Max webber and violence11/3/2023 ![]() In Milton’s Paradise Lost, when Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden and into the world, the archangel Michael offers faith as a consolation within the worldliness that is humanity’s lot: The faithful, Michael promises Adam, “shal possess / A Paradise within thee, happier by far.” Those lines appeared in 1674, more than a century after John Calvin’s death for Weber, they were an inadvertent expression of the capitalist spirit’s historical unfolding. “The Puritans wanted to be men of the calling,” Weber wrote “we, on the other hand, must be.” As a historical process-i.e., something happening over time-this process was gradual enough that the people participating in it did not really apprehend it as it happened. That secular psychology was no “freer” than the religious one we had been emancipated into jobs. The things people did for desperate religious reasons gave way to a secular psychology. Modern invocations of the work ethic are usually misreadings: The Protestant Ethic was more lament than celebration.Ĭalvinism, in other words, was less capitalism’s cause than its ironic precondition. And no wonder their unlucky descendants would internalize our economic miseries as somehow just. No wonder they would come to see their material blessings as a sign that they were in fact blessed. Having foreclosed all other Christian comforts-a rosary, an indulgence, a ritual, a communion-Weber’s original Calvinists needed always to perform their own salvation, to themselves and to others, precisely because they could never be sure of it. They labored in their calling, for what else was there to do? To work for work’s sake was Calvinism’s solution to the problem of itself. The germ of the capitalist “spirit” lay in the way Calvinists dealt with that predicament. The strictures of that dogma ended up creating a new kind of individual and a new kind of community: a community bound paradoxically together by their desperate anxiety about their individual salvation. The centerpiece of Calvin’s theology-the absolute, opaque sovereignty of God and our utter noncontrol over our own salvation-was, in Weber’s account, impossibly severe, unsustainable for the average person. It was, after all, really the failure of Calvinism-in the sense of the unmeetableness of Calvinism’s demands on an individual psyche and soul-that generated a proto-capitalist orientation to the world. ![]() The interpretation, like most of his interpretations, had twists that are not easy to summarize. ![]() Weber’s argument was not that Calvinism caused capitalism rather, The Protestant Ethic was a speculative psycho-historical excavation of capitalism’s emergence. He found the origins in Calvinism, specifically in what he called Calvinism’s “this-worldly asceticism.” He sought the origins of this attitude toward work and the meaning of life, of an ethic that saved money but somehow never enjoyed it, of a joyless and irrational rationality. Weber sought to narrate the arrival of what had become a no-longer-questioned assumption: that our duty was to labor in a calling, even to labor for labor’s sake. Modern invocations of the work ethic are usually misreadings: The Protestant Ethic was more lament than celebration. New York Review of Books, 176 pp., $15.95 Others, hooray, could sustain and perform their work ethic from home. Those who did not face immediate economic peril could experience quarantine as a kind of relief and then immediately feel a peculiar guilt for that very feeling of relief. People go to work because they have no choice. As the pandemic loomed, it should have been obvious that the U.S. ![]() In the U.S., meanwhile, celebrations of the “work ethic” add insult to the injury of overwhelming precarity. The modern Dutch, bless them, are at least as lazy as everyone else, and their enjoyments are vulgar and plentiful. Or the Dutch invoke the Protestant ethic with self-deprecating smugness: Alas, we are so productive. I am from the United States but now live in Amsterdam the Dutch often claim the mantle of an industrious, Apollonian Northern Europe, as distinct from a dissolute, Dionysian, imaginary South. It is less a real thing than a story that people, and nations, tell themselves about themselves. People worked hard long before there was a thing called the “work ethic,” much less a “Protestant work ethic.” The phrase itself emerged early in the twentieth century and has since congealed into a cliché.
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