Thursday, February 23, 2006
(12:01 AM) | Old - Doug Johnson:
American Religious History (pt.1): the Enchantments of Labor
Last week, after fourteen months or so of reading in bits and chunks, I finally put away the final pargraphs of Sydney Ahlstrom's massive 1100 page standard in the field of U.S. Religious History: A Religious History of the American People. Ahlstrom, long time dean of the American Studies department at Yale, was influenced more than a little by Max Weber's thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, particularly through the work of Perry Miller who wrote a major work in the late 1930's arguing that all of American religious history has had to take its stand with, as a deviation from, or at least against the backdrop of Puritanism.Ahlstrom, finishing his work in 1972, spends the last pages of the last section of the book ('Toward Post-Puritan America') basically arguing that the 'turbulent sixties,' and especially the role of black religions in the civil rights movement, have put him in the awkward position of believing that everything he has written up until now needs to be rewritten in light of developments that signalled the end of the Puritan era. I'm going to do a series of posts on Weber and Ahlstrom, American piety and the enduring problem of capitalism. In next week's post I plan to do a longish review of the salient features of Ahlstrom. As a preface to this series, I thought I'd excerpt 'Rationalized Labor: the End of Enchantment?', a paper my wife recently finished on Weber and Madness and Civilization:
*************************************************************************
... Weber asserts in The Protestant Ethic that he means to offer a ‘contribution to the understanding of the manner in which ideas become effective forces in history.’ Weber argues that the emergence of modern capitalistic rationalization was impossible without a preceding radical ethical transvaluation that could make licit the appetitus divitarum infinitus (unlimited lust for gain). ‘To speak here of a reflection of material conditions in the ideal superstructure would be patent nonsense.’ Ideas do sometimes shape history, and Weber asserts that there is no better example than the crucial role that the Protestant notion of calling (beruf) played in the development of capitalism. Yet, Weber is quick to assert that it is not his intent to supplement ‘one-sided spiritualistic’ for ‘one-sided materialistic’ causal interpretations of culture—either would impede the pursuit of historical truth. ...
... Luther’s elevation of the concept of the holiness of a vocation was of vital importance to the development of capitalism, but as finally understood by Luther himself, it was not at all foreign to Catholicism’s understanding of the biblical texts from which the term was lifted. According to Weber, Luther and Catholicism’s understanding of beruf merely involved promoting an acceptance of the traditionalist class in which one is born, one’s station in life. While Luther may have tinkered with an alternative conception early on, such realities as his allergy to the peasant revolt firmly set Luther in the conviction that ‘in the concrete calling an individual pursued’ there resided ‘a special command of God to fulfill these particular duties which the Divine Will had imposed upon him.’
... The genius of Calvinsm was the way in which it married a rational moral order, a transcendent God, and absolute determinism in a way that was ‘much more modern’ than the milder doctrine of the Lutherans that still allowed for God to be moved by human importuning. Calling as understood by Calvinists became central to a thoroughgoing reorientation of ethical asceticism. Beruf no longer carried the meaning of accepting one’s place in the world but rather of discerning ‘one’s life in the world as a task.’ ... The idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful God is critical to understanding a central mystery pursued by Weber ... How does it come to be that only in the West a particular form of rationalization develops, specifically Western economic rationalization (capitalism)? Central to Weber’s answer to this question is the assertion that only in the West was recourse to magical efficacy finally cut off. In Sociology of Religion, Weber writes, ‘no other view of the religious relationship could possibly be as radically opposed to all magic, both in theory and in practice, as this belief in providence.’
At face value this is a strange claim to make. Why would belief in an all-powerful God result in the expurgation of magic from the world? Weber’s answer has been so influential that it simply seems natural. Weber’s Calvinist, in perhaps the most brilliant and counter-intuitive move in cultural history, works because all efficacy of works is denied him or her. Weber argues that when the ideal of a provident God had been completely rationalized, humans began to live in a strange world wherein any importuning of God is vain. ... The Calvinist work ethic, therefore, is derived from the stark proposition that works are not efficacious for one’s salvation. Still, while works cannot produce salvation they can serve as a sign that one possesses salvation. ‘Thus however useless good works might be as a mean of obtaining election … they are nonetheless indispensable as signs of election.’
... At a couple of crucial moments in Weber’s history of thought in the West, the doctrine of predestination serves as a midwife for a radically new way of being in the world, a completely new ethics. The first moment arises insofar as predestination was crucial to the elimination of magic from the world, a phenomenon that Weber elsewhere terms ‘disenchantment’: ‘The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.’ Disenchantment opens the way for economic rationality and scientific rationality for we ‘no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, …[t]echnical means and calculations perform the service.’
Almost simultaneously, stark determinism proves critical insofar as it midwifes a distinct way of being in the world, a way of being Weber calls this-worldly asceticism. Luther had rejected the value of monastic life for the Christian. He had argued that such a withdrawal from the world was actually a sin against brotherly love. Nonetheless, each believer was to be a priest called to do God’s will in this world and to live a life of ascetic self-renunciation. With Calvin’s strict determinism and theology of a God who could not be swayed by confession or ritual, Luther’s this-worldly asceticism became a totalizing, methodical, and rationalized ordering of human life. And, with the triumph of Calvinism in critical sectors of the West (namely, England, Holland, and above all else, America), the worldly ascetic became the driving, bourgeois force behind the unparalleled rise to prominence of capital.
... All of this, however, almost inevitably raises a question for those of us living in a world far more secularized ... than even the world in which Max Weber lived and wrote. If bureaucratic capitalism requires for its sustenance individuals who feel called by God to bear the cross of carpal tunnel, why does capitalism persist in a world no longer under the spell of Puritanism?
... While Weber’s available answers to a proposed post-Puritan query are quite helpful, they remain incomplete in certain critical respects. Does work really no longer bear with it a magical necessity along the line of ritual? Is it true to say that work is disenchanted, completely rationalized? Furthermore, what are we to make of capitalist participation by traditionally Catholic sectors of the population in the West? While there are other tantalizing hints in Weber’s work, for a more satisfactory answer to the question we must turn to ... Madness and Civilization, especially insofar as that work relentlessly pursues the genealogy of those who make up the underside of capitalist reason.
... Foucault himself has suggested that he purposely avoided naming those with whom he was most in dialogue or debate, and this because he distrusted the wisdom of open polemics. It may well be the case that Weber is one of Foucault’s silent dialogue partners in Madness and Civilization. ... For Foucault, it is not at all insignificant that soon after the Reformation, all those who did not work began to be institutionalized, initially without regard to the variegated reasons for their lack of labor. While it seems evident that Foucault learned a great deal from Weber, it is also the case that there are a couple of crucial differences, two of which may help us to resolve questions posed at the end of the preceding section. Most important of all, Foucault understands the situation after Protestantism to be one in which enchantment is not banned to the periphery by a view of divine providence. Rather, ancient views of magic and ritual are reinvested into labour itself. At the heart of discerning this new enchantment of labour is the reconsideration not of those who prove by their thriftiness that they are elect, but rather those who by sloth prove themselves to be reprobate.
... Foucault comments that in the new moral order created post-Reformation, Sloth replaces Pride as the chief sin: ‘idleness is rebellion—the worst form of all, in a sense: it waits for nature to be generous … as in Eden, and seeks to constrain Goodness.’ ... In such a moral order charitable giving is no longer a demonstration of love. It has been ripped from the moral universe in which giving is understood ‘mystically,’ no longer does the saint give the shirt off her own back in order to be joined with the divine. Instead, as Weber argues in keeping with his disenchantment thesis, charity becomes a ‘totally rationalized pursuit, and its religious significance was therefore eliminated or even transformed into the opposite significance.’ Moreover, Weber argues for the disenchantment of charity in spite of the fact that it sometimes takes the form of ‘dressing institutionalized orphans in uniforms reminiscent of fools attire and parading them through the streets of Amsterdam to divine services with the greatest possible fanfare.’ Foucault, on the other hand, is quick to point to rituals such as parading orphans as fools to illustrate not the disenchantment of the moral universe but of its re-enchantment. ... The reason for the special place for sloth in the new moral universe according to Foucault is in part because work is by no means rationally disenchanted.
In the classical era labor lost the idea of a productive capacity and was vested with a power of ‘moral enchantment.’ As Foucault describes it, ‘Produce and Wealth were not to be found as the terms of a dialectic of labor and nature.' ... Instead, in the classical era labor acquired the new ritual of the clock: work was to be methodical and continuous. Foucault argues that this was a sign of the new enchantment of labour. It was no longer laboring productively that mattered, but laboring continually. Foucault quotes Calvin to the effect that ‘we do not believe … according as to men will be vigilant and skillful, according as they have done their duty well, that they will make the land fertile, it is the benediction of God which governs all things.' Once labor has taken on a new moral enchantment, humans no longer receive the blessings of the land by wise work but by a continued diligence in toil all the while hoping that God will show signs of his nevertheless undeserved favor.
... Foucault is sensitive in a way that Weber is not to the way in which a Calvinist view of labor itself gains some of the magical power that Weber believes to have been banished from the world by determinism. While Weber takes it that placing a wedge between works and any possibility of obtaining God’s grace finally opens the way for a rational view of the world, Foucault alternatively sees the loss of something really rather rational – that part of traditional religious understandings of the world which views works as having a productive capacity.
... It must be admitted that The Protestant Ethic itself provides a good deal in the way of resources to answer the questions posed in this paper regarding what happens in a post-Puritan world. In present times, Weber argues, ‘religious asceticism … has escaped from the cage’; it has taken on a new, worldly form, absolutely essential to our modern economic ethos. However, capitalism needs this religious foundation no longer. It is able to be carried on by the sheer force of material factors as mundane as the world’s supply of fossil fuels and by the inescapable bureaucratic structures originally developed by loyalist, whether witting or not, to the Puritan cause. Yet, Foucault’s account shifts the emphasis ever so slightly from the subjectivity of the religious ascetic to the question of the structure of a moral universe. For Foucault what the Protestant ethic brought into the world was not a disenchanted moral order but a new one in which ‘moral obligations are attached to civil law.’ Cites of confinement like the asylum, the poor house, and the prison exhibit a new strategy of power, a strategy of power that only makes sense in the new moral universe created by Protestantism but carried forward as well by the Counter-Reformation. Foucault takes us into the present in a way that allows us to see where the new moral boundaries of our communities lie – for the middle-ages, sickness and death with leprosy; for the classical era, a fear of sloth and madness; for the nineteenth century, the newfound alarm of economists like Malthus who feared (echoing Calvin) that the land will someday spew us all out. In each instance the moral purity of the community has to be protected. In many ways the experiments of the poor houses and asylums were the first strategies of a new, biopolitical way of maintaining life. ...
... Foucault’s attention to those madmen and others who refuse to be swept up in labor’s power puts a new spin on Weber’s thesis concerning Protestantism and the triumph of capitalism. Work itself is our new religion, replete with all the magic, ritual, and exclusions of traditional forms of religion. Those who play by the rules of work are healthy, wealthy, and wise, while those who spurn the charms of labor are chastised, excluded, a thorn in society’s flesh, and, finally for Foucault, prophetic.
