Take The Enchantments of Mammon, a book I was vaguely considering reading at one point but then ... I saw this ...
https://lettherebejustice.blogspot.com/2019/12/in-beginning-was-word-or-where.htm
I was utterly disappointed to crack open Eugene McCarraher's new tome, The Enchantments of Mammon. In a nutshell, McCarraher turns Weber's "disenchantmentment" thesis on its head: capitalism didn't destroy the magic and mirth of the world but became a new vehicle for it. Capitalism is a religion, with its own theological paradigms to interpret all things before the mythical and mysterious "Market". McCarraher offers a crash course in 600 years of history, from the late Middle Ages to now. Weighing in at 650~ pages of content, with 100+ pages of footnotes, I expected something of worth. I was really sad to discover the contrary.
..."Sacramentalism" is itself an intentionally vague word. Despite all of my sympathies, McCarraher's view of sacrament (and the majority of those he cites favorably, as well as the majority of those in the Roman Catholic church) is basically thaumaturgy. "The work of the gods", thaumaturgy is a kind of cosmic magic. It claims to tap into elemental forces of the "world" and call them into the level of reality in which we dwell. Marsilio Ficino, a Renaissance-era magus in priest's clothes, tried to distance what he saw was the good inheritance from what the church condemned. He was not summoning demons, but the primitive spirits of the world, who were benevolent servants of God. Neglecting whether such a concept is remotely biblical, there's a high assessment of not only the practitioner's power and the wisdom of pagan thaumaturgists like Iamblichus, a disciple of Plotinus. In a basic sense, Ficino and McCarraher are on the same page when it comes to a definition of sacrament (though McCarraher may have, being a leftist, ended up like Giordano Bruno who crossed the authorities too many times).
Appeals to "sacramentality" are common in Christian theology nowadays. There are appeals to see mundane chores as a sacrament, or of sex as a sacrament, or of every meal as a sacrament, or the whole of life as a sacrament. But what does any of this mean? Does it simply mean God is omnipresent? Does it simply mean that God cares about everything we do? Advocates of sacramentality tend to misconstrue how enchantment goes bad. At least McCarraher knows that it's not enough to call for enchantment, since the wrong thing - like Mammon - could become the locus of enchantment. However all of these positions make God out to be a kind of force field, personal or not, that one draws upon. I'm someone gifted/cursed with a very active imagination, and all of these prescriptions would be easy for me to adopt and revel in. However, I'm also self-aware about my imagination and that critical Feurbachian critique: how do I know whether all of this is simply the heated movements of the human spirit? Contra the materialist Feurbach, a sacramentalist like Ficino would agree with a twist: it is all the human spirit but the human spirit has the power to confect the gods. In McCarraher's hands, it seems like the same concept is in play. It is up to us (God willing) to open our eyes and see paradise. ...
and this ...
https://blog.ayjay.org/mammon/
...
Eugene McCarraher’s The Enchantments of Mammon is a remarkable book, beautifully written and narrated with great verve. However, I do not find its argument persuasive. You can only find the argument persuasive if you accept the book’s two key axioms, and I don’t. I say “axioms” because McCarraher doesn’t argue either of them, he takes them as … well, axiomatic.
The first axiom is that the Middle Ages in Europe, especially western Europe, constituted a great coherent sacramental order — McCarraher loves the word “sacramental” and uses it to designate pretty much everything he approves of — a “moral economy,” a “theological economy,” in which “preparation for [God’s] kingdom was the point of economic life.” Even the vast waves of rebellion and protest that occurred throughout the Middle Ages weren’t protests against that order as such, only complaints that the political and ecclesial authorities weren’t properly fulfilling their duties. McCarraher cites rebellions (e.g. Wat Tyler’s) of which this could plausibly be said as characteristic, and ignores all the more radical protests. (See Chapter 3 of Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium for examples.) Similarly, he presents the political-eschatological vision of Piers Plowman as though it’s typical of its age, when it isn’t typical at all, any more than William Blake’s poems are typical of England circa 1800. A fair look at what we know suggests that the Middle Ages was as governed by greed and lust and the libido dominandi as any other era, and if God had spoken to the rulers of that age he would have asked them, “What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor?” I think the great preponderance of the evidence suggests that McCarraher’s portrait of the Middle Ages is a pious fiction.
The second governing axiom of The Enchantments of Mammon is that modern capitalism, which was, he says, created by Protestantism, sacralizes wealth in a way that no previous system did. But I don’t think that’s true. In all times and all places that I know of, wealth is generally perceived as a sign of divine favor. The peculiarity of the Axial Age is that in that era there arise, in various places around the world, philosophical and theological traditions suggesting that human flourishing cannot be measured in money and possessions. (After all, one of the key features of the land that Yahweh promises to the wandering Israelites is that it flows with milk and honey, is a place in which the people can prosper economically. It’s only when we get to the book of Proverbs that we discern a serious ambivalence about all this. Proverbs 22:4: “The reward for humility and fear of the Lord is riches and honor and life.” But also Proverbs 11:4: “Riches do not profit in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death.”)...and, well, I'll pass. Having spent the last half decade slogging through at least half a dozen books by Theodor Adorno and reading a lot of music history and theory exploring formal analysis something like Mammon might be an okay read but with my reading and writing priorities I know I don't have to regard it as a particularly important book to go hunting down at the moment, or even "ever".
2 comments:
In McCarraher's defense (contra Jacobson), he is not crudely defending the Middle Ages or conflating the sacralizing of wealth (or, really, capital) with deploring wealth.
Like a lot of Roman Catholic resourcement of the Middle Ages for criticism of liberal modernity (what I call the MacIntyre mafia: guys like William Cavanaugh and Brad Gregory), they are not saying it was perfect. McCarraher is perhaps painting too a rosy a portrait of how, at the very least, society was envisioned. Thus, human economies could not justify themselves simply by acquisition or atheistic laws of nature. Instead, even if they were brutal, the framework was one where human life was still sacred. Historically, this is perhaps confusing theological moral rhetoric for how things were actually run, what common people really expected from life, and properly interpreting what this moral economy meant (i.e. concern for human life/public safety over profits might justify burning heretics, etc.). But it's not enough to simply point to the nightmarish parts and shrug off the criticism. I'm relatively in favor of critical studies of the Middle Ages to examine what was lost.
Second, McCarraher actually believes that a Christian-socialist utopia is possible where all have good standards of living. It's a vision of "every man a king", not "every man a peasant". His understanding of sacramentalism and God's sacral omnipresence borders on a kind of panentheism (something you see in the late leftist Dominican Herbert McCabe and some other fringe figures of the Vatican II melange). So Jacobson's criticism doesn't really stand up. Additionally, the point is more broadly the sacrality of capital. McCarraher is inverting Weber, but the basic point that there's something unique about the "spirit of capitalism" is still accepted. Jacobson might think this is axiomatic, but this is something not wholly fabricated, but drawing off a pillar in historic sociology. I have my criticism of Weber, but McCarraher is basically taking the paradigm wholesale and turning it upside down. It's an interesting move, and actually would bear much fruit if his obsessively magical view of "sacramentalism" didn't constantly plague a bloated text doing too much with too little.
Fair enough, and on this range of topics I'm happy to let the better-read tackle that stuff while I'm tackling stuff on the music history and music theory side for the stuff I'm interested in. :)
The basic idea of the sacrality of capital inspiring Western Christians to ignore the variety of biblical prohibitions against founding economic systems on forms of usury seems to be getting more scholarly and popular traction even where people aren't familiar with McCarraher's work directly.
I'm still curious to see what Jacobs' project on the lineal descent of forms of critical theories are
What I've found with my immersion in Adorno in the last six years is Teachout was right to point that the difference between a "good" critic and a "great" critic is that even when the great critic is completely wrong about key ideas their way of discussing the ideas ca still spur continued conversation. So it might be McCarraher's work could be more rather than less useful for putting things in a way Alan Jacobs thinks are wrong. I think I needed to read just how wrong I thought Adorno was to make some personal breakthroughs developing a ragtime-sonata fusion style. Adorno's core criticism of the lack of systemic gestural "argument" was a good point, he just failed to realize that anyone who has mastered both blues and Baroque counterpoint could eventually arrive at a synthesis of some kind, which, of course, is one of my passion projects.
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