Good Morning Friends,

All of my references for this post will come from the book, Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company. New York, 2009.

We're going to talk about the relationship between Calvinism and capitalism, discussed in chapter three of Ehrenreich's book, labelled "The Dark Roots of American Optimism." As you know, I've been saying that capitalism, despite all outward appearances, is an economic system somewhat reluctantly created by the upper classes and definitely reluctantly engaged in by the rest of us - but we'll come to that another time.

The thesis of the book is very well captured in the subtitle: how the relentless promotion of positive thinking (both religious and secular) has undermined America. This is not the place to discuss the argument, which I am entirely in sympathy with, by the way. But Ehrenreich opens chapter three with a question. Why did Americans, in such large numbers, adopt the uniquely sunny, self-gratifying view of the world?

Answer: because they had tried its opposite, Calvinism, and rejected it - sort of. The white settlers who came to New England brought the harsh, unforgiving ideology of Calvinism with them. Ehrenreich quotes literary scholar, Ann Douglas in saying that its God was '"utterly lawless,"' an all-powerful entity who '"reveals his hatred of his creatures, not his love for them,"' (pp.74-75).

This Calvinist God maintained a heaven but spaces for departed souls were limited. Those who got in had been selected before birth through a process called predestination. The job for the living was to constantly examine the '"loathsome abominations that lie in the bosom,"' in order to uproot sinful thoughts that are a sure sign of damnation. The only relief (not salvation because one never knew) was labor of the spiritual or physical type, such as building up farms and businesses. Idleness and pleasure seeking was considered a deep sin (p.75).

The exhortation to meditate daily, hourly, about what a sinful, wicked creature man is, that got himself expelled from the Garden of Eden is the infinite version of the classic upper middle class dictum of a parent who banished her child to her room for some infraction to "think about what you've done." Only, think about it FOREVER!

Let me say, here, this was the formal doctrine of Calvinism. This is what people were required to say they believed. I could be wrong but I can't imagine that individuals, within the privacy of their own self-image, being anything but confident of their own place in heaven (either that they are one of the predestined or that surely The Lord would open up just one more space for them). I understand that the work, physical and spiritual (but then again, as we know much physical work is spiritual or ideological) serves as repentance, a kind of self-flagellation. But wouldn't they have done so, holding out the hope, that each of them like Job (not employment but the man called 'Job' in the Bible) would be restored to glory and prosperity through their faithfulness? Of course the road would be hard and fraught with peril and all that, and so on and so forth. There undoubtedly would be much fear involved. Remember I told you, in thinking about the GREED of Wall Street and the like, that greed always comes from fear. This is a part of the legacy of Calvinism in America. We exist without justification and therefore we are the desire to become God, to assure ourselves that either God or some aspects of infinite capacity exist, so that we can know that we are "doing the right thing" in life. One thing was certain, if you weren't "productive" surely you were marked as one of the damned.

What would be the real purpose of all that industry otherwise? Ehrenreich makes reference to a book, which I must read sometime, called Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber. She says that the thesis of the book is that capitalism has its roots in the grim, punitive outlook of Calvinist Protestantism, which required people to defer gratification and resist all pleasurable temptations in favor of hard work and the accumulation of wealth (p.8).

You know, I said I was going to stick to one book in this post. But I should have known I was telling a lie. But in chapter nine of his book Wealth and Democracy (2002) Kevin Phillips refers to a book by Edward Chancellor called Devil Take the Hindmost - which I had heard of before but had mistakenly thought was an old English literary novel or epic poem like Milton's Paradise Lost. But no, it is a history of financial speculation.

It seems that the stock market, itself, is gambling. It has its roots in carnivals, gambling, and other "frolics." What Phillips calls the "dignity and hierarchy," "16th century equivalent of pinstripes" was nowhere to be seen. Phillips quoted the English historian Simon Schama, who observed about the early Amsterdam stock exchange, for example, that '"such was its reputation as an undignified bazaar that the great lords of capital who themselves enjoyed substantial dividend income from share trading disdained to set foot in the place, delegating the daily business of buying and selling to professional brokers."' Until the London financial boom of the 1690s, Phillips says, the word 'broker' meant "procurer" or "pimp." And so-called blue chip stocks take their name from the color of the most expensive chips in the Monte Carlo casinos (p.347).

Now, as you know, in addition to the traditional New Money/Old Money dynamic, which seems to have been universal, remarkably so, there is the traditional distaste that the upper classes, the levels of aristocracy and monarchy, and so forth, have invariably shown to the merchant/moneylender sector, apart from the New Money/Old Money paradigm, somewhat. This is so even though the moneylenders were a crucial tool in helping the upper classes accumulate their own wealth. This is so, for this overtly commercial sector (and that is the key word 'overtly'). This is so no matter how wealthy they were; in fact, I think that the wealthier they moneylenders were, the more they were disdained by the upper classes. In other words, I think the wealth of the overtly commercial sector may have had an inverse relationship to their social acceptance within the upper levels of society. And this is so no matter where we look.

Why?

Because no one wants his plumbing to show. No one wants the pipes and fixtures visible. It is aesthetically unacceptable. These fixtures must be concealed behind walls. Similarly, I think, the overtly commercial sector was the plumbing, the actual organs of wealth accumulation of the elites, made obscenely visible. The richer these people became the more prominently, and obscenely - from the point of view of the elites - they were, the more they refuted the elite's view of themselves that they would have liked to hold on to. You see, the very existence of the commerce sector refuted the myth that a certain elect of humanity were super wealthy almost beyond imagining because it is the will of God; in this view, the aristocracy and monarchy are where they are by divine favor, certainly nothing so tawdry as capitalism.

The merchant/moneylender class internalized this feeling, of course, and developed a kind of inferiority complex. They tried to relieve this by redeeming, if you will, of their families and themselves, by marrying off their children into "older," "more established" families, preferably those with titles.

This kind of thing was certainly going on in the 1920s, with American parents of aspiring debutantes sending photos of their daughters to magazines in England, France, and Italy that covered the international society beat. The publication of these photos signalled that the girls were open to wooing from European men, preferably those with titles. The situation was one in which "more than a few" European men, members of the minor nobility who were "pecuniarily embarassed," [I suppose this means they lost it all to speculation] - were seeking rich American heiresses for marriage (Larry Samuel. Rich: The Rise and Fall of American Wealth Culture. Amacom - American Management Association, 2009. pp. 57-58).

This is an arrangement in which both parties gain. The broke aristocrat would gain money - albeit by marrying someone he probably wouldn't have given a second look, in class terms, under normal circumstances - and thus re-establishes an integrated view of himself as set apart from the unwashed masses in glory and wealth. The family of the rich, New Money heiress, would gain "respectability."

Let's proceed. Again, with Phillips. In northern Europe, around 1500, financial markets followed seasonal fairs all around. Medina del Campo, which Kevin Phillips says was the de facto financial capital of sixteenth century Spain, was where royal bankers went to pay the king's debts and arrange his loans. These fairs were popular gatherings were granted exemptions by the church (an elite institution at that time, after all) on trade and finance. By the late seventeenth century the carnival was in decline and was replaced by permanent stock exchanges (Wealth and Democracy, p.348).

In such an environment anything and everything seems possible, anything and everything seems negotiable, anything and everything might be bought, anything and everything, and perhaps everyone seems to have "his price." Even the forgiveness of sins could be bought, even spiritual absolution. It's important to note, here, that John Calvin was born in 1509 and died in 1564, and he reacted to this corruption, as it seemed, to him, to manifest itself in the church. He did not want to start a social revolution or anything radical like that.

So, we see that financialization has a very long pedigree. Perhaps it rose up right alongside capitalism from the beginning. And so, ideologically, Calvinism, then, would tend to turn people away from the faux production of this "virtual" capitalism, to concrete production, to "real" economic activity. Today, in the aftermath of this crisis, we see and hear various commentators on the political economy calling for the re-regulation of financial markets; and this might be understood as an attempted reimposition of financial and economic (because remember, non-industrial firms also tend to lose their discipline and engage in an excessive amount of - as Kevin Phillips has also termed it - "paper entrepreneurialism) Calvinism.

Let's go to another post and finish up with Calvinism in America.

wingedcentaur