Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg
Our first reading in the class was Ta-Nehisi Coates. The second one is Max Weber. The transition between their prose styles is like gliding downhill on a bike into a brick wall. Nick Seaver calls it “the 1-2 relatable-canonical punch.”
David Foster Wallace likes to tell this parable:
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
In America, the water is capitalism. A capitalist enterprise has two necessary ingredients: a disciplined labor force, and an owner class that re-invests its capital. These things are so familiar to us in modern America that it’s startling to be reminded how culturally specific they are.
Weber tells us that in traditional societies, people usually work as hard as is necessary to meet their basic needs, and no harder. Rich people take their money and spend it luxuries or use it to gain power. Capitalism asks us to work as hard as we can to accumulate as much wealth as we can, and then once we have some money, it asks us to invest it rather than spend it. We have learned to see work and wealth accumulation as intrinsically virtuous, worth pursuing not for some outside goal but for their own sake.
Why do we think this is a good idea? Weber points at Puritanism. That is not at all an obvious explanation. When I think of the Puritans, I think of people in homespun cloth who renounce material wealth. In Weber’s telling, that is indeed how the hardcore Protestants got started. So how did we end up with this guy?
Catholics can absolve themselves from sin at regular intervals via confession. Protestants have to struggle under a perpetual state of sinfulness, or to maintain a permanent state of grace. Either way, that means constant performance of good works. Somehow, the Puritans decided that wealth accumulation was an acceptable way to please God, so long as you did it through sober industriousness, and so long as you don’t succumb to idleness, showiness, or self-indulgence.
Weber’s archetypal Puritan is Benjamin Franklin, with his gospel of industry, frugality, punctuality, and integrity. My favorite line from Necessary Hints To Those Who Would Be Rich is this one:
He that idly loses five shillings’ worth of time, loses five shillings, and might as prudently throw five shillings into the sea.
If you read up on Franklin, it turns out that this was more of an aspirational ethic than a description of his own lecherous, hard-partying actual self. But okay. Weber:
[T]he earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational. Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naïve point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence (p. 18).
The profit motive is not what distinguishes capitalism from all the economic and moral systems that came before. Greed is nothing new. But greed is usually in the service of something: luxury, power, status. The novel feature of capitalism is the focus on wealth accumulation for its own sake, not as a means to more luxury or power. Weber says that the capitalist ethic came before the economic conditions that made all that investable capital available.
The question of the motive forces in the expansion of modern capitalism is not in the first instance a question of the origin of the capital sums which were available for capitalistic uses, but, above all, of the development of the spirit of capitalism (p. 31).
And how did Christians come to the prosperity gospel? Weber says that for Martin Luther, renouncing the business of the world is selfish, not admirable. Capitalist labor, on the other hand, is a calling, “the outward expression of brotherly love” (41). The Puritans gradually eliminated magic and priestly hierarchy from their faith until the more business-oriented among them got rid of God entirely.
Combined with the harsh doctrines of the absolute transcendentality of God and the corruption of everything pertaining to the flesh, this inner isolation of the individual contains, on the one hand, the reason for the entirely negative attitude of Puritanism to all the sensuous and emotional elements in culture and in religion, because they are of no use toward salvation and promote sentimental illusions and idolatrous superstitions. Thus it provides a basis for a fundamental antagonism to sensuous culture of all kinds. On the other hand, it forms one of the roots of that disillusioned and pessimistically inclined individualism which can even to-day be identified in the national characters and the institutions of the peoples with a Puritan past… (p. 62)
The result:
A specifically bourgeois economic ethic had grown up. With the consciousness of standing in the fullness of God’s grace and being visibly blessed by Him, the bourgeois business man, as long as he remained within the bounds of formal correctness, as long as his moral conduct was spotless and the use to which he put his wealth was not objectionable, could follow his pecuniary interests as he would and feel that he was fulfilling a duty in doing so. The power of religious asceticism provided him in addition with sober, conscientious, and unusually industrious workmen, who clung to their work as to a life purpose willed by God. Finally, it gave him the comforting assurance that the unequal distribution of the goods of this world was a special dispensation of Divine Providence, which in these differences, as in particular grace, pursued secret ends unknown to men. Calvin himself had made the much-quoted statement that only when the people, i. e. the mass of labourers and craftsmen, were poor did they remain obedient to God (p. 120).
Puritanism is extinct, but the work ethic lives on.
The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so… This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt (p. 123).
We no longer know why we’re skipping lunch and working weekends. We just feel like we have to.
Where the fulfilment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it need not be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons the attempt to justify it at all. In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport (p. 124).
The Puritan work ethic dovetails neatly with the interests of the economic elites.
It appears here that the interests of God and of the employers are curiously harmonious (p. 257).
Oliver Stone meant for Gordon Gekko to be the villain of the movie Wall Street, but America being what it is, the audience identified him as the hero.
Here’s the famous speech:
The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed — for lack of a better word — is good Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed — you mark my words — will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
The problem is that the upward surge of mankind can’t last forever. We live in a world with finite resources. Edward Abbey said: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Weber’s line about the unburnt coal is especially alarming in the face of climate change.
The Protestant work ethic has not been good for music. I found this quote from Doo-dah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture, and it’s the story of my life.
Any career in music was by definition disreputable in a society that venerated the Protestant work ethic, the virtues of practicality and profitability. Music was for women and children; men outgrew it. As anything other than a hobby, music was not just ungentlemanly; it was unmanly (p. 99)
We in America are very lucky to have an emotional counterweight to the grinding emptiness of Puritanism: the music of the African diaspora, and the alternative spiritual values it carries. When we listen to jazz or rock or hip-hop, we are unconsciously resisting imperialism through secular devotion. We’re giving ourselves a break from the grind to enjoy our bodies, our social connections, and the pleasure of the moment. It’s no surprise that white people consider black music to be such a “guilty pleasure” (what a concept!). It’s no wonder that so many of us have to overcome crippling anxiety in order to play or dance, and that so many of us self-medicate that anxiety with drugs or alcohol. It’s a lot of cognitive dissonance to manage.