In his review of Don DeLillo’s highly acclaimed Underworld – whose sheer size and overall chutzpah established it as the last great novel of the twentieth century – James Wood observed that "The book is so large, so ambitious, that it produces its own antibodies and makes criticism a small germ."
I’ve often thought that the same description could apply just as easily to capitalism. Every attempt to curb its voracious appetite, to ‘humanize’ its world-wide dominion, to place the world economy back in the service of the greater good, and thus temper its lust for unregulated growth, has not only failed, but has been assimilated. Almost inevitably, it has been folded back into the existing economic order and turned into yet another expression of capitalism itself.
Take, for example, the wide-spread use of ‘anti-globalization’ rhetoric by designer labels and marketing firms, or the current wave of chic enviro-fundamentalism. In both cases, there has been a convocation of dialectical opposites. Trends that are logically opposed — popular consumerism and radical conservationism, for example — are accomodated in the same space. The exemplar product of global capitalism are T-shirts made in Chinese sweatshops bearing the ‘World Without Strangers’ motto.
Yes – capitalism, too, produces its own antibodies. And it seems that nothing is safe from its grasp.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of global capitalism is to have made choice an 'inalienable' human right. The notion of democracy is now married to a right-to-excess; freedom is measured in economic or consumptive terms, by a 'Big Mac Index' amongst other things. DeLillo grasped this in Underworld:
"Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that’s electronic and sex that’s cyberspaced, the convergence of consumer desire – not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices."
Choice itself has become the true object of human longing, a longing that goes right down to our genes. Karl Marx was right: the vision of capitalism just described – embracing the entire globe, generating more money, ex nihilo, through the mysteries of financial derivatives and futures speculation, bringing together polar opposites in apparent economic harmony – is, in the end, theological. Or, to put it another way, capitalism is Mammon.
So, here’s my question: how can we take Jesus’ statement – "You cannot serve God and Mammon" – seriously, when God and Mammon are now in cahoots?
Let me explain. While everyone loves to poke fun at Hillsong’s slick corporate image and the ridiculous platitudes of 'prosperity theology', the conspiring of God with Mammon is much, much older. Max Weber, in his Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, famously proposed that the capitalist disposition to earn and accumulate arose directly from the Puritan sense of calling which embraces all of life.
But now that the capitalist drive has shifted from thrift to choice, from prudence to indulgence, from accumulation to experience, the way religion operates within capitalism has also changed. Instead of a secularized motivation for work, the function of religion today more closely resembles those mediaeval rituals that provided sinners with the means to atone for their sins.
We all have our own forms of penance – like tithing, charitable donations, watching SBS – each of which makes us feel better about participating in decadent consumerism. And not only that, these forms of penance allow us to participate by relieving any sense of guilt.
And so it is that capitalism and charity can co-habitate. The one lets you indulge, and the other lets you get away with it. The problem is that Christianity traditionally has geared itself to dealing with the guilty conscience of the West. No wonder it has so readily been accommodated by capitalism as its ideal religious accessory.
If one person can be blamed for consolidating this state of affairs, it is the bull of Wittenberg, Martin Luther. It was Luther who provided capitalism with a formula through which it could co-habit with religion – simul iustus et peccator – or, "By faith, the Christian is at once righteous and a sinner."
Luther thereby secured the place of a corpulent religiosity, in which ethics is invisible, but guilt has been assuaged by some deeply held conviction or meagre act of charity.
When Marx claimed that a critique of capitalism must begin with a critique of religion – "the criticism of heaven is thus transformed into the criticism of earth" – wasn’t he simply repeating Jesus’ warning,
"Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them"? Such expressions of disingenuous charity – performed for one’s own peace of mind, and in the service of Mammon – are the oil in the capitalist machine.
Perhaps the best way of breaking today’s alliance between God and Mammon, then, is to refuse ourselves the false comfort of token acts of charity and fashionable faith, so that we can see our behaviour for what it really is, and dare to live differently.