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— Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, 18 Mar 2010.
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“Thinking hurts”
Theory, Culture & Society recently published a collection of Georg Simmel’s aphorisms, translated by Wendelin Reich and Richard Swedberg. You know, those are pithy notes or fragments that contain, in highly condensed form, insight into the human condition or some such thing. Seems Simmel had that art down. Consider this one:
The natural sciences deal with possible necessities; religion with necessary possibilities.
Or the following aphorism, which, as the translators point out in their introduction, is only half as long as de La Rochefoucauld’s shortest aphorism:
Thinking hurts.
Indeed it does. Fortunately, we have brilliant writers like George to help us.
The Scotch hate gold
Many have seen it fit to revisit the latter volumes of Marx’s Capital since the onset of the current capitalist kerfuffle. While they are as prescient and on-the-money as volume I, volumes II and III aren’t generally regarded as works of great literary luster. No surprising Shakespeare couplets lurk in the footnotes here; Freddy couldn’t do in his posthumous editing what Karl could in his lifetime. Nonetheless, the reader that struggles through thirty-five chapters of volume III is finally rewarded with this gem.
The monetary system is essentially Catholic, the credit system essentially Protestant. “The Scotch hate gold.” As paper, the monetary existence of commodities has a purely social existence. It is faith that brings salvation. Faith in money value as the immanent spirit of commodities, faith in the mode of production and its predestined disposition, faith in the individual agents of production as mere personifications of self-valorizing capital. But the credit system is no more emancipated from the monetary system as its basis than Protestantism is from the foundations of Catholicism.
From the point of view of political economy, this insight is very a propros in times of a financialized capitalism whose bubbles rise and pop at a frequency otherwise known only in soda water. But what makes this fragment particularly delicious is the parallel Marx draws between capitalist development and the schism in western Christianity. Catholics believe salvation derives from “works,“ i.e., from the acts of the faithful, including the sacraments, acts of penance, etc. As such, the means of salvation have a material quality. In the case of indulgences where absolution is quite literally bought in a monetary transaction, their material quality is particularly evident. Devotion to Marian figures or icons of the saints involves a medium that enables the devout to quite literally “touch the divine.” Other means are material in the sense that they involve the body of the devout, at its most extreme in certain monastic practices. The religious values inhere in something tangible. Similarly, the monetary system presupposes the (supposed) inherent value of material assets (precious metals). Elsewhere Marx writes that the monetary system “locates wealth altogether objectively, as an external thing.”
Protestant doctrine is based on a rejection of the idea that salvation resides in any material means. “By faith alone!” is the maxim of right-thinking Protestants. And faith—so the common understanding goes—does not reside in anything material or external. Faith is a matter of inner conviction, an intangible, cognitive fact. In this sense, the Reformation displaced the means of attaining salvation entirely into mental space. Likewise, credit is often regarded as a way to conjure values out of thin air. Value is not fixed in any material assets, but in wholly virtual quantities.
But then, time and again, this neat separation between the material and the immaterial breaks down. The so-called “credit crunch” turned out to be nothing short of a systemic crisis affecting all parts of the economy, including manufacturing. Can this insight be transferred to the religious field as well? I think it can. When a capitalist economy binges on fictitious capital, it falls into crisis. Crises require a resolution. In the case of capitalist crises, “accumulation by dispossession” is a time-honored fix. Accumulation by dispossession can be seen as a reversion to the material and a recognition, albeit faulty, of the basis upon which the creation of values rests, virtualization notwithstanding. By analogy, when Protestantism becomes overly intellectualized and interiorized and confined to mental space, it falls into crisis. It becomes indistinguishable from “secular” ways of being. This crisis is also addressed through a reversion to the material. Hence, the revivals spearheaded by Pietists, Methodists, and Pentecostals. The one thing these revivalist movements all share is an emphasis on material and embodied aspects of faith—“enthusiastic” singing or speaking in tongues—in addition to, and perhaps at the expense of, a concern for orthodoxy.
“But this new, neutralised language does not spell any increase in freedom. When I call your action indecent, I state a fact that can be controverted. When I call it inappropriate, I invoke an institutional context—one which, by implication, I know better than you.”
— Edward Skidelsky, “Words That Think for Us”
