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Our big question this year, you'll recall, is How can followers of Christ be a counterculture for the common good? Addressing this question is more or less a fulltime occupation for Gene McCarraher, who teaches humanities at Villanova University. His first book (which belongs on the same shelf as the work of Christopher Shannon, profiled in our previous issue) was Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought, published by Cornell University Press in 2000. Long before the Democratic National Committee got religion, McCarraher was arguing that the American Left needed to rediscover its theological roots. He's now at work on an anatomy of corporate capitalism and what he regards as the baleful spell it has cast on the American moral imagination.
A faithful Catholic and a fierce socialist—in 2006, socialism is about as countercultural as you can get; even anarchism is more fashionable—McCarraher here sets his sights on "the hopeless and infernal world of the capitalist round-the-clock workhouse" and "the cant of diligence and virtue" which, he argues, keeps us from recognizing that "the Work Ethic's boss is Mammon."
Let the argument begin.
Reflecting on the misery of industrial England in the 1840s, Thomas Carlyle mixed acute discernment with moralistic perversity. Capitalism, he wrote in Past and Present (1843), bore "the Gospel of Mammonism," in which money, through its "miraculous facilities," held its devotees "spell-bound in a horrid enchantment." That's a nice encapsulation of capitalism's grotesquely religious character, akin to Marx's later exposition of "commodity fetishism." But in the face of that "Gospel"—whose fruits Friedrich Engels would judge in The Condition of the Working Classes in England (1845)—Carlyle recommended, not the apostasy of revolution, but an evangel of Work. To his tired, hungry, sweated countrymen, Carlyle delivered a sermon on that "unpreached, inarticulate, but ineradicable and foreverenduring Gospel: Work, and therein have well-being."
That's quite an admonition to people already burdened with twelve-or-more-hour days, but Carlyle continued to bless the sweat of Adam's curse as the beads of beatitude. A little later, in his "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question," Carlyle recounted the character-building benefits of African enslavement with a sanctimonious sadism worthy of Christian Reconstructionists. Behind the racism lay the Gospel of Work, now preached with the brutal eloquence of the whip. "If it be his own indolence" that prevents a man from his "sacred appointment, to labor while he lives on earth," then, Carlyle pronounced, every "wiser, more industrious person" had a duty to " 'emancipate' him from his indolence." (Arbeit macht frei, as a later generation of the Wise and Industrious would put it.) The man who dubbed economics the dismal science was certainly a piece of work.
But such has been the cant of diligence and virtue from the Pharoahs to David Brooks, our suburban Hesiod, who tells us the current bourgeois ethic is "sweeter, and more optimistic" than its dour Puritan ancestor. Though instructed no longer in the ways of probity inscribed in McGuffey's Reader, Americans still know the proverbs of exertion passed down by Puritan divines: "An idle mind is the Devil's workshop"; "Satan always finds mischief for idle hands to do." These belabored mites of deception comprise the sentimentality of avarice, and the most eloquent refutation they merit is our yawning, carnal repose. Besides, the Devil's workshops are now located in the world's burgeoning slums, and Satan outsources his mischief to factories and offices around the planet. Thankful for the competitive edge bestowed by global capitalism, Lucifer now finds plenty of work for busy hands to do.
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