Some Weber

“The Puritan wanted to work in a calling: we are forced to do so [...] In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the ’saint like a cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment’. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage [...] Today the spirit of religious asceticism – whether finally, who knows? – has escaped from the the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer [...] 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 gives it the character of sport. Of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation never before achieved’”

(The Protestant Ethic & The Spirit of Capitalism, p.123-4).

SOME COMMENTARY: Max Weber is obviously most well known for the connection he drew between the ‘Protestant Work Ethic’ (notions of vocation, calling etc.; privileging of the active life over the contemplative life; rejection of monasticism) and the ‘Spirit of Capitalism’ (utility; profit as an end in itself). I’ve been reading for review a book by a guy called John Hughes, and he points out that Weber’s account of the connection between these two was not as simplistic or (apparently) reductionist as it is sometimes portrayed. It seems that Weber was at least partially aware of the effect of secularization on the ‘Spirit of Capitalism’. Protestantism may have played a crucial role in the birth of the capitalist spirit, but modern capitalism has ruthlessly thrown off its religious heritage. Even in the worst, most Puritan context, the Protestant work ethic was tempered by a concern for the spiritual. Unhooked from this spiritual dimension via secularization, however, we have slowly emerged into the vulgar, suffocating ‘iron cage’ of the modern capitalist society.

On a related note, the ongoing collusion of the Religious Right with today’s vulgar (stultifying, dehumanizing, profiteering, exploitative) mode of free-market, secular capitalism remains a complete and utter mystery to me, and ridiculously (insanely, absurdly, farcically, disturbingly) hypocritical given all their high-handed and somewhat obsessive moral rhetoric in other areas. I’m of course aware that this is not a new insight.