Christianity and capitalism.

SIR: Here are some of the errors of logic, fact and argument in B.J. Coman's "Is America 'One Nation Under God'?" (December 2003).

Mr Coman states: "'Atheistic communism' is a favourite term with American conservatives, but I have yet to hear the term 'Atheistic capitalism'. Perhaps they have not read R.H. Tawney on the subject."

This insinuates equivalency between communism and capitalism. However, a crucial point about communism in this context is that it is itself a religion of a kind, and actively regards other religions as enemies to be destroyed. Capitalism is not a religion but a description of a method of production. It makes as much, of as little, sense, to talk about "atheistic capitalism" as about "atheistic longitude", or "atheistic steam engines". I have read R.H. Tawney. I have also read Enid Blyton, who I think considerably more intelligent and worthy of respect. Perhaps that leftist fool R.H. Tawney could explain why "capitalist" America, which could allegedly care about nothing but the "worship of wealth", sacrificed 50,000 lives and countless billions of dollars trying to defend freedom in South Vietnam.

Capitalism is morally neutral, communism is not. A capitalist society may be good or bad, but this is caused by other things. To expect capitalism to inculcate moral principles is like expecting a lesson in good manners from the Equator.

There is a qualification here: capitalism works best when free of institutionalised theft, such as monopolies, tariffs and other conspiracies in restraint of trade. To that extent capitalism and morality go together. Communism claims to be the complete answer to the human condition. No sane person makes such claims for capitalism. Nor do I know in the real world, as distinct from political polemics, any person who "worships the market", who does not recognise that market externalities occur, that certain goods need to be public or that social welfare, for example, is ah intrinsic and indispensable part of a whole and civilised society.

As for Mr Coman's deprecation of the material comforts which capitalism has brought, I believe such statements could only be made by an affluent twenty-first-century person without imaginative conception of the stony cruelty, misery, pain, ignorance and squalor of the pre-capitalist world.

Mr Coman ridicules a picture of "most of pre-modernity living in poverty and helplessness". Of course it did! Can he name, apart from perhaps Aesop and Spartacus (neither of whom may have really existed), even one of the countless millions of slaves who lived and died, until they were, in Christian Europe, liberated by the application of technological power and industrial productivity as well as by religious, moral and ethical considerations? At the time of, say, Alfred the Great, even the King, who had the best of everything, was lucky to live to fifty. Science writer S.M. Stirling has summed up the slow progress that occurred at least in Christendom:

   By the High Middle Ages tens
   of thousands of water and wind
   mills were scattered all over
   Europe. Grinding grain,
   eliminating the killing labour
   that Homer's heroes blithely
   assigned to their slave-women,
   fulling cloth, sawing wood and
   stone; every groaning wooden
   wheel represented one less
   whip-mark laid on a human
   back.

Of course before the industrial application of power which capitalism, and in particular British and American capitalism, came to both accelerate and epitomise, most people's lives were "poor, nasty, brutish and short". This was not because of any intrinsic wickedness on the part of the rulers but because they could not be anything else. Nor is this "Whiggish fantasy" as Mr Coman claims, but fact amply attested to by literature, archaeology and history. As comparatively recent a book as Don Quixote gives a picture of a coarse and brutish world, not because of deliberate cruelty or atrocity but because it was inevitable then. The recent film Master and Commander, set aboard a ship about 200 years ago, when the industrial revolution was just beginning, shows graphically and I think accurately the now almost unbelievable but taken-for-granted hardships of life even then. Kipling wrote of the Indian peasant of his day, and his words might apply to most of pre-capitalist mankind:

   He eats and has indigestion,
   He toils and may not stop.
   His life is a long-drawn question
   Between a crop and a crop.

This is not to say that the past did not have spiritual treasures which our present age might envy and do well to strive after, and I do not mean that to sound patronising. Contemplate the Alfred Jewel or the writings of Boethius and you may be lucky enough to touch some of the artistic and spiritual glory of the Dark Ages. Edmund Burke and Adam Smith knew that neither prosperity nor liberty nor any kind of civilised society can survive without traditions and values. I myself voluntarily waste time and money writing poetry and can therefore hardly be accused of being driven by the economic market to the exclusion of any search for things which have no economic dimension. The wonderful success of The Lord of the Rings, and countless other tales of nobility, romance, heroism and chivalry--many of them, particularly films, only made possible because of American capitalist know-how--indicate that modern man is spiritual as well as economic and that human nature does not change. It is not capitalism's job to be romantic, heroic and chivalrous, or to civilise and beautify itself. What capitalism can do is liberate mankind from brutalising poverty and toil for survival and give, as part of this liberation, infinitely greater opportunity to experience spiritual and other non-materialistic aspects of life. In this first Britain and then America principally showed the way.

Mr Coman claims: "Positive linking of Christianity and the success of capitalism in the liberal democratic society is a complete falsehood ... to assume Christianity and material progress are linked is a thoroughly modern notion and a thoroughly false one." Neither argument nor evidence is produced to support these sweeping statements. Is the fact that only in Christian societies have capitalism and liberal democracy arisen a complete coincidence, then? It is only in Christian societies that an idea has arisen of the equal worth of all human beings and an idea sprung from this of human rights. This has admittedly been honoured in the breach as well as in the observance, but compare it with virtually any other society of religion. There is a useful book of statistics about Nobel Prize-winners in the twentieth century. The number who give their religions as either some Christian denomination or Jewish (obviously connected in this context) absolutely dwarf the rest.

In all non-Christian societies progress in terms of both technology and economic and democratic freedom either never started, or, as in ancient China, Egypt, Indus, Greece, Rome, or modern Asia before Western contact, stopped at a low level. Part of the explanation of why Christian societies proved the exception may be that Christian monastic libraries preserved a system of retaining and building upon knowledge.

As for Mr Coman's claim that "spiritual poverty and intellectual helplessness" are "two of the great hallmarks of postmodernity in the West", what does this collection of abstract buzzwords mean? If by "intellectual helplessness" he is referring to existentialism, that doctrine is not American but French. I would certainly prefer such largely imaginary intellectual helplessness to the physical helplessness of a captive of the non-postmodern Aztecs bound to the altar of a pyramid for sacrifice, for example. And if, as Mr Coman infers, C.S. Lewis was opposed to applied science as an evil "magician's bargain", why, please, did Lewis suggest to a diabetic that she thank God for insulin?

Mr Coman claims: "The modern West seems to have got what it desired of religion--a toothless tiger. Note the howls of abuse when some religious figure dares to comment on public policy or defend some article of faith." It would take some time to disentangle the errors and false assumptions in this sentence. How does one know what "the West", an undefined group of pluralistic societies of hundreds of millions of people, collectively is or wants? The loaded and emotive language--"howls of abuse when some religious figure dares"--speaks for itself in its low didactic quality. In fact religious figures who are criticised for commenting on public policy tend to be, at least in this country, criticised not because they are religious but for political statements others believe wrong. (There is a great deal of active persecution of Christianity per se in non-Western countries.) During the Cold War some religious bodies adopted pro-Soviet and anti-Western agendas, which invited criticism on several grounds. Since Mr Coman quotes Malcolm Muggeridge as an authority for his propositions, he may be interested to know that at the time of Mr Muggeridge's death he and I were planning a joint book, to be called The Worst of Christ (his title), on this very subject of left-politicised clergy.

In 1999 a Catholic cardinal and two Catholic bishops stuck their heads over the parapet by--in company with the well-known atheist Mr Phillip Adams--lobbying the Australian Senate to reject voluntary student unionism, something which, as far as one could see, had nothing to do with their religious or pastoral duties but was a purely political act. This is quite different from the criticism directed at religious figures who try to uphold tenets of faith.

Mr Coman's claim that "It remains to be seen whether the remnants of real Christianity in the West can mount a successful challenge to the hegemony of the market", both flails at a straw man and begs the question. Christianity and the market are not in conflict and are not alternatives. And what exactly does he wish to put in the place of the market? Presumably some form of state-enforced coercion. This was tried on a very large scale last century but largely given up after it had killed 100,000,000 people. As for the present Pope's alleged "counteroffensive" against economic freedom I commend to Mr Coman the Pope's comments in Centesimus Annus:

   Not only is it wrong from an
   ethical point of view to
   disregard human nature, which
   is made for freedom, but in
   practice it is impossible to do so.
   Where society is so organised as
   to reduce arbitrarily of even
   suppress the sphere in which
   freedom is legitimately
   exercised, the result is that the
   life of society becomes
   progressively disordered and
   goes into decline ...

   The social order will be all
   the more stable, the more it
   takes into account and does not
   seek to place in opposition personal
   interests and the interests
   of society as a whole, but seeks
   to bring them into fruitful harmony.
   In fact, where self-interest
   is violently suppressed, it is
   replaced by a burdensome
   system of bureaucratic control
   which dries up the well-springs
   of initiative and creativity ...
   democracy without values easily
   turns into open or thinly-disguised
   totalitarianism ...

This continues to specifically endorse free trade, although with proper qualifications to the effect that the needs of those too poor or otherwise unable to enter the market economy must also be cared for: "On the level of individual nations and of international relations, the free market is the most efficient instrument for utilising resources and effectively responding to needs." It continues that:

   Even in recent years it was
   thought the poorest countries
   would develop by isolating
   themselves from the world
   market and relying on their own
   resources. Recent experience has
   shown that countries that did
   this suffered stagnation and
   recession, while the countries
   which have experienced
   development were those that
   succeeded in taking part in the
   general economic activities at
   the international level. It seems
   therefore that the chief problem
   is that of gaining access to the
   international market ... It is
   necessary to break down the
   barriers and monopolies which
   leave so many countries on the
   margins of development ...

Mr Coman's article turns into an increasingly naked anti-American rant as it progresses. He asks of America: "Are its citizens, on the whole, happier and more contented that the citizens of other societies?" Tell me, Mr Coman, how many Americans swim the Rio Grande every night to escape into Mexico and find happiness there? How many try to navigate from Florida to Cuba on rafts of patched inner-tubes? During the Cold War, how many tried to escape over the Wall from the American sector of West Berlin into East Germany? As for the question: "What proportion of the American population is on antidepressant medication at any given time compared with other, non-Western societies?" a counter-question could be asked: "What proportion of the population of non-Western societies would be on antidepressant medication if it could get it?"

Writing in the Weekly Standard of December 8, 2003, Christopher Caldwell says that in Americophobe France, which endlessly denigrates American culture vis-a-vis its own, there were 15,000 more deaths in last summer's heat-wave than might have been expected by actuarial rabies. Most were old people who had been abandoned by their families over the summer vacation. This suggests a selfish, atomised, hedonistically-consumerist society rather worse in that respect than America when the crunch comes.

The crudity and simplisticism of Mr Coman's writing is further illustrated by his claim: "The new conservatives wish to return to Enlightenment values. Old conservatives wish to return to the source." This both begs the questions of which Enlightenment and which source and is another instance of false alternatives. The whole idea of an absolute dichotomy between old and new conservatism is not only simplistic but extremely dangerous. However, the overarchingly objectionable thing here is the suggestion that since mere "material success" and "genuine freedom" are not enough, something else must be supplied. I believe this is known as the Totalitarian Temptation.

There is not room to say much about Mr Coman's diatribe against American popular culture, many aspects of which I also find disagreeable and do not patronise. I might praise the wit of Frasier, the zestiness of Dolly Parton, the inventiveness of Star Wars, the satirical bite of The Simpsons and the imagination of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I could also mention displeasing aspects of the popular culture of other lands, but I will close with a single anecdote.

The 1998 British film The Full Monty, highly praised by Prime Minister Tony Blair as an example of British culture and achievement, was about a group of unemployed men in a dying industrial town who became male strippers. The 1999 American film October Sky was about a group of boys in a dying American coal town who built and launched model rockets, teaching themselves physics, chemistry, trigonometry, metallurgy, machining and systems-control. All became successful and their leading light eventually became a NASA scientist. A true story. Enough said.

Hal G.P. Colebatch,

Nedlands, WA.