The Spiritual Side of Capitalism – Part 3

The Spiritual Side of Capitalism – Part 3

Capitalism has clearly brought material prosperity, but does it represent a spiritual improvement over rural communal life? Admittedly, the village economy offered some spiritual advantages that are currently in rather short supply, most notable, rootedness in kin and community and organic connection to one’s work. There was no conflict between pursuing one’s career and living close to family and friends. People were born, lived, died within a few kilometers’ radius. There was none of the dehumanizing impersonality that afflicts urban life today. Within the village, everybody knew everybody else. And there were no nagging doubts about one’s career choices. Most people did exactly the same thing, grow their food, and the meaning of this work was as obvious as a stomach pang.

But if life is to be less unsettling and fretful than today, it could also be less interesting and spiritually challenging. The average person lives just as his or her parents and grandparents; the crops planted, the tools used, the farming methods followed; these were all part of a received tradition. Moreover, economic life was simple as it was unchanging. Since growing food consumed so much physical energy, the division of labor was necessarily rudimentary only a few basic goods and services were produced for exchange. Accordingly, there was little specialized technical knowledge, or complex analysis, or original thinking, or independence judgment, or personal initiative, or responding swiftly to changing circumstances. In short, for many of those forms of spiritual exertion that are ubiquitous in the dynamic complexity of modern capitalism.

What are the motivations that underlie the capitalist process? Clearly, people do work to acquire things. But just as clearly, people work to compete to be a success, to measure up, to move up in the world, to make one’s mark. When someone gets a coveted job or wins a big promotion, he or she is likely to feel competitive exhilaration at having won as well as excitement about things that can now be purchased. A person who is fired or laid off feels not only the threat of economic hardship but also the spiritual emptiness of failure.

Ambition in commercial life is most obvious in the life of cooperate moguls, particularly those who started their own businesses. Such individuals put the lie to the notion that commercial life is all pettiness and crabbed, narrow calculation. Simple avarice cannot explain why billionaires continue to strive to expand their enterprises, and money is simple a means of keeping score. What drives such people is ambition the desire to build an empire or even to remark the world.

Over 200 years ago, the British economist Adam Smith indemnified the role played by ambition in driving commercial life when he noted “the rich man glorifies in his riches” while “the poor man, on the contrary is ashamed of his poverty”. According to Smith: “It is the vanity, not the ease or the pleasure, which interests us”.

Commercial ambition is by no means an unalloyed virtue. It has its darker and dangerous side. Obsession with status, with what other people think of you, is unhealthy and repellent. And winning at all cost forsaking family, friends, and outside interest for the sake of career success, is a spiritually costly victory. Nevertheless, competitive spirit, in its proper place, is a powerful force for good in commercial society. It unleashes human energies and imparts to life a bracing and vital dynamism.

The salutary effects of ambition can be seen in the struggles of immigrants who come to a new country to make new lives for themselves: in the overtime and scrimping that allow a couple to put their children through school; in the man who builds a family business that can be passed on to another generation; in the woman who goes to night school while working a full time job. The common theme here is the pursuit of dream of bettering oneself one’s lot in life.

Again, comparison with other social systems is instructive. In traditional rural society there was little place for ambition among most of the population. People were enmeshed in ties to the land, to family and community. The idea of breaking from the past and “reinventing” yourself was utterly foreign. Competitive spirit was confined to the ranks of the ruling class and found its outlet predominantly in the quest for military glory. This chivalric code enshrined ambition in its willingness to kill or to be killed proves one’s superiority to others.

It may be argued that the aristocratic ethos represents human ambition at its most sublime. There is perhaps no act more inspirational than the willingness to risk one’s life. Accordingly, it is tempting to romanticize the social system that produces this ethos and, by commercial order. While the highs may have been higher in ancient regime, the lows were the general rule. Chivalry may have been exquisite. But its beauty fades in larger view when one sees the killing and wastes it produced and the stagnation, passively, and resignation, on which it rested. Commercial society, by allowing general participation in a competitive and dynamic order, offers the ambitious pursuit of self-improvement to high and low alike. The stake may be lower, and thus the winning less glorious, but many more people get to play, and contest now produces affluence and comfort rather than death and destruction.

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Brink Lindsey was the Director of Regulatory Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington.

Reprinted from Topic Magazine No.202