This article is a review of a book called The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity by Eugene McCarraher. There’s some interesting concepts brought forward on this piece we could reflect on in terms of our current globally imposed economic and social structure.
First, here are some excerpts from the article.
A stable material and social infrastructure gives us the time and space to thrive as individuals
In 1943 the psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed his famous hierarchy of needs. The banal premise is that some needs are prior to others. We need food and shelter, for instance, before we can seek friendship and love. And only once we’ve attained those can we attain the summit of the pyramid: the Shangri-La of “self-actualization,” defined as doing what one “is fitted for” and becoming “more and more what one is.” This vision of human flourishing has become ubiquitous in the decades since Maslow’s paper. A regular feature of school curricula and self-help guides, it has filtered into our everyday understanding of the meaningful life: one in which a stable material and social infrastructure gives us the time and space to thrive as individuals.
A “beloved community”
Analyzing capitalism from a moral and anthropological perspective—though one very different from Maslow’s—[McCarraher] presumes that human beings desire to lead meaningful lives, in concert with others. At the core of our being, he thinks, we do not aim to actualize the self but to actualize a world: a “beloved community” of nature, friends, and family, with worship and work as the grammar of those relations.
A “God-drenched cosmos”
Moreover, he thinks that the fundamentally secular approach to self and world that we find in Maslow is inconsistent with our true nature, and our true needs. We can live properly in the world only if we understand the world for what it is: not brute matter for our exploitation, but a God-drenched cosmos that is already suffused with meaning, if we know how to look for it.
A Bankrupt Love Story
McCarraher wants us to see that we are living in a system that, in failing to answer our most human needs, is literally inhumane. But this is not a book that asks us to slow down, smell the roses, and so on. That kind of ethical injunction is as tired as it is futile—and it is also, McCarraher thinks, an intellectually bankrupt analysis of the modern condition, told by theorists such as the sociologist Max Weber and the philosopher Charles Taylor, but also in popular culture. Once upon a time, this story goes, we inhabited an enchanted universe, in which we understood our place in the cosmos. Life in the past may have been hard, but at least it made sense. The transition to modernity, though, came with a cost: our lives might be materially better, but they have been drained of meaning. We are, in a word, “disenchanted.” We are tasked, then, with crafting meaning for ourselves—whether by finding meaningful work, falling in love, or doing yoga.
Capitalism twists our love for fellow humans beings into a force of estrangement, and it transforms our God-given desire to work into forms of exploitation.
McCarraher contends that this whole story is disastrously misguided; it keeps us from seeing how capitalism functions, and why it continues to exert so much appeal. Disenchantment, he argues, never happened. Our world is still soaked with meaning, just as it was in the Middle Ages. We are not abandoned to a universe of moral relativism and nihilism, because capitalism and its prophets have offered an astonishingly stable set of alternatives. “Capitalism,” McCarraher insists, “is a love story.” What he means is that the market translates the poetry of our desire into the prose of institutions and exchange. (And isn’t this the structure of any love story, or at least those ending in marriage?) Our world, in other words, is just as “enchanted” as the one of our medieval forebears: the human frame is such that it could not survive otherwise. Capitalism offers us community, faith, ritual, nature worship, and everything else that we imagine in the enchanted worldview of the past.
The trouble is that it is black magic. It twists our God-given love for neighbor and world into a force of estrangement, and it transforms our God-given desire to work into forms of exploitation. The problem with capitalism isn’t that it lacks values, but that it values the wrong things. If McCarraher is right, the salvation we seek will not come through technological breakthroughs or even the creation of new political coalitions. The first order of business, he thinks, is to learn how to love again, and to love better.
Capitalism as a form of religion
McCarraher … is not the first to argue that capitalism follows a religious structure in its desire to invest ordinary objects—commodities, money—with mystical qualities. Nor is he the first, by far, to point out the importance of this idea for Marx, who develops it into the idea of “commodity fetishism.” … Since the Puritans, he thinks, American culture has been suffused with the logic that “wealth was God’s benediction on the righteous, a reward from the Almighty to the archangels of improvement.” The prosperity gospel has long been with us, and McCarraher shows us a coven of gilded age prophets of accumulation. To take just one of the most surprising examples: the first monthly business magazine in the United States, Hunt’s Merchant Magazine, was founded by a man named Freeman Hunt who was utterly convinced that business prosperity was the grammar of God’s love.
For much of the twentieth century, the corporation replaced the godly entrepreneur as the locus of capitalist enchantment. There is, after all, something magical about the corporation: a legal person, but also, as its name implies, a community. McCarraher is well versed in the literature of corporate and business history, but his main point is more cultural. The gilding work of advertising and human relations were central to the hegemony of the corporate form, he contends. Even Frederick Taylor, that much-maligned prophet of mechanized human labor, was committed to a beloved community, a workplace in which “each man possesses his own individuality” and yet could “work harmoniously with many other men.” This union turns out to be ubiquitous, and McCarraher delights in unearthing forgotten business gurus who reached to scripture in their attempts to defend the corporate order.
Capitalism makes us feel it provides us the tools we need to craft a meaningful and humane life
We all know that capitalism strives to make us feel good about consumption. McCarraher’s move is to say that this is not so much a mere feature or façade of the system as the foundation. As much as we might not like to admit it, he argues, capitalism does provide something like that: it does, in other words, succeed in making us feel, when our critical guard is down, that the marketplace is providing us the tools we need to craft a meaningful and humane life. Advertising firms strive to show us that their products provide access not only to a good experience, but to a good world. Think, for instance, of the bucolic fantasies that adorn our egg cartons, or the utopian labor regimes extolled on our cans of craft beer. Rather than sites of exploitation and conflict, management and HR ask us to experience them as ersatz families, complete with birthday celebrations and pep talks. Not even our leisure time is free from the machinations of capitalist enchantment. Walt Disney, a crucial figure for McCarraher, created an entertainment empire around the idea that the “magic” has not been drained from our world at all, but is (still) all around us.
Capitalism is a love story, then—but the kind that, whether you notice or not, will break your heart. These forms of enchantment lead to misery, and to McCarraher they are alien to the true needs of the human soul.
A comment I found recently on Tumblr in a discussion about this:
Have you ever considered how astonishing babies crying is?
The young of other animals don’t make noise, or if they do, barely any at all. Baby birds only start chirping when their parents come back with the food, kittens meow to their mothers because cat communication is extremely subtle and drawing your caretaker’s attention may require a sound when you have eight siblings. At this point, they can already see and walk.
But human babies? Crying is essentially the first willful action that they learn. Months before being able to move on your own, or even hold your own fucking head up, or being able to choose when and where you defecate. Before anything else, a skill more valuable than anything else, is a distress call.
A distress call specifically intended to be impossible to ignore.
Before object permanence or theory of mind, without even an understanding of what help they need, who could provide it, and whether they choose to do so, a human being is capable of expressing that there is something wrong in the state they are in, that they are powerless to correct on their own.
This is what was evolutionarily selected above silent babies that did not attract predators. This is what was selected instead of young who could instantly walk. This is what was selected as the ideal offspring for the human race. Not one that runs. Not one that hides. Not one that can fend for itself. A creature that can communicate, if only the simplest, most inherent message:
Some questions I’m interested in discussing:
‘Self actualization' = "becoming who you are”?
Human beings are fundamentally social animals, are we most fundamentally us when we are creating systems of belonging?
Does Taiwanese culture already do this? I want to talk about individualism and collectivisim in Taiwanese society.
I found a very interesting take on the idea of American Individualism, and its conception of community:
An excerpt of Chapter 1 of “The Invention of the White Race: Volume 1” (1994) by Theodore W. Allen
