Capitalism and the Spirit of Disobedience

The April 2006 issue of Harper’s has a fascinating article called “The Spirit of Disobedience: An invitation to resistance” by Curtis White. He begins his essay by discussing the question: “Are we fundamentally a Christian or an Enlightenment culture?” He comes to the conclusion that it is more of a capitalist culture than anything else and analyzes what is wrong and inhuman about this kind of culture. He goes onto express the history of dissent that I feel is the true legacy of American intellectual thought-Thomas Paine, Ralph Waldo Emerson Henry David Thoreau, etc... He makes a lot of porvocative points in his essay. I thinkit worth picking up this issue for this essay alone. I have recorded some of the more arresting and astute observations below:

It should go without saying that it is capitalism that most defines our national character, not Christianity or the Enlightenment. (Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations-with its arguments for the good of the division of labor, the good of money, and the preeminent good of free trade-was published, after all, in 1776.) As Henry Osborne Havemeyer, president of the sugar trust, acknowledged in 1899, “Business is not a philanthropy…. I do not care two cents for your ethics. I don’t know enough of them to apply them…. As a business proposition it is right to get all out of a business that you possibly can.”

Capitalism has not believed and does not believe in the authority of Christ’s spiritual vision nor does it feel constrained by Kant’s Enlightenment ethic, which argued that human beings should be treated as ends, not means. It can’t even be said to believe in utilitarianism’s calculating approach to belief: “the greatest good for the greatest number.” Such a precept causes good capitalists a sort of painful suspicion that they might be distracted from the immediate goal of maximizing profit. Just how many of these others do I have to benefit? I understand that I am not the keeper of my brothers, at least not all of them, but why should I keep ANY of them?

That is the only certain morality of the so-called Free Market. “Our stockholders deserve a return on the investments they have entrusted with us, and we are honor-bound to maximize that return,” say our captains of industry on CNBC or FOX or Wall Street Week or even The Nightly Business Report on PBS, a little tear of commitment welling in the corner of their eyes. They do not trouble themselves to try to operate under what John Ruskin called “conditions of moral culture,” whether Christian or Enlightenment. Compassion is at most something for private consideration as charity, though even that must be made economically rational as a tax deduction.

…do Christian republicans truly not understand the fundamental ways in which an unfettered corporate capitalism betrays Christ’s ethical vision and their own economic well-being? (It is an astonishing irony that many of these religious anti-Darwinians are in their politics and economics Social Darwinians, with a naïve and self-defeating assumption of the virtue of competition. Of course, the people as Herbert Spencer put it, of the “lowest development” to be “weeded out,” are demonstrably themselves!) Most fantastically, do Christian Republicans really not recognize their own perverse marriage with secular rationalism? Or that there is an unacknowledged alliance between the pragmatic, ultra-rational needs of corporate capitalism and the blarney of Christian cleansing through the “social values” movement?

Ours is a culture in which death has taken refuge in a legality that is supported by both reasonable liberals and Christian conservatives. Our exploitation of humans as “workers” is legal and somehow, weird and perverse though it may seem generally acknowledged as part of our heritage of freedom, and virtually the entire political spectrum falls over itself to praise it. When Wal-Mart pays its employees impoverishing wages without adequate health or retirement benefits, we justify it out of respect for Wal-Mart’s “freedom,” its “reasonable” need to make itself “competitive,” and because what it does is legal. As George Whalin, president of retail Management put it,” They don’t have a responsibility to society to pay a higher wage than the law says you have to pay.” Similarly, our use of the most fantastically destructive military power is also legal and also somehow a part of our heritage of “protecting freedom,” no matter how obscene and destructive its excesses.

Henry David Thoreau found his time so much “out of joint” that he concluded that it was better to cease to exist than t continue in corruption and injustice. As he writes in “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”: “The people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.” For Thoreau, the moral bearing of the state had reached a point where he was forced to conclude it was no longer itself. As a consequence, Thoreau was not a citizen of the state of Massachusetts. As he put it in a statement to his town clerk: “Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined.”

Thoreau has something critical to teach us, if we’d let him, about the relation of the personal to the public and of the spiritual to the political. But he’s mostly not available to us. He is shut away with a lot of other books in the virtuous and therapeutic confines of literary and historic institutions. He peers out to us from the pages of his book as another defeated man, another dead white male, as the professors say these days. Our question is whether we any longer know how to retrieve our own traditions from their institutional entombment. This can’t be done by teaching Walden in high school. “Saved” by the American literary canon, Thoreau is a mere dead letter. Thoreau can only be retrieved if find a way to integrate his thought into the way we live as a sort of counterlife opposed to the busy work of the legality of the culture of death. But what is his thought? How would he argue to us if he could?

Thoreau was no Marxist, but he was, like Marx, appalled by what work did to human beings. And by large Thoreau was aware of this human damage without the benefit of experiencing the grim reality of the nineteenth-century English factory. Most of his examples are agrarian, and so his conclusions surprise us, his twenty-first-centaury readers, because we tend to look back at our agrarian past as a kind of utopia lost. What Marx and Thoreau shared with Christ was s sense that “the letter killeth.” What killed was not the letter as Mosaic Law but as secular “legality.” Legality had so saturated the human world that it stood before it as a kind of second nature. But it was a false nature that brought not life but death. The culture of death understood as legality is what Paul Ricoeur (borrowing from Kant) calls “radical evil.” Radical evil is not the individual act of malicious intent; it is the world and its system into which we are born. We take this world up as our own, as if it were our duty to do so.

For Thoreau, the most basic question to ask society is, What kind of human being does it produce? His answer was not optimistic.

…in our community young people are asked to grow up into the following: you will abandon your private intelligence in the name of public stupidity (patriotism in particular) in order to do something dubious as learning to kill other humans? And yet this passes as virtue in our own time and what passed for virtue in Thoreau’s.

We need to ask, as Thoreau and Ruskin did, What are the life-giving things. Such important questions are answered for us in the present by the corporate state, while we are left with the most trivial decisions: what program to watch on TV and what model car to buy.

Comments

[Arie]

So if we look at the history of man and categorize each era of every western civilization as Christian, Enlightened or Capitalist what kind of quilt do we end up with? Then which patches served humanity most kindly? Is our agrarian past a utopia lost? What about famine, city states, plague, crusades, the Inquisition, the French Revolution, the Reformation, Stalin, Mao, etc. What about Asia? I think the attempt here is to only think in terms of US history and to not reach back to far or too deep. Somewhere in US history amid slavery, the Civil War, the industrial revolution, gun boat diplomacy, Indian wars, the Salem witch trials, and the dust bowl, and epidemics there may have been an agriarian ideal, but it was not the norm.

Thoreau showed us the way, our fault is not having followed once given the resources of a Capitalist empire. Instead we've opted for oil and blood and a government that is antithetical to the efficiencies that much of the corporate world represents. (Executive compensation aside...)

[MC]

Arie the context of the article is missing, he's talking about America not western civilization. In fact he framed it in a very convincing manner--you should pay the $4 or whatever and read the entire thing--thought provoking and well-written. I just wanted to post some interesting and provocative bits that felt especially true. So I think you're a bit off the mark, but I basically agree with your last statement. But I think it's an individual choice essentially-anyone can drop out of society and find a home in their own Walden...although society somehow co-opted free market capitalism as a componet of liberal democracy (Bristish influence?) along the way. It need not be (see Scandanavia). But I don't think there's any turning back at this point.

[Arie]

I think I will. I was a bit thrown off by "Radical evil" part, from this excerpt I may be missing a lot or context.