomenon.
If capitalism does not address traditional theological topics -- cosmology, for example -- it is because they are neutralized. The origin of the universe is utterly irrelevant to attaining capitalist/consumerist success. One may believe what one likes about such matters; only beliefs on matters of the faith -- the market, freedom to contract, etc. -- are of concern.
The religiousness of capitalist discourse is further borne out in its rhetoric. Seizing on Marxist atheism, communists were routinely denounced as "godless," to the point where any socialism, even a theistic one, was heretical. Earning money "the old fashioned way" has an almost pietistic tone.45 American advertising, from 19th century catalogs to 1950's suburbia, explicitly and consciously adopted themes of abundance and fecundity from Christian and pre- Christian religious sources.46
The function of religious systems had always been the development of a coherent worldview for the adherent, the construction of a picture of the world with a role for the human to play. The American separation of religion from political life created a temporary vacuum in this role: there was no clear Ultimate Goal for able Americans to pursue, as there had been for Medieval Christians (salvation) or contemporary Europeans (in the 19th century, nationalism). Of course, none of these goals matter for the majority of people; most continue to have the Ultimate Goal of feeding their children. But if people were "able," the acquisition of wealth grew from an American ideal based on freedom from European class hierarchies into nothing short of religious ultimacy.47
Of course, one can debate endlessly where the goal of "getting rich" came from: whether it is, as many would have it, part of "human nature," or whether it is, as suggested above, a 'dream' springing from the freedom from European limits on land and commodity ownership, or dozens of other possibilities. Whatever its origin, the capitalist religion is as much a part of the American geography as its many cathedrals: skyscrapers for those who have achieved the dream, McDonalds for those who wish to participate in it anyway.
The capitalist stand-in dream of consumption to displace the inability to produce should not surprise. Dreams inevitably produce their own surrogates, and the soteriology of the capitalist faith is no different. If one cannot be saved by having truly improved oneself, the delusion that one has done so remains available. Thus we find the greater Dream miniaturized: "My home is my castle," says the suburban, middle-class king. It is, of course, his temple as well. One cannot travel across the world, but one can go to Disney World's EPCOT center, and do so without leaving Orlando. And even women, who until recently were totally forbidden access to the masculine American religious ethos of self-formation, were granted a zone of control in self- construction by being the shoppers, dressers, and cooks.
The role in self-formation of these and other surrogates for salvation is itself an enormous subject, and it is not clear what position one should take. On the one hand, forming one's sense of identity has based on pre-set sentimentality is a form of false consciousness. Its kitschy pseudo-individualism gives a false sense of identity which makes "real" introspection and reflection, whatever that is, impossible. Moreover, the person who constructs his or her identity on the basis of an automobile, television, or amalgamation of many goods48, is at the mercy of the mass- consumptive producers of those goods; his or her individual autonomy seems, at best, suspect. This lack of autonomy, in turn, is dangerously close to fascism: repeating the value mantras promulgated by large industry, feeling as dictated to feel, fulfilling the roles defined by large, centralized units in society. Certainly it is possible to take a dim view of the consumptive end of the capitalist religion.
Yet it is also possible to see department store windows and Hallmark cards less as institutions of control than of empowerment. In this view, women shopping in department stores are not so much victims of a patriarchal system that marginalizes them as creative "free players" who construct their senses of self out of the materials presented -- which is what all of us do, all the time. Men unable to be major capitalist players who instead channel their selfhood into the acquisition of goods are no different at heart from those who invest energy into producing art, acquiring education, or pursuing spiritual paths; only the means is different, and in today's postmodern context, not easy to judge as necessarily worse. And some consumers -- inner city minorities, for example -- may be seen as subverting the commercial signifiers they co-opt and reinterpret (the Gucci symbol as used by young African-American males is an example). Their creativity, in the face of continued repression, should be seen not as a pathetic act of conformity but as a subversive act of rebellion.
Obviously, both arguments have merit. Intuitively, it seems difficult to be too approving of self-formation by acquiring goods, but it would be elitist to argue too strongly too the contrary. And historically, people have invested value in goods for millennia. Of course, the political issue continues to cut both ways: True, a black inner-city teenager is constructing a viable sense of self-identity by buying expensive athletic shoes or subverting a dominant commercial paradigm. But his efforts to this end are being channeled away from real improvements that remain needed in more consequential realms. In terms of self- formation, it may be possible (though, again, I have my doubts) to rescue the housebound wife (if she still exists) from the Sartrean mire of false consciousness. But in terms of equality, she unwittingly contributes to the oppression of women less lucky than herself by enabling the "System" to continue.
Of course, today, gender and race inequalities that still persist seem less engendered by consumerist religion than by the brute slowness of overcoming centuries of oppression. Forty years ago one could persuasively argue that women and blacks were being given diverting playthings (placebos for placebos?) while white males played the important capitalist games. Today the diversions seem less viable a focus: it is the rules of the games that are now in question.
Whatever its merits, consumerist capitalism provides for those who cannot partake in its primary pilgrim's progress much as all religions provide alternative, though less preferable, means of integrating religious action into adherents' lives. Consumerist capitalism is a religion that reinforces itself: it succeeds not because of assent but because of virus-like replication. The instruments of promotion are driven by money; thus only those who have money (and thus, to some degree, approve of having it) promote themselves. Those who chose other religious paths do not have access to mass media, political power, and the like.49 Whether or not the medium is the message, as McLuhan famously said, only those with certain messages get to the medium.
In sum, there is clearly a religion established in American geography, ironically resulting from the separationisms described in Part II of this paper. Whether it is Protestant- or Catholic- or Jewish- or atheist- flavored, consumerist capitalism has successfully dominated the space of American consciousness at least since the second World War. In its two forms -- producer capitalism for the able, consumer capitalism for the rest -- it defines success, provides objects of maximal concernment, offers new roads to immortality (whether purchased in the form of cosmetics or literally etched in stone as business or philanthropic monuments), and gives meaning, direction, purpose and shape to American lives.
Put colloquially, if that's not religion, I don't know what is.
The first line of criticism is that most directly related to the foregoing portions of this paper. To be sure, capitalism may be the root cause of much suffering in our and other societies. Yet I think it is somewhat farfetched, even setting aside the factual question of whether other systems have proven more effective at lessening suffering, to claim that it is the value/economy split that leads to the actual, physical oppression of people under capitalism. I would claim that the split leads to the undue toleration of such suffering, that we put up with things we should not put up with because we have a free market morality. But sweatshops are not caused by ethics.
It is plausible to claim, though, that the legitimacy of sweatshops is an ethical phenomenon. The capitalist religious system, as described above, is a claim to ultimate concern, and as such devalues claims to ultimacy that may be made by morality, religion, or aesthetics. All of these are either costs or benefits to be placed into the larger calculations of efficiency, which expresses capitalism's ultimate concern. It makes no sense to a capitalist/consumerist to speak of consumption in terms of its effect on ethics, except insofar as those effects can be be plugged back into the cost-benefit calculations to make them more accurate. Of course, by means of "reality check," it is easy to see that the supposedly objective normative judgments of the neo- utilitarian consumerist economist entirely rely on capitalism's value orientation. One wonders what a German Romantic, or Classical Aesthete, would make of the calculations.
So insofar as consumerism disengenders values of integration, or the full culmination of the human person,50 or engagement with land and work,51 it may be critiqued according to systems which develop value-contexts which privilege those values being thwarted. Yet it will not be possible to do so within a strictly capitalistic system, unless rehumanization turns out to be "efficient." Something "else" must be brought in.
This paper should conclude, then, with some sort of conception of what that "else" should be. It is not clear, though, that to re-ethicize American society will "cut the right way" for those seeking to minimize suffering and actualize human worth. Simple injection of Christian ethics, for example, may lead to more repression and suffering (the abortion case being the most readily available example). And as enjoyable as it is to provide an ethical "reality check" to consumerist economics, the same reality check is required when pondering what ethical systems are available for integration into the political-economic unit. In terms of theology and other neutralized metaphysics, "Old time religion" is far more widespread than the New Age. Countless statistics may be offered, so I will chose one at random: as many as 81 percent of Americans believe hell is a real place.52 And this sort of religion, with its condemnations of behaviors postulated as unholy, can hardly be a desirable prescription for a post-liberal society.
In many ways, the problem is intractable, much as the birth of capitalist religion was identified with the laudable "liberation" of religion from power structures. If we leave ethical choices to the individual, which is what we must do as a pluralist collective, we separate ethics from the state and, concurrently, the economy. The value systems that best lubricate that economy will then become "naturally" dominant. From a Marxist perspective, of course, this has always been the case, idealist reformers notwithstanding; it would be fruitless to attempt to "inject" any sort of ethics without radically restructuring modes of production and consumption. (It is worth remembering that the massive state apparatus required to effect such restructuring has in this century proven incapable of allowing voices of dissent or even of individual expression.)
Some solutions must be possible, though, between consumerism and totalitarianism. Once more, it will be useful to bifurcate the targets of our "reforms" into value and justice concerns. For the latter, steps can be taken that would not be dangerous at all from a libertarian perspective, so long as that libertarianism is attached only to individuals and not to corporate structures and other members of the "private sector." If we take as an axiom that avoiding individual suffering is more important in all cases than allowing corporate freedom, economic reforms of a wide variety (and I deliberately seek to restrict this discussion to the general concepts, without plunging into a debate about minimum wages, guaranteed housing, and so on) may be acceptable. We need only overcome the naive-capitalist normative hurdle that all inefficiency is bad.
From a valuational perspective, it seems difficult to remarry the divorced values and polity after two centuries of separation, and, as just mentioned, liberals might not want to do so anyway. If, then, the separation cannot (or should not) be healed, those who decry the dehumanizing effects of consumerist capitalism should simply try to strengthen the hand of the "other sides," be they art, culture, traditional religion, nontraditional spirituality, or any other forms of human actualization that compete with capitalist religion for primacy. After all, while Rockefeller and Carnegie enjoyed spending their weekends at work, many people do define themselves in non- capitalistic53 terms, whether by their ethnic or religious group, by their family, by their art, and so on. If the struggle cannot be for integration -- and integration as a good itself has an unfortunate history -- then the struggle may well be, in shorthand, for lengthening weekends. If there are zones of human actualization which are in some way more deeply true and authentic than others (and again, as earlier, I indicate my intuitive, though tentative, support for the proposition); and those zones are irreconcilable with the dominant economic paradigm; and we cannot or do not wish to reinvent an entire economic paradigm from scratch; then we should simply favor the right zones.
Asking for more free time may seem like a strange (though actually quite apt) endpoint for an investigation such as this one.54 Yet judging by the failures of those who have sought to make work-time do all the self- transformation work, and remembering that we have separated the valuational and justice-related questions vis a vis consumer capitalism, doing so seems like the right prescription. Of course, economic forces appear to be moving us in the opposite direction. People work more, not less, and more people work than ever before. So the initially bland proposition of "more free time" to be something other than producers and consumers becomes an almost dangerous idea, at least insofar as it would seem to require directed, large-scale interference with the market.
And of course free time alone is not enough if the space that is allotted is filled completely with commercials, television, and beer. But renovating culture is not, in this view, a job for governments or administrations, with the possible exception of government's present role as mass educator. We are not trying to repair a 200-year old bridge, not trying to link culture with power once again. Rather, with religion and value marginalized, the task of increasing the size of the margins until they are coequal with the "center" seems to require a rediscovery of the "old-fashioned way" people used to do things: as people.
1. What I have in mind here is the sort of "high capitalism" routinely studied in contemporary cultural criticism, with its emphasis on mass consumption and concealment of means of production and so on. I will attempt to develop the picture further along in the paper, but obviously the portrait is not originally mine. See generally Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899); Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904); Chandra Mukerji, Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (1983).
2. See, e.g., Charles Reich, Opposing the System 76 (1995) (characterizing faith in capitalist economics as "quasi- religious").
3. See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity 44- 95 (1989); George Herbert Mead, Social Consciousness and the Consciousness of Meaning in Pragmatism: the Classic Writings 341 (Thayer ed. 1982).
4. Rorty, supra, at 189-98.
5. See Joseph Dan, Tfisat HaKedushah b'Yahadut v'Notzrut (The Idea of the Holy in Judaism and Christianity) (1994).
6. Id.
7. See generally R. Travis Herford, The Pharisees (1962).
8. Christian syncretism often produced massive changes in the Christianity's core belief structure, of course, adopting from Mithraic Roman religions the myth of the virgin birth, the practice of consuming the godhead via bread and wine, and the belief in an infernal hell, among others. See Franz Cumont, The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism (1956); Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (1958).
9. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930). Weber's general arguments regarding the causal connection between Protestantism and capitalism are discussed in more detail, infra part D.1.
10. See Nicholas Wolterstorff, The Migration of the Theistic Arguments: From Natural Theology to Evidentialist Apologetics (1992); Anthony J. Cascardi, The Subject of Modernity (1991).
11. Arlin Adams and Charles Emmerich, A Nation Dedicated to Religious Liberty 51-58 (1990); Roger Williams, Mr Cottons Letter Lately Printed, Examined, and Answered (1644) in Adams and Emmerich, supra, Appendix 1 (arguing for "Wall of separation between the garden of the Church and the wilderness of the world").
12. Adams and Emmerich, supra, at 22-31. But see Leonard Levy, The Establishment Clause 27-53 (1994)(Cases of separation of church and state in Confederation states and doctrinal linkage to freedom).
13. See, e.g., John Locke, On Toleration.
14. Clifton E. Olmstead, Religion In America: Past and Present 49-60 (1961); A. James Reichley, Religion in American Public Life 53-85 (1985).
15. See, e.g., The Declaration of Independence ("Life, liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness").
16. The growth of the subject is an essential narrative of modernity, though we cannot address it here. To be sure, Enlightenment and post-enlightenment theories of politics, ethics, and even religion depend as much on the epistemological and psychological grounds for arbitration -- the self -- as on their constituent arguments. Indeed, most of these projects (e.g. Locke, Kant) begin with an enquiry into what it is for the human subject to "know" anything. See Anthony J. Cascardi, The Subject of Modernity (1992).
17. Although perhaps not in the quintessentially "capitalist" way of acquiring capital as an ends in itself. See Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise 133-77 (1904); Weber, supra, at 57-79.
18. Olmstead, supra, at 49-74.
19. Id. at 41-48.
20. And may be continuing to do so today, in the resurgence of the Christian Right and its influence on shaping dominant value structures in some sectors of American society.
21. For a useful account of the men who probably shaped American culture more than any others, see Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons (1934). Josephson's book is something of an artifact itself, written during the Depression with an air of hindsight and regret, yet remains a classic treatment of the rise of American capitalism.
22. Insofar as the discussion in this section pertains to Protestant puritanism, Andrew Carnegie must remain the asterisk next to the argument. Though Fisk, Gould, J.P. Morgan, Philip Armour and John Rockefeller were raised (and, with the exception of Fisk, remained for some time) in a puritanical religious culture, Carnegie was the child of radical, non-traditional parents. Josephson, supra, at 32. With regard to formal education, only J.P. Morgan, who was the son of an already prosperous banker, breaks the mold, having spent several years abroad, including residence at the University of Gottingen. Id. at 44.
23. Weber, supra. See generally R.W. Green, Protestantism and Capitalism: The Weber Thesis and Its Critics (1959).
24. Apparently, Weber's development of this thesis was partly an attack on the Marxists of his day who sought to exclude from history the impact of non-economic ideas such as religion and ideology. Weber, supra, at viii-x (introduction by Anthony Giddens).
25. Olmstead, supra, at 23-41; Weber, supra, at 95-98.
26. The use of the word "humanist" should not confuse; it was not until the last twenty years that the term came to be identified with a non-religious outlook. Of course, Renaissance humanism was resolutely religious, even as it focused on the betterment of the human condition in this world rather than the preparation of the soul for the next one.
27. Weber, supra, at 155-185. Weber is quite critical of the "extreme inhumanity" of Calvinist doctrines of predestination, which he thought created "a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness." Id. at 104.
28. This topic is of course beyond the reach of this paper, but it is worth noting the similarity of the "villain" in critiques of capitalism ranging from Marx to Pat Buchanan: it is the man disconnected from his work, who does not produce anything and who instead leeches off the productive labor of his society. In both cases, this man is the Jew. See Mark Levinson, The Buchanan Manifesto, N.Y. Times (Jan. 8, 1996) at A-27.
29. See Josephson, supra at 32-74.
30. Josephson, supra.
31. Josephson, supra, at 47, 319.
32. Id. at 322-23.
33. Olmstead, supra, at 93-96.
34. Weber, supra, at 155-85; Reichley, supra, at 53-90.
35. For a contemporary critique of this "privatization," see Stephen Carter, The Culture of Disbelief (1993). From his religious perspective, Carter sees America's privatization of religion as necessarily trivializing and minimizing. While I personally share some of Carter's intuitions, his own considerable evidence of religion's continuing import to most Americans undermines the claim that it is in dire need of rescue, with attendant changes in constitutional jurisprudence. At the same time, I hope in this section to draw a broader Carteresque critique: to say that American culture trivializes not just religious value but the notion of any non-economic ethical value.
36. See Olmstead, supra, at 61-70, 146-61.
37. It is worth noting that despite the contemporary identification of religious critiques of society with conservative agendas, religion has and continues to be a powerful inspiration for radical criticisms as well, from Reinhold Niebuhr's demand for a "Christian capitalism" to the Jewish socialists of the middle of this century to Cornel West's contemporary blend of Biblical calls to justice and what he calls
38. See Tawney, supra, at 189-210.
39. See William Leach, Land of Desire (1993)(Analysis of American department stores in the post-Civil War era); Veblen, Leisure Class, supra, at 23-63 (discussing conspicuous consumption).
40. Church of Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 457, 471 (1892).
41. Reich, Opposing the System, supra, at 76.
42. For a general critique of economic discourse as applied to law and justice concerns, see Fred Block, Postindustrial Possibilities: A Critique of Economic Discourse (1990).
43. At the risk of narcissism, I would point out that this position has been explicitly endorsed by the 104th Congress' embrace of cost-benefit analysis based on industry profit to determine regulated levels of toxic poison. Jay Michaelson, Toxics, Regulatory Reform, and the Price of Acceptable Death, 105 Yale L.J. 1891 (1996). By predicating acceptable levels of cancer on the amount of toxics industry finds it profitable to produce, the Congress has well exemplified the sort of value inversion discussed here.
44. See The Theology of Paul Tillich 29 (Kegley and Bretall eds. 1952).
45. Ironically, most money made today is not made "the old fashioned way," but rather the suspect, disconnected, Jewish- capitalist way. It is a curious phenomenon of American capitalist ideology that this split between the idealized capitalist, the self-made man who works by the sweat of his brow, and the real capitalist successes, who today rarely break a sweat outside of the racquetball court. As mentioned elliptically supra, Americanism seems not to have resolved this dilemma. See Mark Levinson, The Buchanan Manifesto, N.Y. Times, Jan. 8. 1996 (noting Buchanan's populist opposition to "big business" at odds with capitalist-religionist free-market Republicanism). Although I am unable to locate the citation for the quote, Buchanan himself has alluded to the religious quality of his free-market peers, saying "I do not worship at the altar of efficiency."
46. Lears, supra at 17ff. This is in fact the subject of Lears' entire study, which comprehensively and in a fascinating way traces the development of American advertising as a neutralization of almost pagan magical elements, associated with the carnival (which was itself both religious/aesthetic and economic in nature). Because Lears has so effectively analyzed the subject, I will attempt to limit my own discussion of advertising as player in the capitalist religion, simply referring the reader to his excellent book.
47. Compare Weber, supra, at 155-85; Veblen, Leisure Class, supra, at 151-69.
48. Of course, this is not exclusively the purview of those who cannot produce, as Veblen first pointed out. Veblen, Leisure Class, supra, at 23-63 (discussing "conspicuous leisure" and "conspicuous consumption"). Veblen suggested in The Theory of the Leisure Class that consumption as competition was exclusively the action of those wealthy enough to do so. While this may have been true in 1899, it is obviously no longer the case, and is at least as important for those unable to compete in other capitalistic "domains" as those who have already succeeded in them.
49. Though some have seen recent revolutions in information technology as threatening to break capitalistic holds on communication, it still seems to early to declare victory for the countercultures on the basis of the world wide web. True, information is more available now than ever before, and insofar as internet structures remain non-hierarchical, hegemonic judgments on content remain limited. But the internet does not exist in a vacuum, and as of now, it plays only a supporting role in a much larger carnival.
50. I have not had much occasion to speak of the dehumanization of being on the production end of consumerism's service economy, though it is certainly one of the graver "externalities" of the consumerist system. See Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983) (case study of effects of "emotion work" on airline flight attendants); Robin Leidner, Fast Food Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life (1993).
51. See supra.
52. Stephen Carter, The Culture of Disbelief 137 (1993)(citing survey by James Patterson & Peter Kim, The Day America Told The Truth (1991)). Of course, Professor Carter's own arguments for re-religiosizing American life -- or rather, bringing American life in sync with what most people seem to believe -- are beyond the scope of this paper.
53. This is not to say non-capitalist, of course.
54. Perhaps, on reflection, it is more surprising that it seems so unusual; was the original purpose of 'technology' not to allow more time to be more human, with one's family, doing what one liked to do?
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