AMERICANS IN WONDERLAND:

Max Weber Goes Global (Michael Novak, April 2005, First Things)

Whereas others have emphasized the market’s ability to create wealth and foster technological innovation, Weber understood capitalism primarily in terms of duty, asceticism, and self-denial—and he stressed its tendency to encourage instrumental calculations of cost and benefit, as well as to employ a purely formal mode of thinking and reason. Most ominously, once capitalism becomes divorced from its original religious impulses, it turns into iron cage” from which we are unable to extricate ourselves. The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we, by contrast, are forced to do so. The “inexorable power” of the capitalist ethic rests upon “mechanized foundations.” Weber discerns in this atheistic, secular system a “mechanical petrification.” He describes the fate of modern man in terms as bleak as those found in the writings of such poets as Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. For Weber, modern capitalists are “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.”

Which raises an important question: Is Weber’s outlook justified by the reality of life under capitalism? Or is it instead the result of his mistaking certain aspects of capitalism—aspects that ultimately derive from secularized Reformed Protestantismthe capitalistic order as a whole? The Protestant ethic may issue in hard work, asceticism, and an always unsatisfied striving for material betterment, but doesn’t capitalism also foster ingenuity and inventiveness? Put theologically, the Protestant ethic tends to emphasize conversion and change of life that can be wrought only by divine grace. An alternative but no less important ethic—one that can be described as a “Catholic” ethic—has historically worked to emphasize that, despite the wounds inflicted on creation by sin, the world retains marks of God’s goodness. If Protestant striving has inspired economic dynamism, Catholic delight in the goodness of creation has, by comparison, encouraged economic creativity.

Weber was blind to this distinctly Catholic contribution to the development of capitalism because he erroneously assumed that the Benedictine ideal of worldly withdrawal remained the only mode of Catholic asceticism. Indeed, as early as the eleventh century, the regular canons of towns and villages throughout Europe began to adopt the Rule of St. Augustine and live the monastic life while ministering to growing urban populations. Western monasticism moved still closer to the life of the laity with Robert of Molesme and the establishment of the Order of Citeaux in 1098. As sociologist Randall Collins has shown, one of the primary causes of the great revival of European commerce in the twelfth century was the rise of Cistercian monasteries:

These monasteries were the most economically effective units that had ever existed in Europe, and perhaps in the world, before that time. The community of monks typically operated a factory. There would be a complex of mills, usually hydraulically powered, for grinding corn as well as for other purposes. . . . The Cistercians were the cutting edge of medieval economic growth. They pioneered in machinery because of their continuing concern to find labor-saving devices. Their mills were not only used by the surrounding populace (at a fee) for grinding corn but were widely imitated. The spread of Cistercian monasteries around Europe was probably the catalyst for much other economic development, including imitation of their cutthroat investment practices.

And then there was the influence of the mendicants. The Dominicans and the Franciscans, in particular, introduced lay Catholics to the rhythms of apostolic life, taught them to cherish holiness in their daily work, and inspired them to perform that work perfectly for God. More, of course, could be said. The point is not to deny that the Protestant Reformation unleashed a special dynamic energy, but rather to note the crucial contribution of other religious and cultural influences to the development of the capitalist order, in its unique blend of dynamism and creativity.

Nowhere has this potent combination been more fully realized than in the United States. In unexpected ways, the distinctive experience of economic life in America falls as much within the Catholic view of things as it does within the Protestant outlook described so vividly by Weber. The joy of discovery, the delight in novelty, the love of risk and surprise, the frequently experienced disproportion between effort and reward—Alexis de Tocqueville points to all of these qualities in his discussion of the United States. The typical American, Tocqueville observed,

lives in a land of wonders; everything around him is in constant movement, and every movement seems an advance. Consequently, in his mind the idea of newness is closely linked with that of improvement. Nowhere does he see any limit placed by nature to human endeavor; in his eyes something which does not exist is just something that has not been tried yet. . . . Choose any American at random, and he should be a man with burning desires, enterprising, adventurous, and, above all, an innovator.

While Americans retain a strong notion of human imperfection and affirm the need for checks and balances—in other words, they hold to a nonutopian understanding of human nature—they also take an almost Catholic delight in the goodness and possibilities and wonders of creation. “Chance,” Tocqueville notes, “is an element always present to the mind of those who live in the unstable conditions of a democracy, and in the end they come to love enterprises in which chance plays a part. This draws them to trade not only for the sake of promised gain, but also because they love the emotions it provides.”

In such a tumultuous nation, marked by extraordinary social and economic fluidity, people began to understand—perhaps for the first time in human history—that poverty was not necessarily a natural condition. The age-old class structure—not to mention the seemingly inevitable premodern cycle of prosperity and economic decline—could be broken. And if such progress were possible in the United States, why not in other countries? The chains of poverty could be systematically broken—and if they could be broken, there was a moral imperative that they must be broken.

And so they were—first in the United States, and then slowly, progressively, around the world. Little by little, people began to understand that it need not be the case that “you always have the poor with you” (Matthew 26:11)—that it is a moral obligation of societies as well as individuals to overcome poverty. Whereas poverty had previously been taken to be the natural condition of most human beings everywhere, through the workings of capitalism it came to be considered as counter to nature, immoral, and the result of inadequate social planning and effort. In America, the process of moving up and out of poverty, generation by generation, came to be called fulfilling the “American dream.”

Obviously some would still be comparatively "poorer" than others, but it
's surprising how easily we could make everyone eventually affluent.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 5, 2005 10:55 PM