Christianity and the Logic of Capitalism (Part One)
The following is a (rough) essay I wrote comparing Christianity's concept of freedom with that of the logic of free-market Capitalism. The whole essay will be posted in parts due to length. This was my first foray into an essay that examines economic philosophy and Christian theology and it barely scratched the surface of what I wanted to say, and is certainly crude and underdeveloped in many areas. Nonetheless I felt interested in posting it. As always I welcome feedback as long as it is charitable, constructive, and above all commiserate with me in the complexities of the topic at hand.
There are two ways by which
the spirit of a culture may be shriveled.
In the first—the Orwellian—culture becomes a prison. In the second—the Huxleyan—culture becomes a
burlesque…In America, Orwell’s prophecies are of small relevance, but Huxley’s
are well under way toward being realized…[Indeed] an Orwellian world is much
easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan. Everything in our background has prepared us
to know and to resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us…we take
arms against such a sea of troubles…But what if there are no cries of anguish
to be heard? Who is prepared to take
arms against a sea of amusements?
Neil Postman[1]
Money is a great breeder of
unreality.
Terry
Eagleton[2]
There
is a hidden double meaning in the word utopia. The first meaning is, of course, a sort of
ideal paradise, a place of total human contentment and freedom. Sir Thomas More coined the English term in
1516 for his book of the same title, in which utopia described a fictional self-contained island in the
Atlantic. In this sense the word appears
to stem from the Greek eu-topia, or
good-place. Yet the word is carved also
with an inner negative core. This can
best be illustrated by (among many examples) what Naomi Klein describes as
“hollow corporations.”[3] In the mid-1980’s, she explains, there was a
general sea-change among major companies who understood that the path to
financial success was now primarily about producing brands, as opposed to
products. Such a shift in focus caused a
“race toward weightlessness,” namely, whoever “owns the least, has the fewest
employees on payroll and produces the most powerful images, as opposed to
products, wins the race.”[4] Anyone can manufacture a product, they
reason. Such menial tasks laboring with
bulk and earthen husk should therefore be contracted out, sent elsewhere. “There is no value in making things anymore,”
says Nike CEO Phil Knight.[5]
These
restructured companies’ goals seemed to be “to transcend the corporeal world of
things so they could be an utterly unencumbered brand.” They were thus hollowed out of anything but
the image. Shorn of connection to
specific earthbound products, the companies were free to allocate nearly all
resources to becoming vast engines of mythology, and the brand was free to soar
and become not just product hocking but a lifestyle, an orientation of our
deepest desires. Indeed the erstwhile
marketing director of Starbucks Scott Bedbury puts it plainly: Starbucks wants
“to align ourselves with one of the greatest movements towards trying to find a
connection with your soul.”[6] This is the zen of the brand: the brand is
one, the brand is all. Thus with apologies
to Marcus Aurelius, today’s marketing gurus sound like revised pantheists: “You
are a fragment of [Brand]; you, within you a part of [It]…whenever you mix in
society, whenever you take physical exercise, whenever you converse, do you not
know that you are nourishing [Brand], exercising [Brand]? You are bearing
[Brand] about with you.”[7] Noting that “brand” has been substituted for
“God” in the quote gets us one step toward realizing the problem. Another step is the recognition that this
marketing logic, coupled with capitalism, is an attempted realization of a freedom
defined merely as being unencumbered by limits.
The brand is contained in no site (though it has its temples) and in no
products (though it has its totems).
Thus branded utopia finds utopia’s true root: ou-topia. Nowhere.
Our first reaction is, perhaps, to take this
as harmless wordplay. It is the
contention of this essay that it is much more, however. It is the nature of the Brand, as it is the
nature of capitalism, both as a potentially limitless ideal, to expand. (“Absolute
deterritorialization is the essence of capitalism
itself,”[8] as John
Milbank puts it). It will be argued
that the Brand’s sinister nature is precisely the utopian logic noted above: it is idolatrous in that it seeks, like
in the revised Aurelius quote, to saturate our lives and (re)orient us and our
desire and emotion to its own visions of the “good life” contained in its
images—to have us, in other words “bear it about,” with (and in) us. And the expansive logic contained in the
“nowhere,” (and so everywhere) of the Brand idea is beginning to colonize,
crowd, and dis-place the “real” places of our lives. “There is a certain logic to this
progression,” says Klein, “first, a select group of manufacturers transcend
their connection to their earthbound products, then, with marketing elevated as
the pinnacle of their business, they attempt to alter marketing’s social status
as commercial interruption [of culture] and replace it with seamless
integration [of Brand producing
culture].”[9] Unbranded
space is disappearing quickly. This
isn’t merely about logos appearing
everywhere. It is much rather that they
are beginning to produce and drive self-contained worlds. The logic and lifestyle of capitalism and marketing
are thus prone to make “microcosms” of themselves by (subtly and not-so-subtly)
inscribing other forms of life and discourse and replacing their original logic
with its own, creating “simulacra.” “The
simulacra are just like the real thing,” says Graham Ward, “except that they
can be identically replaced…the real itself is commodified and the
commodification becomes the new benchmark for what is real.”[10] The simulacral is thus an image (or activity,
discipline, etc…) which has survived beyond its own symbolic death—and which
has its symbolic meaning secretly replaced while its surface remains apparently
untouched. Which is to say, more simply,
that if as Christians we still often sound
Christian, and want to speak of freedom, charity, and love, these are often
mere traces, now secretly filled inwardly with another logic—the logic of the
market.
Thus
this essay can be read as a rough sketch of two ontologies of freedom often at
odds with one another—capitalism and brand marketing on the one hand, and Christianity
on the other. It is an attempt moreover,
to expose the false logic of the market’s freedom. It is thus not an attack on
the “Free Market,” as such, so much as it asks “when is a market free?”[11] In the process of this disentangling of the
two sorts of freedom it will be argued that definitions of freedom which regard
it merely as “freedom from” limits (as offered by the market) is actually
fraught through with invisible limitations and aporias. These limitations and
aporias can be described as capitalism’s and image marketing’s “Gnostic,”
impulse: in the flight toward limitlessness, the virtual begins to be valued
over the embodied (capital over labor, money over goods, image over substance
etc…) and can shift over into the bodily being denigrated for the sake of the virtual and simulacral. Just what this means we shall come to better
understand, and then be able to pose the alternative Christian idea of freedom
as a freedom for others, not a
restrictionless expanse but a harmony with a higher good, expressed in embodied
servanthood and community centered around the singularity of Christ and his
mission.
[1] Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse
in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin Books, 1985) pp.155-156.
[2] Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections
on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) p.41.
[3] Naomi Klein, No
Logo (New York: Picador, 2009) p.xvii.
[7] As quoted in John Cooper, Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers (Grand Rapids: Baker
Academic, 2006) p.38.
[8] John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular
Reason 2nd ed. (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006) p.274. Emphasis in original.
[9] Klein, No Logo
p.35.
[10] Graham Ward, Cities
of God (London: Routledge, 2001) p.59.
[11] William Cavanaugh, Being
Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s
Publishing, 2008) p.2ff.
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