Christianity and the Logic of Capitalism (Part Two): The Invisible Catastrophe
In
his seminal book, After Virtue,
Alasdair MacIntyre closes his fascinating survey of intellectual history by
suggesting that “a new dark ages,” are already upon us.[1] These dark ages of which he speaks are
symptomatic of a “disquieting suggestion,” with which his book opens: that we
have suffered “a catastrophe…of such a kind that it was not and has not
been—except perhaps by very few—recognized as a catastrophe.”[2]
Though MacIntyre is dealing specifically with moral theory, I want to use his
“disquieting suggestion,” of an invisible catastrophe silently inscribing,
altering, and indeed undermining from within our discourse, our affections, our
very orientation to the world, and apply it to the phenomenon of capitalism. The disaster of which MacIntyre speaks
regarding moral discourse argues even our most sophisticated moral
deliberations are only “simulacra of morality,” because they are a bricolage of
fragmentary leftovers “which now lack the contexts from which their
significance derived.”[3]
Thus,
again analogously, I want to suggest that while capitalism offers and sustains many seemingly Christian impulses in our
orientation to and construction of time and space—the spread of personal
freedom, affirmation of the goodness of the body, the breaking down of borders,
global community, the value of humankind, mastery over creation—capitalism
actually often fragments Christian discourse and re-inscribes meaning upon Christian terms and practices subtly (and
not so subtly) altering them: “the units
of [capitalism’s] grammar are also the instruments of its coercion”[4]
(what I described above in the term “simulacral”). As Daniel Bell suggestively puts it:
Neoliberal government aggressively
encourages and advocates the extension of economic reason into every fiber and
cell of human life. Economic or market
rationale controls all conduct.
Capitalism has enveloped society, absorbing all the conditions of
production and reproduction. It is as if
the walls of the factory had come crumbling down and the logics that previously
functioned in that enclosure had been generalized across the entire space-time
continuum…now [we] must submit every aspect of [our] lives to the logic of the
economy…[we] must be entrepreneurs of [ourselves].[5]
For
our purposes one of the major transformations of logic as we have said is that
of freedom. This can be seen in the
basic idea of freedom as “rights.” “In the newer tradition,” says Bell, “God’s
right established discrete rights possessed originally by individuals…according
to this [new] conception the individual occupies the central position as right
is associated with human power to control and dispose of human things.”[6] We will see a bit of how this came about in
the next section. For now the point is
that this picture of rights “far from marking a milestone in the struggle to
overcome ‘all that keeps human beings from self-fulfillment’…it is more
plausibly understood as but one component of the host of technologies that
developed for the sake of governing persons ‘through freedom,’ in accord with
the demands of emerging market forces.”[7] Thus whether we side with the historiography
that says “rights” language was co-opted by the market, or the other side
(which Bell takes, following the analyses of Alasdair MacIntyre, Anthony
Arblaster and Ian Shapiro)[8]
which states that rights discourse was formulated
by an emerging bourgeois class “intent [on] securing new forms of wealth and
property…against traditional feudal forms of wealth embodied in the
[inheritance based] aristocracy,”[9] the
ultimate point is that the concept of freedom and human fulfillment are now
seen along essentially individualistic and acquisitive lines. “To emancipate,” is only to say: “maximize
negative freedom of choice,” and to say “freedom” is to say “arbitrary power
[for consumption].”[10] And thus, as we shall turn to in a moment,
“rights” discourse, far from providing a barrier to the excesses of capitalism,
is often the undergirding logic of those very practices.
For
the moment we can see how this has invaded Christian discourse in certain
ways. Dave Ramsey as a small example can
admirably help people out of crippling debt, and yet troublingly couch the
whole thing in quasi-Christian redemption, where one passes through the death
of hard-work to emerge into the second-birth of salvation as personal economic
liberty. Of course neither hard work nor
economic liberty are in themselves pejorative, but they are veiled in the
narrative of his mantra “live like no one else,” that is, to be in a financial
position to do whatever one wants. Self-sacrifice
paradoxically becomes self-security and charity becomes a philanthropy seen
almost purely through the lens of giving money out of one’s personal financial reservoir,
rather than in forms of self-emptying servanthood and personal relation. I had the opportunity to attend one of
Ramsey’s recent seminars, and perhaps the most ominous note in Dave Ramsey’s presentation
was “you can only help others if you have money.” Of course persuasive lies are those that are
partially true. To state the obvious: relationships
can (and most often do) involve money (I in fact attended Ramsey’s seminar only
because my wonderful parents generously paid my way). What is troubling is that
Ramsey’s (perhaps unguarded) declaration became an almost unilateral commission
to first get to a place of financial self-satisfaction and then, if one felt so
inclined, to give. Charity and Christian
mission from a position of personal vulnerability in this instance became
(despite Ramsey’s obviously good intentions) subservient to an alien logic
where money and efficient power are king.
Indeed the mantra “to live like no one else,” is inscribed into the very
notion of freedom-as-rights and thus freedom as consumption: I have the right
to be myself (thereby be like no one else) and I do this through the gesture of
being able to consume in my own way.
Not
to pick on him too much because I truly believe he is doing a great thing in
helping debt-stricken families, but he related the story of how one
of his wealthy friends ran into a woman whose power was turned off, and he very
magnanimously (and in secret) paid for her power bill a year and a half in
advance. This is of course a story to be
applauded. But it was not said if the man
ever spoke to the woman again. Not
announcing one’s charity is of course a great way to avoid Pharisaic
triumphalism, and yet as the single instance of charity in Ramsey’s entire six
hour presentation it appeared that charity had degenerated into being a
“ghostly benefactor,” who can help while simultaneously paying little personal
investment. At the same time Ramsey used
it as a pillar supporting his hypothesis that only if you have money can you
help others. Again, who can deny that
money is useful? Yet this logic of
money’s usefulness, and its specific sort
of usefulness appears to have become something of a universal acid for Ramsey,
eating away the distinctiveness of all other forms of thought and action. Not a week later, however, my Pastor told a
similar story of a man who couldn’t help a woman pay for her electric bill,
himself being poor, but every day he came to her apartment and helped her
prepare food in the dark, prayed with her, and gained a new friendship. It is
of course helpful to have money, who can deny that? But the “success,” of both men in their
efforts is only disparate when judged by what John Howard Yoder calls a
“politics of technique,” and an obsession with “effectiveness,” as judged by an
immanent logic of efficient causality.
The true judgment of Christian effectiveness, says Yoder, is not “cause
and effect,” but “cross and resurrection” [11] which is to say personal giving, community, and sharing
in fellowship.
Of
course Ramsey is not unique here. Stephen Webb recently argued
in his interesting (though alarming) book American
Providence[12]
on the basis of the same logic of the efficacy of money and capital champions a
type of American exceptionalism. While
he says we should not baptize every American action, nonetheless, “that America
is doing more than any other nation to spread the kinds of political structures
that can best prepare the globe for God’s ultimate work of establishing the
final kingdom is not insignificant.”[13] This is, of course, partially true. America has
done a lot of things which have let the gospel be heard, and for that we should
be grateful. But a Faustian gambit does
not go away because one just looks at the good.
Moreover it seems quite reasonable to ask by what standards Webb is
judging both “Christian flourishing” and that “America is doing more than any
other nation,” to establish this. I
think all of us who live in plush safety as Christians in America can
appreciate that the odds of us being martyred while picking up milk and eggs
from the local market are quite low. I
thank God for my own, and especially my family’s safety. Yet, is this
Christian flourishing? What is the index being used here? A crucified messiah, a God whose strength was
displayed through weakness to bring
salvation and communion with Himself? Or something else? The supposition that
America is spreading the kinds of political structure “that can best prepare
the globe” for God to establish the kingdom ignores both the damage caused by
the spread of our particular brand of freedom, and just as significantly the
change in the modus operandi of terms
(freedom, choice, liberation, etc…) employed once they are contextualized
within American nationalism or global capitalism. Jesus and Milton Friedman might utter the
same sentence, but it stands to reason they would not thereby mean the same thing.
Yet Webb, for all of his
strengths, seems unaware or unconcerned by these issues. He believes that Christian evangelization of
the world will be completed when the world is open to American style freedoms.[14] The problem here is not with “freedom,” (who
would object to less totalitarianism and religious oppression?) but with a sort
of unthinking equation that “American
style freedom” (his shibboleth for free-market capitalism) is automatically a
frictionless structure for Christianity to reside within. Elsewhere Webb notes
that he believes that democracy and free markets ultimately are a product of
Christianity, specifically the “great Protestant theme of freedom.”[15] While this is certainly historically quite
plausible, here again Webb is showing a remarkable insensitivity to how
different modes of Christian (and
Protestant) discourse—not just Christian discourse in the abstract—produced,
and then was produced by, this economic theory.
Webb not only does not really examine these possible differences, he
downright rejects that this “American
style freedom” has any ontological implications for any worldview: he writes
that we [i.e. American Democracy] have no “coherent social vision” to impose on
others, that “our very respect for freedom, in other words, both fuels our
overseas endeavors and inhibits us from developing the kind of ideology that could
result in global domination.”[16] This naiveté deconstructs itself when later, in the same book Webb writes that “forcing [my emphasis] Muslim nations
into democratic political orders can accomplish much good in the world, but it
needs to be recognized that this goal is theological as well as political.”[17] The mind boggles. Yet perhaps the most telling feature is that
Webb values the power of American democracy and capitalism precisely because “God
moves nations by working through history, not against it. By definition the
poor are not effective agents of significant historical change.”[18] To feel the full force of
two different types of freedom, one need only imagine these words being spoken
to a currently-being-crucified Christ.
Hence
we here present capitalism as an ontology, and as a set of practices deriving
and informing that ontology, which orient us, our desires, and our identities in
time and space by engaging what Charles Taylor calls our “social imaginaries,”[19]
which direct us—often at pre-theoretical and even emotional levels—in how we
collectively envision society and how our terms and concepts are invested with
meaning. Or in the words of Gordon Bigelow “Economics, as channeled by its
popular avatars in media and politics, is the cosmology and the theodicy of our
contemporary culture…it is economics that offers the dominant creation
narrative of our society, depicting the relation of each of us to the universe
we inhabit…”[20] If
capitalism acts like a religion (or perhaps is
one) then in the words of Eugene McCarraher, we can “critique it as a religion,
a form of enchantment, an ensemble of rituals, symbols, moral codes, and
iconography,”[21] in
order to uncover some of its oppressive mechanisms we have unthinkingly
accepted, and perhaps move towards rendering visible the often very invisible catastrophe
that has not just affected Webb, but many of us as well.
[1] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory 2nd
ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984) p.263
[2] Ibid
p.3
[3] Ibid
p.2.
[4] Milbank, Theology and Social Theory p.141
[5] Daniel Bell, Liberation
Theology After The End of History: The Refusal to Cease Suffering (London:
Routledge, 2001) p.31.
[6] Ibid p.105.
[7] Ibid p.126.
[8] MacIntyre, After
Virtue; Anthony Arblaster, The Rise
and Decline of Western Liberalism (New York: Basil Blackwell Publishers,
1984); Iain Shapiro, The Evolution of
Rights in Liberal Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
[9] Bell, Liberation
Theology p.126.
[10] Milbank, Theology
and Social Theory p.275.
[11] John Howard Yoder, The
Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids:
Eerdman’s Publishing, 1994) p.232.
[12] Stephen H. Webb American
Providence: A Nation with a Mission (New York: Continuum, 2004)
[13] Ibid p.8.
[14] Webb, American
Providence p.78.
[15] Quoted in William Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the
Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2011) p.98.
[16] Webb, American
Providence p.85.
[17] Ibid p.139.
[18] Webb, American
Providence p.62.
[19] Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2004) pp. 23-30; and in more detail, Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007) pp.171-176.
[20] Gordon Bigelow, “Let There
Be Markets: The Evangelical Roots of Economics,” Harper’s 310, no.1860 (May 2005): 33.
[21] Eugene McCarraher, “The Enchantments of Mammon: Notes
Towards a Theological History of Capitalism” Modern Theology. No. 21, vol. 3 (July 2005): 449.
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