Capitalism and Spirit
by: Dave Belden on May 29th, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Capitalism is primarily about profit, as we know, and we are in desperate need of a New Bottom Line, which is all about creating a loving and sustainable commonwealth. But let’s first give capitalism its due, and understand why it is so appealing to our spirits as well as our pockets (if we are doing well). If we don’t, we won’t understand its strength.
For a minute, think about the past not the future: the ways the rule of the merchant and moneylender was better than what came before. Comparing capitalism’s bottom line with that of traditional societies dominated by religion, it’s clear the pragmatism of the $ opened up new space.
Example: it was commercial freedom that enabled gay bars, baths, magazines and districts to grow in the relative freedom of great cities (made huge and anonymous by the industrial for-profit economy), which enabled gay culture to flourish. Then it was Disney (of all companies) and IBM who were among the first big institutions to give spousal benefits to same sex partners. Societies run by traditional ideology would not have countenanced that. But a growing number of businesses run by straight people were so unmoved by traditional morality in their business lives, so given over to Mammon, that they actually rented space to gay enterprises, or sold paper to, or advertised in, gay publications (though they wouldn’t have been seen dead in the Castro, San Francisco’s gay district, in their personal lives, nor would they have let gay people into their church).
Substitute any minority status for “gay” above and the same kind of argument can be made. Wages (as opposed to subsistence farming), cities, commercial freedom to expand one’s own meeting places and speech, plus access to the education a commercial society requires: those gave the oppressed a few dollars in the marketplace and space to use them to grow their own cultures. Desire for crass monetary gain by straight white businesspeople helped break down aspects of traditional patriarchy and white privilege. We owe them thanks, don’t we?
Now it’s increasingly clear that the marketplace in religion is breaking down traditional religion itself. People are shopping for elements of religion. Yoga from here, meditation from there, weddings and funerals in church, kabbala for spice. Clark Strand laid it all out this week in a post called “i-Religion: Spirituality as Playlist.” Apparently, it’s all about what religion can do for me, not what I have to do to meet the requirements of my religion.
Me, I don’t know if that’s self-centered and bad, or self-actualizing and good. Most revolutions are paradoxical and two-edged.
But it does all sound similar to the long slow break-up of patriarchy to me: positive in what it makes possible, but depressing in so far as commercial values become the long-term winners. Why did the capitalists allow traditional patriarchal morality and privilege to break down? Could it be because their bottom line didn’t really need it? Was it just a set of prejudices they had that they were actually better off (in dollar terms) without? Yes, they had to be brought into the more equal world kicking and screaming–they are only human after all. But gradually, have they not understood that a true commercial commodification of every part of the people’s life, and absorption of all the smartest business types into running it, is only possible if everyone is equal before the dollar, and equally in thrall to it?
The liberation movements (whether black, gay, feminist, whatever) in their early stages typically embrace ideals of solidarity and dreams of a better world where all people care about each other as worthy for their own sake. But over time as they get their place at the table, and start eating all the goodies on the table, a lot of newcomers tend to mute their wholesale critique of the table, and start looking more and more like the people who were at the table all along. That’s fair: newcomers should not be expected to be more elevated in their ideals and lives than oldsters. I’m a straight white male, one of the oldsters, and hardly a paragon of spiritual activism, so who am I to preach?
But once all the passengers are the same class on the Titanic, it doesn’t mean the Titanic isn’t going down. So after capitalism, we need the caring commonwealth, to save the ship and our souls. And for that, we need to prioritize real caring and other centered and interdependent values in our lives. Will marketed spirituality and i-religion enable that? Or will the market values win, not the spiritual or caring values?
Great question, Dave. Part of me wants to say that, right now at least, it isn’t a matter of what should or should not happen, but a matter of what actually is happening. A lot of religious statistics have been tossed out over the past year and a half. One of the sexiest is the one about the “unaffiliated” accounting for 16.1% of the U.S. adult population. That’s roughly 50 million people–and growing quickly according to pollsters. These are people who currently claim to have no religion (although, apparently, most still believe in God).
There is another statistic that isn’t so sexy, but in some ways it’s the more significant index. That finding says that half of the U.S. religious population is now affiliated with a different religious denomination than the one they were born to.
What does that mean? The people at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life have come up with various catch-phrases like “a culture in transition” or “faith in flux” to describe it. Honestly, it’s a little funny watching them scramble to make sense of a reality they are constitutionally defended against seeing. The writing on the wall seems to be that Americans are spiritually restless and (if you look at the numbers for young people rather than grouping them together with what Dave calls “oldsters”) that restlessness is now making them move from one religion to another in an attempt to find one that works. If we take Dave’s Titanic anology, we could say that the passengers have figured out that the boat that they are riding in is about to sink and so they have set about looking for other boats to get into.
Now, I don’t want to push this analogy to the point of absurdity, but there is an important fact about the Titanic that’s relevant here. When they built it they thought it was unsinkable and so they didn’t put enough lifeboats on board for all of the passengers. Or maybe in the back of their minds was the idea that, in the unlikely event that it DID sink, there would at least be enough boats for the people who matters.)
In Buddhism, the teachings are often referred to as a “vehicle” (bascially a raft of a boat) that helps you travel the turbulent waters of life to the “other shore” of salvation. But I think the analogy holds true for religion in general. Only, there are never enough boats. Religions teach humility for human beings, but in themselves they are arrogant to the core, because what they invariably teach is some form of selective salvation. The first class passengers have a place on the lifeboat, just as certain Chirstians will supposedly be taken in the great Fundy Airlift (aka, Rapture) into heaven at the end of time. The rest of us get “left behind.” In other words, Americans are on the verge of realizing that religion doesn’t work for the greater good, as most of the other developed nations in the world have already realized. They’re just trying all the decks at this point to see if there’s a boat left somewhere. Once they realize the truth, they’ll jump in the water like everybody else.
And so, to sum up, I agree in principle that (1) Traditional religious teachings favored the exclusion of impure or otherwise alien sets of people in order to make the other set feel more safe and more saved, (2) Capitalism, whatever else we may say about it, was an improvement over this, and (3) We are again on the cusp of a global revolution. But I believe that revolution is setting it’s sights beyond capitalism as that model current exists in the world (i.e., as a broader but still profoundly selective model of salvation). Rather, I think i-Religion is part of that greater groundswell of bottom-up activism that allows people to take the best of all existing modalitiles (not just spiritual or religious ones) and move forward to address the pressing global concerns ahead.
In other words, we are even now in the process of building a VERY different kind of boat. I think Buckminster Fuller called it Spaceship Earth, and the good news is it’s already built for us…if we can just learn to relax and enjoy the ride and learn out how NOT to steer it.