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Say you're a theologian in the religion business who's concluded that your company's oldest and most trusted product doesn't really exist. What do you do after the death of God? You could lie to the customers and stockholders, continue writing copy, and ruefully await retirement. But if you're more imaginative, you could turn your crisis into an opportunity, as consultants like to say, and spin God's death as a new form of life, an "entrance of divinity fully into the human." You could "re-tool" and jump to another firm—English, philosophy, or perhaps a start-up in something-or-other studies.
Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption by Mark C. Taylor Univ. of Chicago Press 358 pp., $23 |
Or, like Mark C. Taylor, you could become an entreprofessor, a broker in the emerging intellectual markets, trading in some of the hottest stocks in cultural capital. Pooling your dwindling fortunes in theology and philosophy with venture capital from postmodernism, you nimbly navigate the volatile and bubbling markets in profundity, hang out with the rich and famous, and after a while you're a pioneer in internet education, adulated in the Sunday New York Times. As long as the bubbles don't burst, and as long as the old business doesn't revive, you're as safe as a tenured academic—which, of course, you are already.
Lest anyone recoil from these remarks as ad hominem, consider that Taylor himself (a professor of humanities at Williams College) blithely endorses the opportunism they evoke. "For the canny player," he writes at the end of Confidence Games, life is a "game of poker." Since "one can never be sure that the chips can be redeemed"—redemption being a game for losers and suckers—"the best strategy is to keep the game going as long as possible." And since the game is, according to Taylor, increasingly played as a "complex adaptive system" of global information networks, "we" need to "cultivate an appreciation for the resources and limitations of many religious traditions." In short, don't invest too heavily in any one company—diversify. You can't be saved, but you'll live longer.
That's a sinister notion, however winsome Taylor makes it seem, and it epitomizes the super-cool sophistry that characterizes Confidence Games. A consummate bourgeois bohemian (or Bobo, to borrow from David Brooks), Taylor embodies the merger, or perhaps the now-unmistakable fraternity, of countercultural iconoclasm and late-capitalist business culture. (Call it the hipness unto death.) So even if it's read only by a few thousand academics, Confidence Games is symptomatic of the tony nihilism that pervades the American professional and managerial classes.
Taylor tells us that Confidence Games marks the culmination of his search for a "philosophy of culture" after God's demise. Not that he ever accepted the "secularization" narrative now discredited among scholars: in Erring (1984), he advanced an "atheology" that rejected transcendent divinity and relocated it in the processes of nature and culture. "Religion never disappears," he now writes; rather it "takes different forms." Those forms, he contended in Imagologies (1994) and The Moment of Complexity (2001), are increasingly those of deconstruction, cybernetics, and advanced communications technology. For Taylor, telecommunications represents an End of History without Francis Fukuyama's mandarin disdain for the Last Man's consumerism. "The net," he proclaimed in Imagologies with a characteristically aphoristic flourish, "wires the world for Hegelian Geist."
That geist has been decidedly capitalist since 1989, and it moved Taylor, in the late 1990s, to join with the financier Herbert Allen in founding Global Education Network (GEN), an online "service provider" of education in the humanities and sciences. A century after Thorstein Veblen scoured the Victorian pecuniary pieties regnant amidst "the higher learning," Taylor represents a brash new style in academic profiteering, fusing post-Christian religiosity with the glitzy banalities of info-capitalism. As Taylor observes, "the distance between Haight Ashbury and Silicon Valley is not as great as it often appears." Tom Frank has labeled this sort of convergence "the conquest of cool," and it names the transformation of Hip into the latest style of corporate hegemony.
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