Nowhere more than in America, the Protestant ethic of hard work has lead to the disenchantment with life around us, a disassociation with the non-scientific, and a deep desire to accumulate “things� as a means of defining who we are.
In his seminal work, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,� Max Weber said, “The care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders … ‘like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.’ But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.�
The Shinto religion believes, in what is seen to be a very primitive belief system, that all things, including people, rocks, water and the air, contain energy, substance, being. They have, in short, spirit as manifest by energy.
Most monotheistic religions, especially Protestant ones, detested such belief systems because they afford energy, an embodied life force, to such objects to guide life instead of a deity that can control and oversee life to the betterment of the individual and society as a whole.
And when they created Hell, a place to be avoided on your demise, they created a set of circumstances wherein you need to practice a sort of monastic frugality to ensure your place not in Hell: the discipline of denial of self, hard work and devotion to the enterprise are seen as the path to righteousness and salvation. Continuous work is the basis for keeping yourself on the straight and narrow. Amassing money, therefore, is proof of that path to salvation.
This fit in perfectly with the capitalist model, creating Rational Capitalism, wherein the fruits of your labor are sanctioned, proof of a holy path to salvation. Weber said that this became an attitude to life as you live it: that you have to be rational, sober, and methodical.
Out of that comes the capitalist habits that we now see as Rational Capitalism.
This created the rational behavior of our American economic system, devoid of European, African and Asian millennia-old pagan spirituality and social strata to overcome; to create free profit, unlimited rewards and the measure of wealth as societal (salvation) status beyond that which money can buy. And this Rational Capitalism has so captured our lives that we are trapped in that iron cage of our own making, unable to become more than a cog in the machine of capitalism.
Weber: “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and above all by the disenchantment of the world. Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life, either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations.�
Weber, who died 90 years ago, could have been writing about the increasing disenchantment we all feel about our society. There is a serious disintegration of our trust in the political system. People no longer have a valued meaning for life provided to us (which is why war is often so attractive; it requires a commonality of purpose).
Because wealth is seen as a path to salvation in the Puritan ethic, corporate leaders have self-justifiably gone from 26 times the mean salary of the country in the 1950s to 300 times that same value today — and it is why such people complain over tax rates for the most wealthy that are seen as too high today when, in the 1950s, they were over 55 percent.
All over the country, fringe groups are opting out of the system, creating new religions not dependant on the values or dictum of the old. And, never least, sexual activity has turned rampant as a means for basic human connectivity.
People are turning inward. Children are increasingly dependent on reflective actions and inter-actions with computers devoid of need or feedback. Japan is investing in the industry of personal robotics they see as important as the automobile in “freeing the individual to a satisfying personal existence.� Facebook has passed 500 million users. Pornography grows at 10 percent a year.
And yet, walk outside, smell the fresh air, put your hands in the soil, take a long walk on a summer’s day. The life you were intended to live is still there, it is just harder to attain, harder to experience, harder to justify taking the time to share. Somehow Rational Capitalism has grown into Irrational Capitalism, a jailer for that iron cage. Perhaps it is time for a re-think?
Peter Riva, formerly of Amenia Union, lives in New Mexico.
