Per Caritatem

Like a voice crying out in the wilderness, Frederick Douglass speaks both eloquently and powerfully to the brutality and injustice of chattel slavery. For example, in his 1852 oration, “The Internal Slave Trade,” Douglass offers his own analysis and stringent condemnation of America’s participation in the trafficking of human beings for economic gain. He begins by drawing our attention to “the practical operation” of America’s slave industry, an industry “sustained by American politics and American religion! Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market.”[1] Driven around the country like mere animals, these men, women, and children are beaten, prod, and whipped, as they process in dirge-like fashion toward the New Orleans slave market. Douglass then zeros in on a few of these infelicitous, iron-clad souls—an elderly, gray headed man, a young mother with sun-scorched back and teary eyes carrying her infant child, a teen-aged girl mourning the violent separation from her mother. Tired and exhausted from hours of exposure to the blistering sun, the young mother begins to lag behind. Then you hear it—“a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream that seems to have torn its way to the center of your soul.”[2] What was this awful sound, followed by a high-pitched, piercing scream? The sound was a whip striking the young mother’s bare shoulder; the scream needs no explanation. As the slave traders drive this human herd to the auction block, where the males will be “examined like horses” and the women ”exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers,” Douglass implores us not to forget “the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude.”^[3]

This is simply one among many scenes depicting the hardships African American slaves endured on a daily basis as a result of the institution of chattel slavery. Enslaved by the love of money, the master’s vision becomes distorted. Not only does he see human beings as things, but the sounds of suffering fail to reach his muted ears. Deafened to the wailing of mothers torn from their children and children torn from their mothers, he transposes the dissonance of clanking chains into golden keys, which like the dual cut of a double-edged sword open the door to his future and secure the bonds of his brother.

To add to their humiliation and degraded status as mere property of the white man, slaves were subjected to public auctions where they were ordered to stand, often naked or nearly so, allowing the potential buyers to examine their bodies to ensure their suitability for long-term servitude. If a slave’s body showed signs of illness, disease, or possible weaknesses, they were passed over as bad investments, unprofitable for the master’s business. Scar tissue on a slave’s back—the number of scars, whether a scar was old or relatively fresh—became the subject of a mythology employed to determine a slave’s character. Too many scars indicated a rebellious spirit, whereas having few scars meant the slave possessed a docile, obedient spirit. “As they worked their way from inflicted scars to essential character, buyers fixed slaves in a typology of character according to the frequency, intensity, and chronology of the whipping apparent on their backs.”^[4] While the slaves stood humiliated, exposed and wondering what kind of master might purchase them on that particular day, the slave buyers paraded themselves before the crowds as augurs who “could read slaves’ backs as encodings of their histories.”^[5] The slave’s face, however, with its expressive capacities spanning the spectrum of human emotions—from compassion to agony, ecstasy to alarm—the face as the display case crafted to exhibit the eyes is of no interest to the slave buyers. Provided that it is free of work-hindering defects, the slave’s face is utterly insignificant to the purchase. “It was the instrumental value of these bodies that mattered to the buyer, their size and shape, the color and the ages, the comparability of parts and durability of attributes—not the faces.”^[6]

[1] Douglass, “The Internal Slave Trade,” 436.

[2] Ibid., 437.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Johnson, Soul by Soul, 145.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 142–3.

French sociologist Loïc Wacquant, professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, traces four causes of present-day American anti-intellectualism.  Not surprisingly, topping the list is America’s worship of the dollar.  Elaborating on this point, Wacquant explains,

[t]he first is the unquestioned supremacy of economic over cultural capital in the American field of power, a supremacy that is arguably more pronounced today than at any time in the past half-century. Few modern societies abide by rules of social competition and access to positions of authority that so strongly favor money over knowledge, the wallet (porte-monnaie) over the pen (porte-plume), and give such abrupt precedence to big business over big ideas. The hegemony of the haves is virtually complete when the paradigm of the market imposes itself upon the totality of human activities and needs, from the arts to the media, publishing, health, and education (the fact that these are referred to as “industries” testifies to this), and is elevated to the dignity of a collective ideal at the highest reaches of a state exhorted by its head to transform itself into a mere service provider for taxpayers.[1]

(Forgive my jumping-to-related-current-readings tendencies, but that’s how things go in blog posts). Although I have not finished it yet, Philip Goodchild’s conclusions in his excellent book, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety, likewise attest to the all-pervasiveness of the market paradigm on our human being-in-the (post)modern world. As he engages Nietzsche’s critique of reason and his discussion of the “murder of God,” Goodchild unearths the new horizon, the new sun to which we have chained ourselves, namely, money.

The meaning of the murder of God, that is, the emergence of a secular worldview with a corresponding affirmation of atheism, is that God is no longer required to play a foundational role in organizing humanity’s activity in relation to reality. The murder of God therefore reflects a shift in pieties. God has stopped paying us our ordered existence; or rather, there is another god who pays us, who responds more immediately, directly and tangibly to our prayers: Mammon.[2]

One could make several comments on this fruitful passage (and I recommend highly Goodchild’s book); however, let’s return to Wacquant’s four causes. In addition to our new god, Mammon, what else has brought us to disparage the life of the mind and contemplative pursuits? The second cause for enthusiastic American misologism is that progressive intellectuals are, on the one hand, “severely handicapped by the debilitation of the organizational vehicles liable to enable them” to effect social change and to engage in (reasoned, if such is possible these days) public debate, and on the other hand, the lack of unity and bickering among various activist groups themselves. In other words, in addition to the absence of a strong left-wing party, those advocating for equal rights etc. for their group or cause end up following “their particular(istic) strategy, and [aim] at distinct goals without sufficient concern for the synergy of agendas and the overall coherence of their lines of action.”[3]

Third, there is the reality of large numbers of intellectual puppets, that is, so-called intellectuals—members of various think tanks on the “Hill”—who produce so-called scientific, scholarly, “reports” for the purpose of reinforcing “the accepted wisdom of the moment” and presenting “a veneer of rationality” to their own public policies.

The new advisers to the Prince salaried by the Manhattan Institute and the Heritage Foundation possess all the trappings—the hexis, the language, and the credentials—of the academic, but they lack the one attribute that makes (or made) the latter troublesome: the capacity to formulate his or her own questions and to seek answers with total freedom, no matter where this leads her. Henceforth, the think tanks and the schools of public policy that serve as their transmission belt within the academic institution are there to stand guard and protect the American dominant class from the impertinent questioning of critical reason.[4]

The fourth cause of America’s anti-intellectual atmosphere is found in the self-absorbed, inwardly turned university community itself, occupied with its own inconsequential “intestinal controversies” and filled with university “professionals,” that is, “expert[s] possessed of a neutral body of knowledge reduced to its technical dimension.”[5] Given this splintered, fragmented milieu, where cross-disciplinary pollination is anathema, serious collegial dialogue within disciplines is rare, and narrow “professionals” abound, it is no wonder that

the mass of academics feel justified to cast aside any and all civic or moral engagement beyond their narrow domain of expertise by invoking the professional imperative of neutrality, for which the precepts of positivist epistemology serve as a convenient philosophical G-string.[6]

Wacquant does have a way with words, doesn’t he? And I thought my dissertation was provocative!

In reading various texts—whether of a philosophical, political, literary, or economic nature—it is striking how many authors offer a (re)reading of the Genesis Fall narrative and then proceed to use their particular reading as the hermeneutical lens through which they explicate their position as a whole or at least to illuminate some significant theme integral to their position.  Consider Hegel’s interpretation of the Fall as necessary for the ultimate good of humankind, or Kant’s re-reading of Genesis in his essay, Conjectural Beginning of Human History, where he claims that the original transgression actually causes reason to emerge.  That is, prior to the Fall, humans did not possess a moral or rational capacity for such a decision. However, with the Fall, we overcame our “tutelage” to nature (i.e., instinctual animal-like existence).  For Kant, within the human race itself and from the very beginning, there is an inherent struggle, a tension between sociability and unsociability.  This is quite different than the traditional Christian narrative, which affirms the current dis-integration of humans, that is, an inner struggle of desires that tear at our very being and which was not present from the beginning; rather, this unnatural condition is a result of our willful turn away (“fall”) from the Triune Creator.

Friedrich Hayek, economist, philosopher, self-professed promoter of liberalism even writing an essay to distance himself from conservatism,[1] ardent defender of free-market capitalism, and winner of the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics, though in no way an advocate of Christian Holy Writ, offers a narrative about economics that, as Jung Mo Sung observes, shares certain structural similarities with the Genesis Fall narrative. Though himself an agnostic, Hayek acknowledges rather begrudgingly that beneficial practices have resulted from religious beliefs, in particular, monotheistic religious beliefs, “which are not true—or verifiable or testable in the same sense as are scientific statements and which are certainly not the result of rational argumentation” (The Final Conceit, 136–7).  If Hayek were a Christian, we might interpret this statement as allowing for the possibility of truths that are revealed by faith—suprarational, not irrational truths; however, given Hayek’s rejection of Christianity, this interpretation is not an option.  Interestingly, Hayek’s view of economics has deeply influenced the way that many conservative Christians (as well as others) think about the free market.  (This is not in itself “damning” in my view, as many non-Christian philosophies, insights, etc. have been appropriated by Christians for the furtherance of their tradition and to aid in the explication of their own teachings; however, what would be “damning” is if the teaching or ethos appropriated is fundamentally at odds with the Christian faith, tradition, and teachings of Christ himself).

Upon reception of the Nobel Prize in economics, Hayek presented a lecture entitled, “The Pretence of Knowledge.” In the lecture, he speaks against a “scientist” approach to economics which attempts to apply “habits of thought to fields different from that in which they have been formed.”[2] In other words, according to Hayek, economics does not belong with the “hard” (physical) sciences, as it deals with complex phenomena that are not quantifiable, observable, measurable, etc. in the same way that the phenomena of the physical sciences are.  One might grant this conclusion; yet, Hayek goes further, claiming that because we cannot understand, completely master, etc. a phenomena as complex as the market, attempts to do so are dangerous and harmful.  For Hayek, the great economic crisis of the 1970s was due to Keynesian interventionist policies.  Like Adam and Eve, whose desire to be omniscient overtook them, moving them to partake of the fruit of the forbidden tree and thus created havoc for them and others beyond their wildest dreams, so too, according to Hayek, do those who dare steer the invisible hand of the free market system lead us to our doom.  “To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.”[3] There is no doubt that certain kinds of interventionist policies could be used for tyrannical, totalitarian purposes; however, does it necessarily follow that they must?  One could become very pessimistic about any attempts to regulate or direct the market for purposes of social justice. One could also choose to believe that social and economic problems will somehow solve themselves through the unintended effects of the Smithian benevolent, invisible hand.  (I am not claiming that these are the only possible options). To opt for the second possibility, as Sung highlights, is not only an act of faith, but an (irrational) leap of faith.

[I]f it is true that we cannot sufficiently understand the factors and dynamics of the market so that we can intervene in it, how can we know that the market always produces beneficial effects or that it is essentially a ‘force for good’? Is knowing that the market always produces beneficial effects not a pretension of knowledge of the market? Since one cannot prove this providential character of the market, we have here a ‘leap of faith’ in the affirmation of the essentially beneficent quality of free market.[4]

Hayek, highly influenced by philosopher Karl Popper (and, it seems, Popper’s literal reading of Plato’s Republic as a blueprint for totalitarianism!), held to an (obviously non-theistic) view of evolutionary morality, which as I understand it—and I am open to correction here as I have not read the entire book and am no expert on Hayek’s work—suggests that we move beyond primitive instincts—“rules of solidarity and altruism” (The Fatal Conceit, 13) and “treat[ing] all men as neighbors.”  Why?  “For those now living within the extended order gain from not treating one another as neighbors, and by applying, in their interactions, rules of the extended order [=”free market economy”]—instead of the rules of solidarity and altruism” (Ibid.). Somehow, I just don’t think Jesus would approve.

Notes

[2] “Friedrich August von Hayek – Prize Lecture.” Nobelprize.org. 22 Jul 2010 http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1974/hayek-lecture.html.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Beyond the Spirit of Empire, p. 82.

* The Invisible Hand Image was created by Mark Bailen and was copied from this website.

In his book, Beyond the Spirit of Empire:  Theology and Politics in a New Key,  co-authored with Néstor Míguez and Jung Mo Sung, Joerg Rieger discusses how the production of a specific kind of desire functions within capitalistic Empires.  “Demand is infinite since, unlike needs, desires are infinite as well.  Thus, unlimited desire provides the basis for unlimited consumerism.  As a result, limited resources must be negotiated with potentially infinite desires” (58).  Rieger then turns to Girard’s notion of “mimetic desire.”  As its name indicates, mimetic desire is “not the ordinary desire of particular objects but the imitation of other people’s desire”[1] (58).  On this model, a “conflictual relation” emerges between the one who imitates another’s desire and the one whose desire is imitated.[2] This kind of struggle or conflict relation does not apply merely to individuals but to relations between larger social configurations.  As one can imagine, poorer nations often find their natural resources exploited, not to mention the exploitation of workers, that is, human beings de-valued and transformed into a cheap labor force so that desires of the wealthy can be satiated—not that they actually are satiated.  Such inhumane, instrumental treatment of course affects how the poor perceive themselves.  The poor, however, are not the only ones whose  subjectivities are shaped (internally and externally) by this never-ending-always-chasing-after-more social apparatus, the subjectivities of the wealthy are likewise constructed.  As Rieger explains,

Mimetic desire helps us to understand some of the deeper levels of human relationships and subjectivity under the current conditions of Empire, Subjectivity itself becomes what we might call ‘mimetic subjectivity’.  Competition is not simply based on the scarcity of desirable objects, as is often assumed, it is based on mimetic desire.  What drives economic progress, consumption, and the progress of the structures of Empire from this point of view, is that others want what the wealthy already have.  The result is the extraordinarily intense competition that has come to be accepted as the essence of free-market economies.  It is not hard to see that there is little room for [… ] an active subject, except at the very top of society.  But even there a constant battle ensues about who tops the lists, who is wealthier and more powerful, […] Mimetic desire can never be satisfied.  The problem is compounded, of course, for those who cannot keep up. When they are drawn into this system, they can only perceive themselves as failures, as theorists from the Southern Hemisphere have pointed out.  What makes this mimetic desire so effective in the pursuit of Empire is that it seems to have a snowball effect, and it seems that we are witnessing this effect in extreme forms today.  Moreover, there is a built-in reciprocity that leads to further escalation, since, in Girard’s words, “the model is likely to be mimetically affected by the desire of its imitator’ [Girard, “Mimesis and Violence,” 12] (48-49).

Notes

[2] Ibid., 147.

In between dissertation reading and writing, I have been spending time with a wonderful book, Beyond the Spirit of Empire:  Theology and Politics in a New Key,  co-authored by Néstor Míguez, Joerg Rieger, Jung Mo Sung.  (Professor Rieger, is, I am delighted to say, the third reader of my dissertation).  I hope to have at least some time this summer to devote a few substantive blog posts to this book, which I have found thoroughly refreshing and on the mark with its assessments of our market-driven way of being.  In the meantime, let me whet your appetite with this witty excerpt discussing the market as “financial games”  involved “virtual goods” and played for the benefit of the elite few at the expense of the exposed many.

[I]n the economic jargon imposed by the businesses of hegemonic communication “the markets”, or even in the singular “the market”, does not refer any more to places for the exchange of goods, where producers and artisans sell and exchange their products.  It does not even refer to the most abstract derivations of the celebration of the buying and selling transaction.  Rather the market now refers to financial games.  The notion that the ‘market formulates prices’ within industrial capitalism has now given way to finances.  The great fortunes of today are not established by the possession of material goods but rather from bank accounts, financial wealth and other forms of “virtual goods” such as trademarks, patents, images, use of business ‘logos’ in the form of merchandizing, and so on.  Things virtual, fantasy or fetish, to use Marxist language, have replaced, scammed, and annulled what is real.  It is just like the story of the witty tailors who scammed the emperor by selling him a robe of non-existent cloth and telling the gullible crowd that only the wise can see it. So everyone refrained from telling the emperor that he did not have any clothes on, for then they would be considered stupid.  Today we all believe that things exist that others say exist, even though personally we do not see them. But in this case we have all been forced to wear these invisible robes and we all fear to discover that we are naked. The only one who is dressed is the emperor (“Empire, Religion, and the Political,” in Beyond the Spirit of Empire:  Theology and Politics in a New Key by Néstor Míguez, Joerg Rieger, Jung Mo Sung, 11–12).