Eugene McCarraher's The Enchantments of Mammon
Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became The Religion of Modernity, (Cambridge, MA: Belknap at Harvard University Press, 2019).
McCarraher agrees with both socialists and libertarians that the essential characteristic of modern capitalism is its rationality. Against both Max Weber and Charles Taylor however, he argues that this logic is sacramental. If capitalist enchantment had its roots in the puritan association of labour, wealth, and virtue, then it found its apotheosis in the early 20th century. As the American Empire rose and the great industrial cities dominated the land, theorists and practitioners of capital and faith elided wealth and virtue, divinity and the free market. God was the supreme CEO, and in our business activities our accumulation of wealth was the sole sign of virtue. Indeed in Moneytheism, money becomes the sole marker not just of utilitarian worth but Christian virtue: extra pecuniam nulla salus. Art, culture, and heritage no longer reveal a transcendent truth, nor does its excellence depend on its relation to platonic conceptions of beauty. Only when it is sold, and its monetary value becomes apparent can one say how ‘good’ it is. In the wake of the populist rebellion of reconstruction and the horror of the First World War, thousands of frustrated and former preachers sank into business. As they researched the organisation of immense companies, coming to the conclusion that social and business orders were inextricable, and the priestly class of businessmen better moral leaders. The art they produced formed ‘the transition from enchantment of commodities to enchantment as a commodity’ (237). There is, then, no real difference between the inability to imagine the end of Capitalism, or a world stripped of God. The vital force remains, the great chain of being as tangible in market forces as it was in the eucharist. As the American Empire crumbles, McCarraher argues that only communities rooted in non-monetary reciprocity, in love expressed, can ever hope to battle against mammon.
The most startling example of this doctrine involves an anthropomorphic pencil. The early 20th century saw the spread of evangelical universities, founded with the aim of instilling godly capitalism in their undergraduates. These young men then went forth into industry, founding company christian fellowships as they went. Think tanks, associations, countless publications populated or funded by these men raged against the New Deal. Even those who remained preachers proclaimed the divinity of accumulation. Rev. M.D. Babcock stated baldly in his 1901 Thoughts for Everyday Living that ‘business is religion and religion is business’ (189). Howard Kershner meanwhile ‘a conservative quaker who grew increasingly alienated from[what he called] the socialist society of friends’ (585) proclaimed a ‘Christian Economics’. Divinity was everywhere, with atoms hiding the infinite power of God. Since the universe is God’s work, and economic laws are divine legislation, therefore economic theory is not just science but theology and the Bible the greatest business book ever written. Therefore, according to Kershner, religious revival required the reinstatement of the Gold Standard. Leonard Read’s ‘I, Pencil’, published in Dec 1958, ‘was an accessible manifesto for the metaphysics of laissez faire’ in which the Pencil declared itself a ‘combination of miracles’, as since only God could make a tree ‘only God could make me!’. The God of the Bible was to be found just as easily as the market forces by which trees and graphite could be formed, shaped, marketed, and sold. This ‘market animism’ therefore underscored the divinity of market and Dollar.
McCarraher also suggests that it is impossible to think about this enchantment without considering the populism that arose in the wake of Reconstruction. Populism ‘stemmed from the incorporation of America’ and intermingling of city and countryside in the wake of the Reconstruction (261). Industrialisation was not just anathema to the share-croppers, tenant farmers, and other agriculturists, but also to the small-town bourgeoise of lawyers, merchants, and bankers - whose wealth was threatened as much by the coming of the railroad as by their creditors’ looming insolvency. Against both those who see populism as the agrarian founding myth of rugged American capitalist exceptionalism and the view that they prefigured the proletarian dissent of the 20th century, McCarraher argues that populism ‘was an alternative model of capitalism, [not] an alternative to capitalism’ (265). Rather, it’s best to think of populist capitalism as a call to renew the Protestant covenant of capitalist enchantment (ibid) and therefore a key element in the development of neoliberalism.
McCarraher however has less to say about the earlier political history of this theology. God is best thought of as a CEO, or perhaps the great power generator, from whom business transmits authority through the market. Just as Ginsberg decried seeing the ‘best minds of generation destroyed by madness’ as they laboured in Madison Avenue, Rand, or countless other agencies and industries. Enchanted Capitalism was surely, therefore, a direct riposte to post-lapsarian social order. Rather than an Aristotelian or MacIntyre-esque vision of a planned economy, enchanted Capital’s reliance on the market and money as the sole assigner and embodiment of value countered communistic planned economies. Its divinity versus communistic atheism was a feature and not a bug: if the lesson of Babel was that a planned polis will fail due to the frailty of man, then neoliberal economies with their fluidity of value and order, their theoretical openness to inversion, was the only possible biblical answer to social organisation. There is of course a nod to Augustine. The protestant capitalism here was a rejection of Augustine’s belief that the city of man could never stand up to the city of God. The American Empire of the 20th century had a robust self-image that was matched only by its self-belief in its expansive foreign policy. Like Augustine, they saw an empire fall; but as Britain retired from its colonies, America saw only new opportunities.
Trump is the obvious embodiment of populist enchanted capitalism. He embodies the rough and ready, anti-intellectual bluster of the evangelical entrepreneurs of the early 20th century. Acknowledging the remarkable plutocracy of his administration, and
Despite Trump's execrable racism and misogyny, his appeal stemmed, in large measure, from the dogged persistence of the capitalist idyll. Trump’s boorish defiance of political politesse might be seen as a form of the creative destruction embellished in ou cult of the entrepreneur. His actual incompetence as a businessman [...] is of no account; having flourished so gaudily in the turbulence of the market, Trump clearly believes that his prowess in business is an infinitely convertible wisdom - a conceit sustained by the American inclination to attribute all manner of ingenuity and virtue to the scrappy victors of capitalist competition’ 670.
Trump, then, was a feature and not a bug. Declaiming the ‘swamp’, trumpeting his love of fast food and fox news, his home apartment decked in gold, he articulates the liturgy of populist capitalism. The very fact he has failed in most of his businesses means nothing. His success is to ally himself inextricably with the markers of success and popular consumption. In other words, he is successful because his brand has triumphed in the market, and his brand has triumphed in the market because he has become one with enchanted capital. Being so anti-intellectual, rejecting bourgeois morality, and yet becoming rich and powerful, he is the ultimate demonstration of moneytheism.
The last 20-30 pages of the book are perhaps the angriest. The American Empire is dying, the threads of enchanted capitalism unravelling. He discusses with particular excitement and reverence the occupy movement, which ‘revived a languishing hope’ and is inseparable from the New Deal politics of Bernie Sanders. Yet what this hope consists of is never entirely clear. Indeed, ‘its more immediate importance may lie in the realm of the spirit rather than the barricades’ (673). At one point, McCarraher seems to want to associate Occupy with the belief of the desert fathers that only through self-exile can we begin to reimagine society. Instead, he claims Occupy was redolent of how disaster creates new forms of mutual exchange, of charity, of love. But this is not enough to characterise what seems to be an apophetic description of moneytheism. Le Guin’s statement that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism is answered implicitly approvingly, because - ultimately - and with more than a nod to Heschel:
If nothing less than a new civilisational paradigm will enable us to weather and perhaps avert this century’s maelstrom of impending disasters, it must be rooted in a deep and even rapturous ontological imagination of wonder. (675)