The Spiritual Side of Capitalism – Part 2
The Spiritual Side of Capitalism – Part 2
Brink Lindsey
The spiritual energy that produces material wealth is by no means limited to a handful of tycoons or even to the entrepreneurial economic function. Those who implement the entrepreneurial vision must also contribute their creativity and dedication if the vision is to succeed. The amount of knowledge and skill required to run a modern capitalist economy, with its amazing complexity and diversity of production, is enormous, and it must, by necessity, be widely distributed.
To an ever- increasing extent, the continuing vitality of commercial society hinges on the mental effort of vast numbers of people. Commercial society thus requires a large spiritual investment from its participants. Workers must do more than use their muscles or follow explicit instructions by rote; they must hone their skills, think things out for themselves, take initiative, assume responsibility. This spiritual investment brings spiritual benefit namely, the fulfillment that arises from developing and exercising one’s capability to surmount a challenge.
Philosopher Charles Murray, in his book In Pursuit, builds his discussion of the preconditions of happiness around psychologist Abraham Mallow’s hierarchy of human needs. At this summit of hierarchy above simple subsistence and physical security, above emotional intimacy, and self-respect, is something Maslow called “self-actualization.” In essence, this concept refers to basic need of human being to realize their potential, to develop talents and abilities, and then use them to be good at something that is hard to do. In other words, human beings need challenges.
Capitalism, by creating opportunities for demanding and challenging work, create opportunities for “self-actualization”. By asking that people apply themselves to develop special skills or expertise, the free market gives them the chance to savour the mastery of something difficult.
The spiritual richness that is possible in commercial life – the interplay between effort and reward is nowhere more grippingly portrayed than in Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Soul of a New Machine. Kidder tells a story of engineers at America’s Data General Corporation and their effort during the late 1970s to build a new generation of minicomputers. The book reads like a thriller, yet there are no chase scenes or shootouts or dark conspiracies; most of the action takes place in a window-less basement computer laboratory. What drives the plot is the competitive threat of archrival, Digital Equipment Corporation, corporate intrigue within Data General, and above all, the intellectual drama of designing and debugging a complicated new machine under crushing time constraints.
What comes across so compellingly in Kidder’s account is that this year and a half long project with its long hours and no overtime pay and all its stress and frustrations was ennobling experience for those who participated. As Kidders says near the end of the book: “Presumably the stonemasons who raised the cathedrals worked only partly for their pay. They were building temples to God. It was the sort of work that gave meaning to life. That’s what west [ at Data General] and his team of engineers were looking for, I think. They themselves liked to say they didn’t work on their machine for money. “Many looked around for words to describe their true reward. They used such phrases as ‘self-fulfillment, ‘satisfaction.’ Then Guyer struggled with those terms awhile with growing impatience. Then he said; “Look, I don’t have to get official recognition for anything I do. Ninety-eight percent of the thrills comes from knowing that the thing you designed works, and works almost the way you expected it would. If that happens, part of you is in that machine.’’’
This kind of feeling about one’s job is familiar to anyone who enjoy challenging work. It is not necessary to be building a new computer or devote your talent and energy to achieving some goal and to experience the fulfillment that comes from this devotion. Moreover, it’s not necessary that you involve abstract analysis or requires “book knowledge “. You can enjoy being a truck driver or steelworker or a carpenter with the skills and know how necessary to do your job well. What matters is that you find the work interesting and engaging and that you have some control over responsibility for what you do. Without these things working can involve your soul as well as your body and mind.
Of course, fulfillment on the job is by no means universal, and may even be exception rather than the rule. There are jobs so menial or routine that almost nobody could enjoy them. There are organizations and bosses that can make working life miserable. There are workaholics, whose compulsive devotion to their jobs leave the rest of their lives to atrophy. There are people stuck in the wrong one of work. And there are all too many people who do not commit enough of themselves to make their jobs enjoyable.
No social system can guarantee happiness for everybody. What capitalism does accomplish is to create wide and varied opportunities or rewarding and satisfying works. Moreover, it does a reasonable good job of meshing external, material inducements with the conduct that generate internal, spiritual rewards. From the individual’s perspective, the incentive of commercial society material benefits and the status that comes from being successful encourage people to take precisely those actions working hard, taking initiative, assuming – that make work fulfilling. Moreover, commercial enterprises that address the spiritual needs of their workers by giving them some control over what they do tend to be more productive and more successful than businesses that treat their workers like machines.
The spiritual richness of the market economy is most apparent when comparing it not against some imagined utopia but against other real life social systems. Communism, the attempt to subsume all economic life within the centralized state, was not only a failure in material production; more fundamentally, it was a spiritual impoverished system. The pervasive bureaucracy necessitated by central control stifled initiative and the assumption of responsibility, thereby robbing work of pleasures that comes from committing oneself to a job.
More basically, the suppression of economic insensitive radically transformed the nature of work. Neither the quality of one’s own work nor the overall productiveness of one’s organization had much, if any, connection with one’s job security or advancement. Nothing was at stake in one’s working life: job success was no longer a value to be earned or lost.
Click to read part 1 of the article
Brink Lindsey was the Director of Regulatory Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington.
Reprinted from Topic Magazine No. 202
