The Perpetuation of Disappointment
Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity
Belknap Press, 799pp, £31.95, ISBN 9780674984615
reviewed by Stuart Walton
If it were possible to pinpoint the originary moment of capitalism, the long-deferred process of dismantling it might begin. Was it inaugurated when the accumulated profits of trade began to be invested in greater technological means of productivity in western Europe's late Middle Ages? Is trade itself, the selling of products at greater return than the cost invested in recovering, obtaining or manufacturing them, inherently capitalist? Is the act of exchange itself, which can be traced back to paleolithic communities, in which inequity stalks under the guise of equivalence, the foundation of all exploitation of the weaker by the stronger? At what point did the qualitative alteration in the soul of humankind brought about by a money economy provoke the passage to another evolutionary stage – Homo economicus?
There are two countervailing theoretical lineages in the history of capitalism. One, classically expounded by Max Weber, is the narrative of secularisation, which follows the received Enlightenment account of modern commercial societies gradually departing from the orthodox mythologies of organised religion and replacing trust in God and the authority of the Church with a hard-headed pecuniary rationality, what Weber himself called 'disenchantment' (Entzauberung), the rending of the veil of theological illusion that previously occluded the eyes of material beings. The other, which has deep roots in Marx and Engels' critique of the commodity form, insists that, far from opening the world to the clear vision of the autonomous rational mind, capitalism has become in itself a substitute faith, with its ecclesial elders, its sacred texts, its canons of belief, its enfevered evangels, all turned in votive array towards the deity of money and its mysterious ways. If there was a disenchantment in the Weberian sense, it has been paralleled by a concomitant re-enchantment by the idol of Mammon. In one of his essay fragments, 'Capitalism as a Religion' (1921), Walter Benjamin already argued that the capital system was an extreme dogmatic cult that permits no sabbatical interludes, and consecrates not repentance but blame as its central piety, a universal context of degradation in which God himself, whose fault humanity is, stands among the accused.
As his explanatory subtitle indicates, Eugene McCarraher is firmly of the latter persuasion, his long ruminations and deep readings on the topic having resulted, after a 20-year gestation, in bringing to birth this immense work of historical synthesis. The immediate context is the United States, the whole kit and caboodle from the Puritan Fathers to the Trump kakistocracy, but its panoramic compass is broad enough to take in the whole contemporary empire of capital, wherever its sway extends. There may be mountainous regions in central Asia and uncontacted forest-dwellers in the Brazilian interior where its writ doesn't run, but for the rest of humanity, capitalism is what there is.
'America has always been a Business Civilization,' McCarraher writes, whatever the successive manifestations of that tendency. He recasts the Puritan errand as an 'errand into the marketplace', an endeavour to make the new continent a place where amassing wealth through trade would be a sacredly protected founding principle. Evangelicalism, always Christian theology's nearest approach to primitive magic, converted the worship of Mammon into a spiritual duty, seeing worldly success as God's reward for thrift and shrewd investment, much as it would produce a theodicy of slavery as the burden that he authorised white people to lay upon the heathen. Not just profit, but the corporations that generated it, would eventually be endowed with a soul, while the Fordist production system would be reconstituted as a heavenly city of industrious toil. The most advanced design techniques were brought to bear on capitalism's sites of production, and with the coming of computerisation and automated systems, a brand-new version of the ineffable sublime entered daily experience. For the past century, advertising has played an energetic and incantatory role in the thoroughgoing mythologisation of the commodity, and in the present day, a capitalism largely recovered from the self-inflicted cerebral haemorrhage of the financial crash now insolently encircles the world in the tentacles of neoliberalism, an economic theory raised to the level of a fanatical creed.
Embroidered throughout this grand narrative are the once brilliant, often faded, sometimes raggedly frayed, threads of opposition to this master ideology, aesthetic movements and currents of dissident thinking that coalesced at different moments into anti-urbanist Romantic subjectivity, recovered paganism, practical revolt and abstentionist countercultures. McCarraher is a good dialectician in the sense of locating the fatal flaws of self-delusion not just in capitalism's modern apostles but in the milk-and-water nonconformism of the realist novel of the 1950s. By the same token, he can admire the streamlined clarity of modernist industrial architecture and find space for an analysis of the gorgeous graphic work of the commercial illustrator Maxfield Parrish, poised as it was between the dictates of cold commerce and the homespun warmth of popular art.
McCarraher begins in Europe before the Fall, before the descent, that is, into the industrial maelstrom and the evacuation of the rural villages into the pullulating cities. The anti-materialist turn of the Puritan revolution of the mid-seventeenth century in England eventually gives place to the confrontation of the Romantic individual soul with a refulgent natural world that is now less its element than its refuge. Then Marx and Engels enter on the scene with talk not of secular disenchantment but of haunting spectres, 'metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties', and the repurposing of relations between humans and things into enigmatic relations among things. When the Pilgrims made it to the new territory over the ocean in 1620, battered, disease-ridden and gagging for a drink, they brought them not only the certain knowledge that they were a new chosen people, but an elastic approach to the theology that had blown them there on the prevailing maritime winds. 'By widening the eye of the needle,' as McCarraher puts it, 'the Puritans enabled the camel to pass and eased the passage of the rich into paradise.'
McCarraher's style is densely allusive and resourceful, as befits its history, and possessed of entrancing locutions, as well as passages of bitter lamentation and the sort of freely poured scorn that Job would have recognised. The monstrous Ayn Rand is treated to extended derision, her revolting fables of masculine sexual violence and cringing greed, now holy writ for a whole generation of those responsible for the sub-prime fiasco, driven by nothing more meritorious than a 'middlebrow theology of money'. But there are also sharply unillusioned assessments of many of the luminaries of pastoralism and the Arts and Crafts movements: those who cherish the sacrosanct purity of Ruskin, Morris, Emerson, Whitman, and the Beats and anarchists of the postwar era, should steel themselves.
The text is excellent in its analysis of the still only partially understood malignity of advertising, which pulled itself out of its historical status as honest flimflam in the 1920s in order to become a branch of behaviourism, a budding discipline of the psychological sciences that offered up its academic founder, John Watson, to a job with the J Walter Thompson ad agency. The standard critique of advertising, that it sells an unreal, ideologically remodelled version of the commodity to gullible consumers, is only half the story. Its perceptual mechanism relies on what McCarraher calls a 'culture of futility', glooming the life that the consumer is currently living as dreary and unfulfilling, to which it offers itself and its wares as the antidote. If consumption delivered the spiritual transformation the ads promised, it would render the whole illusion irrelevant with one wave of the card over the chip-and-pin machine, but it relies existentially on the perpetuation of disappointment, so that it will always have something else to sell.
The Enchantments of Mammon is an epic summary on the Tolstoyan scale. It seems churlish to suggest that a work of, say, two-thirds the size could have done the job quite as thoroughly. The book is not freighted with economic theory, which some will regard as a deficit. There are long passages of historical recounting that are not entirely to the polemical point, and a very few common solecisms – a crescendo, despite what virtually everybody now believes, is not a climax. No matter. The authoritative synthetic heft of this work is such that it will be a compendious historical reference into the far future.
There are two countervailing theoretical lineages in the history of capitalism. One, classically expounded by Max Weber, is the narrative of secularisation, which follows the received Enlightenment account of modern commercial societies gradually departing from the orthodox mythologies of organised religion and replacing trust in God and the authority of the Church with a hard-headed pecuniary rationality, what Weber himself called 'disenchantment' (Entzauberung), the rending of the veil of theological illusion that previously occluded the eyes of material beings. The other, which has deep roots in Marx and Engels' critique of the commodity form, insists that, far from opening the world to the clear vision of the autonomous rational mind, capitalism has become in itself a substitute faith, with its ecclesial elders, its sacred texts, its canons of belief, its enfevered evangels, all turned in votive array towards the deity of money and its mysterious ways. If there was a disenchantment in the Weberian sense, it has been paralleled by a concomitant re-enchantment by the idol of Mammon. In one of his essay fragments, 'Capitalism as a Religion' (1921), Walter Benjamin already argued that the capital system was an extreme dogmatic cult that permits no sabbatical interludes, and consecrates not repentance but blame as its central piety, a universal context of degradation in which God himself, whose fault humanity is, stands among the accused.
As his explanatory subtitle indicates, Eugene McCarraher is firmly of the latter persuasion, his long ruminations and deep readings on the topic having resulted, after a 20-year gestation, in bringing to birth this immense work of historical synthesis. The immediate context is the United States, the whole kit and caboodle from the Puritan Fathers to the Trump kakistocracy, but its panoramic compass is broad enough to take in the whole contemporary empire of capital, wherever its sway extends. There may be mountainous regions in central Asia and uncontacted forest-dwellers in the Brazilian interior where its writ doesn't run, but for the rest of humanity, capitalism is what there is.
'America has always been a Business Civilization,' McCarraher writes, whatever the successive manifestations of that tendency. He recasts the Puritan errand as an 'errand into the marketplace', an endeavour to make the new continent a place where amassing wealth through trade would be a sacredly protected founding principle. Evangelicalism, always Christian theology's nearest approach to primitive magic, converted the worship of Mammon into a spiritual duty, seeing worldly success as God's reward for thrift and shrewd investment, much as it would produce a theodicy of slavery as the burden that he authorised white people to lay upon the heathen. Not just profit, but the corporations that generated it, would eventually be endowed with a soul, while the Fordist production system would be reconstituted as a heavenly city of industrious toil. The most advanced design techniques were brought to bear on capitalism's sites of production, and with the coming of computerisation and automated systems, a brand-new version of the ineffable sublime entered daily experience. For the past century, advertising has played an energetic and incantatory role in the thoroughgoing mythologisation of the commodity, and in the present day, a capitalism largely recovered from the self-inflicted cerebral haemorrhage of the financial crash now insolently encircles the world in the tentacles of neoliberalism, an economic theory raised to the level of a fanatical creed.
Embroidered throughout this grand narrative are the once brilliant, often faded, sometimes raggedly frayed, threads of opposition to this master ideology, aesthetic movements and currents of dissident thinking that coalesced at different moments into anti-urbanist Romantic subjectivity, recovered paganism, practical revolt and abstentionist countercultures. McCarraher is a good dialectician in the sense of locating the fatal flaws of self-delusion not just in capitalism's modern apostles but in the milk-and-water nonconformism of the realist novel of the 1950s. By the same token, he can admire the streamlined clarity of modernist industrial architecture and find space for an analysis of the gorgeous graphic work of the commercial illustrator Maxfield Parrish, poised as it was between the dictates of cold commerce and the homespun warmth of popular art.
McCarraher begins in Europe before the Fall, before the descent, that is, into the industrial maelstrom and the evacuation of the rural villages into the pullulating cities. The anti-materialist turn of the Puritan revolution of the mid-seventeenth century in England eventually gives place to the confrontation of the Romantic individual soul with a refulgent natural world that is now less its element than its refuge. Then Marx and Engels enter on the scene with talk not of secular disenchantment but of haunting spectres, 'metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties', and the repurposing of relations between humans and things into enigmatic relations among things. When the Pilgrims made it to the new territory over the ocean in 1620, battered, disease-ridden and gagging for a drink, they brought them not only the certain knowledge that they were a new chosen people, but an elastic approach to the theology that had blown them there on the prevailing maritime winds. 'By widening the eye of the needle,' as McCarraher puts it, 'the Puritans enabled the camel to pass and eased the passage of the rich into paradise.'
McCarraher's style is densely allusive and resourceful, as befits its history, and possessed of entrancing locutions, as well as passages of bitter lamentation and the sort of freely poured scorn that Job would have recognised. The monstrous Ayn Rand is treated to extended derision, her revolting fables of masculine sexual violence and cringing greed, now holy writ for a whole generation of those responsible for the sub-prime fiasco, driven by nothing more meritorious than a 'middlebrow theology of money'. But there are also sharply unillusioned assessments of many of the luminaries of pastoralism and the Arts and Crafts movements: those who cherish the sacrosanct purity of Ruskin, Morris, Emerson, Whitman, and the Beats and anarchists of the postwar era, should steel themselves.
The text is excellent in its analysis of the still only partially understood malignity of advertising, which pulled itself out of its historical status as honest flimflam in the 1920s in order to become a branch of behaviourism, a budding discipline of the psychological sciences that offered up its academic founder, John Watson, to a job with the J Walter Thompson ad agency. The standard critique of advertising, that it sells an unreal, ideologically remodelled version of the commodity to gullible consumers, is only half the story. Its perceptual mechanism relies on what McCarraher calls a 'culture of futility', glooming the life that the consumer is currently living as dreary and unfulfilling, to which it offers itself and its wares as the antidote. If consumption delivered the spiritual transformation the ads promised, it would render the whole illusion irrelevant with one wave of the card over the chip-and-pin machine, but it relies existentially on the perpetuation of disappointment, so that it will always have something else to sell.
The Enchantments of Mammon is an epic summary on the Tolstoyan scale. It seems churlish to suggest that a work of, say, two-thirds the size could have done the job quite as thoroughly. The book is not freighted with economic theory, which some will regard as a deficit. There are long passages of historical recounting that are not entirely to the polemical point, and a very few common solecisms – a crescendo, despite what virtually everybody now believes, is not a climax. No matter. The authoritative synthetic heft of this work is such that it will be a compendious historical reference into the far future.