The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

Sandy Levinson

I mentioned in a previous post some of my reactions to Patrick Deneen's interesting book Why Liberalism Failed.  I noted that many of his arguments are evocative of earlier critiques of liberalism written in the 1960s and early '70s.  One of the most important of those critiques was Daniel Bell's "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism."  As Marx had noted, one effect of capitalism was to disrupt settled societies, to "make all that is solid melt into air."  The decidedly anti-Marxist Joseph Schumpeter emphasized the importance of "creative destruction" in the capitalist project, i.e., to destroy existing industries and the communities that might have been based upon them upon the discovery of new and better mousetraps.  Although it is not my primary interest in this post, I do note a story in today's New York Times that emphasizes, altogether accurately, the extent to which  Donald Trump is engaging in the political economy of nostalgia, trying to restore industries, most obviously the coal industry, that will never ever make a come back because it has in fact been creatively destroyed by other sources of energy.  Texas, for example, is now the largest source of wind power in the US, and one finds very few Texans, other than the hapless Rick Perry, who believes that valuable dollars should be wasted on trying to revive a dying coal industry.  One might make much the same argument about steel.  But, as I say, that's not the primary focus of this comment.

Instead, I am completely fascinated by the column in Friday's Wall Street Journal, part of its regular series "Houses of Worship," on various religions in America.  The Journal, of course, is to be commended for taking an interest in American religious communities.  This weeks column, by Kim Woodward Osterholzer, is about "Faith and Family Among the Amish."  She herself is a home-birth midwife, now living in Colorado, having earlier lived for nine years in the Amish country in Pennsylvania.  She scarcely presents an attractive picture of the Amish; it is very different, for example, from the high-romanticism offered by Chief Justice Burger in Yoder.  Thus she writes that she "found barely functional homes filled with a bustling, Spartan folk wearing patched and sweat-stined clothes.  I was taken aback by the rough hands, the weather-battered faces, the round and weary shoulders, the bare and blackened feet, the swollen ankles, and the legs stranger with bulging veins.  I glanced when I saw how many young families lived in barns, shed and the basements of partly constructed homes....  I learned to regard with nonchalance the rolls of flypaper that dangled from the ceilings.  After a while, I hardly noticed the mice scampering under doors and along the edges of baseboards,,,, "  She also describes herself as "unfazed by the severity of the religion," which is structured around following the Ordnung, as interpreted by a bishop and two local ministers, "who are selected by lottery and serve for life while keeping their day jobs."  Perhaps needless to say, "women are never allowed to preach."

Lest one think that the column is a criticism of this completely totalitarian enclave of those who might be described by the unsympathetic as religious fanatics, the author in fact ends up with a tribute to what she saw.  "The Amish are a God-fearing, family-centered people.  They work hard, but they also relax and play.  Their lives are so untarnished by the broader culture that to be with them is refreshing...  The fruit of the Amish way i\of life is that it keeps its people better focused on what truly matters--faith and family.  They intimately understand the resilience and fragility of life and the certainty of death.  It keeps them close to the earth, in sync with its rhythms.  Whenever I departed from a visit, I would ask myself:  Do we really need the fear of hell driving us before we can make time to be with one another and enjoy the magnificent world God created for us?"  I suspect that one might find some similar elegies about some Hasidic Jews, who equally withdraw from the world and do everything they can to make sure that their children are indoctrinated into the ostensible virtues of the integral community and rendered basically unfit to exist in the outside world.

Deneen is Catholic, so I doubt that he would be completely taken with these descendants of German Anabaptists.  But they do instantiate the kind of small integral communities whose destruction by liberalism--defined either as the strong consolidated state favored by contemporary progressives or the buccaneer capitalism embraced by libertarians--he laments and seemingly wishes to return to.  There is an obvious problem, though.  If a significant number of Americans were persuaded even that milder versions of Amish austerity were desirable, American capitalism would collapse.  The Wall Street Journal devotes itself to covering those whose lives are devoted to extending the reach of capitalism, including, all importantly, the consumer-oriented societies that define success as owning the next big thing, whether the latest number IPhone or expensive watches or whatever.

I suspect that the Wall Street Journal would be hesitant to open its columns to serious hippies, assuming any are left, who call for the rejection of consumption in favor of the simple life.  Ordinary radicals, who might believe that everyone deserves an equal opportunity to buy Mercedes etc. are far less dangerous to the overall capitalist ethos than someone who preaches the virtue of asceticism, as do the Amish.  So why do they publish the column, and its conclusion?  I suspect it is because they recognize that almost literally none of their readers are likely to find asceticism a genuine virtue.  The Amish play the function of exotic animals at the zoo.  We can feel better about ourselves for tolerating them, but only so long as they do not in fact present a genuine threat to a society built on almost everything the Amish reject.

But Bell wasn't really concerned about the Amish. Rather, he noted that capitalism depends on the destruction, creative or otherwise, of existing ways of life.  My home town of Hendersonville, North Carolina is now a quaint tourist town instead of a community of local small businesses, etc, (where I worked when I was growing up, beginning when I was a ten-year old), because of Walmart, etc.  Donald Trump promises to restore communities in West Virginia and Kentucky that were built around coal, or Gary, Indiana, built around steel.  But, tellingly, he isn' promising to go after Walmart and other denizens of modern American capitalism that have destroyed many small communities.  (Nor do I necessarily think he should.  That, too, is the topic for other conversations.)

The Journal instantiates the most bizarre feature of the contemporary Right, i.e., the alliance between religious conservatives, many of whom genuinely yearn for community, and the agents of American capitalism who are completely and utterly indifferent about the consequences of their prosperity.  Think only of Facebook in this regard.  And, of course, the Journal adamantly supports the further destruction of labor unions, a destruction accurately credited by Stephen Brill in his own book Tail  Spin, as one of the sources of American decline over the past half century.  Opioids and suicide are genuine problems of public health, and they are in part a response to the "creative destruction" of modern capitalism.   





Posted 11:00 PM by Sandy Levinson [link]