Book review: Bad Romance
While
written from a Christian perspective, the book is not evangelizing, and it has
something to teach us all. At its heart, it is a moral critique of capitalism
The Enchantments of Mammon: How
Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity
Eugene McCarraher
Eugene McCarraher
Reviewed by JAMES G. CHAPPEL
In 1943 the
psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed his famous hierarchy of needs. The banal
premise is that some needs are prior to others. We need food and shelter, for
instance, before we can seek friendship and love. And only once we’ve attained
those can we attain the summit of the pyramid: the Shangri-La of
“self-actualization,” defined as doing what one “is fitted for” and
becoming “more and more what one is.” This vision of human flourishing has
become ubiquitous in the decades since Maslow’s paper. A regular feature of
school curricula and self-help guides, it has filtered into our everyday
understanding of the meaningful life: one in which a stable material and social
infrastructure gives us the time and space to thrive as individuals.
What most people don’t
know about Maslow is that he was also a celebrant of postwar capitalism. He
worked as a managerial consultant and with an early digital manufacturing
outfit in California. He had nothing to do with the hard-nosed economists that
we associate with the rites of capital; even Ayn Rand thought he was too “primitive”
to engage. Yet he shared with them a desire to study the excellent individual,
or genius, and a desire to show readers that the responsibility for
actualization lies, ultimately, within themselves. More than Rand, of course,
Maslow was a self-described humanist, seeking ways to help us all survive and
thrive. It is this softer approach that makes him an indispensable guide to the
moral history of our times. He found a way to make capitalism adhere to our
inner longings—to translate the austere dictates of the marketplace into the
fuzzier language of the heart. He exposes, that is, the spiritual logic of late
capitalism.
In his mammoth new
study, The Enchantments of Mammon, the historian Eugene McCarraher
makes the case that this is the logic that really matters. Analyzing capitalism
from a moral and anthropological perspective - though one very different from
Maslow’s - he presumes that human beings desire to lead meaningful lives, in
concert with others. At the core of our being, he thinks, we do not aim to
actualize the self but to actualize a world: a “beloved
community” of nature, friends, and family, with worship and work as the grammar
of those relations. Moreover, he thinks that the fundamentally secular approach
to self and world that we find in Maslow is inconsistent with our true nature,
and our true needs. We can live properly in the world only if we understand the
world for what it is: not brute matter for our exploitation, but a God-drenched
cosmos that is already suffused with meaning, if we know how to look for it... read more:
