Replies to Reviews

I recently discovered (by the grace of the internet) Eugene McCarraher's long, long review in Books and Culture of one of my recent books, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006). I'd like to respond. I'll not respond quite in the tone that Professor McCarraher allows himself in his writings, here and elsewhere. McCarraher hates me and he hates the book, as he hates many, many other people and things (Michael Novak, MSNBC, Pelagianism), and he prides himself on his angers. He hasn't quite grasped the gospel of love. But one must in Christian charity forgive his youthful intemperances.

After all, he felt the book deserved 7000 words. An author can't complain about that intemperance, if the reviewer spells her name right. Yet most of the 7000, sadly, are not arguments that might improve our understanding even if they were mistaken, but boiling, sneering hatreds. Anything goes in McCarraher's rhetorical armamentarium. No chance to sneer, however small, is missed. When I note that Americans consume a great deal because they produce a great deal, which is an accounting truth often forgotten by critics of consumerism, I am said to "bark." When I remind my fellow economists that solidarity matters to human communities, a point they are very inclined to forget, it is "not quite worthy of Polonius." And on and on, a "Sargasso Sea of intellectual froth." (One hazard of invective, quite aside from its corruption of the soul, is that the mud tends to stick to the hand of the thrower). McCarraher even finds space to drag in my gender history, for Lord's sake, and refers to me as "he."

But consider the few actual arguments that McCarraher makes. He asserts that anti-capitalism is not, as I call it, "the high orthodoxy of the West." His evidence is that the World Bank favors capitalism. Agreed. But when I used the adjective "high" I was not applying it to the bourgeoisie and what Gramsci calls "the historical bloc of capitalism," but to artists and intellectuals, what Coleridge and I call the "clerisy"---the people like you, me, and Eugene McCarraher who read Books and Culture, say. Many such people, and among them the heights (Shaw, Weil, Sartre, Rorty), have since 1848 turned against capitalism and the bourgeoisie. I don't think there's any doubt on the matter in the book, or in the history of Europe. And in truth McCarraher agrees, as he shows in his opening sarcasm: he pretends to confess that he has indeed sinned, Father, as a snob, a fraud, and an ignoramus about economics, a typical exponent of the high orthodoxy of the West. He is admitting here and throughout that the high intellectual orthodoxy, and especially the orthodoxy of intellectual Christians, is anticapitalist.

McCarraher does not like my defense of an ethical and Christian capitalism, he himself being a socialist. He's not I think a Stalinist or even, as I was for a month or two in my own angry youth, a Trotskyist, but a Christian syndicalist. Perhaps it's Prince Kropotkin (also my first political love) supplemented by a hateful version of Jesus. McCarraher exhibits little sign of understanding Marx or Adam Smith, so I am puzzled what really is his social gospel. But whatever McCarraher is, he views capitalism as evil, the chief evil. As many left-leaning Christians do, he believes that the gospels and a proper common sense view capitalism that way, too. He sneers at my readings of the synoptic gospels, though as usual not pausing to tell why my readings are mistaken. That Jesus and his tradition used rhetorical figures of prudence as well as justice---the honest workman as well as they that mourn---is not something that the left-orthodox and Christian clerisy is willing to acknowledge.

He quotes me---"Capitalism has triumphed in our time, which I claim is a good thing, though boring"---and exclaims, in a good example of his invective, "So why spend 500 frigging pages on it?" Because, dear boy, it is good, and accords with many versions of Christianity, and you say it's not, and doesn't. In 1919 Paul Tillich in McCarraher style wrote that "the spirit of Christian love accuses a social order which consciously and in principle is built upon economic and political egoism, and it demands a new order in which the feeling of community is the foundation of the social structure. It accuses the deliberate egoism of an economy . . . in which each is the enemy of the other, because his advantage is conditioned by the disadvantage or ruin of the other, and it demands an economy of solidarity of all, and of joy in work rather than in profit." That's McCarraher's view, and Dorothy Day's, and Wendell Berry's. But McCarraher offers no evidence that it's correct, and neither did Tillich or Day or Berry. I offer 500 frigging pages that it's false. The economy in the left-Christian view, for example, is a zero sum game, which is false. And trading goods and services is said to be inconsistent with Christian love, which is false. And capitalism is said to be mainly competition rather than cooperation, which is false.

McCarraher accuses me of being against "system" in ethics. This is a strange charge, and suggests that he was soooo vexed by what he takes to be my politics that he couldn't actually bring himself to read the book. I spend literally hundreds of pages erecting exactly a system of ethics, on the model of Aquinas, but adopted by Adam Smith, too. On page 304 I even give a diagram of it, in a chapter called precisely "The System of the Virtues." McCarraher does not, I think, like diagrams, so that must be why he skipped over such sections.

But what he mainly skipped over, and is the main oddness in his review, are the pages (some of the same hundreds) in which I attack the Prudence Only view of the right wing. For instance, pp. 108-138, 394-432, and passim. The book is a reasoned reply to the left, but also to the right.

And that's my main objection. I've long noted that there's a certain incompetence on both left and right in making alliances. "Why make alliances with another Christian against economism," McCarraher says in effect, "when he/she doesn't agree with me on every single point?" If we're going to get beyond invective and the mere reassertion of orthodoxy---God knows the Christian tradition has plenty of that---were going have to get serious about the other's arguments.

McCarraher does not.

Sincerely,

Deirdre McCloskey

Economics, History, English, and Communications

University of Illinois at Chicago, Academia Vitae (Deventer, The Netherlands), University of the Free State (Bloemfontein, South Africa)

Dear Mr. McInturf:

I could not get the blog to display properly: it gave me a lot of formatting stuff, but I extracted the following:

At any rate, I do admit that my little blurb was probably too critical of a book I haven't read,

Yeah, that's a problem. People take hostile and partial reviews as accurate, without reading, especially if the review reflects their own ideology. My book is cheap!

I believe that the Augustinian diagnosis of capitalistic commodity fetishism as a privation of the fundamental human longing for a sacramental way of being in the world is right on the money.

There is as you know a long, long tension about this in Christian thought. Augustine is one, stoic, world-denying side. The modern left has adopted such a line of, as Milton called them, "budge doctors of the stoic fur." The other side is the ethical enjoyment of God's gifts. "He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:/ Praise him." One can't just mention Augustine and leave the field, yes? One has to argue the case against the world and its riches. My book argues for the defense. Few enough intellectuals do, but that's not in itself an argument. Look for instance at Daniel Horowitz's fine The Morality of Spending (1985), which chronicles the turn against consumption among American intellectuals looking down with alarm on the proletariat.

But honestly, Ms. McCloskey - the business of America is business. Capitalists are not and never have been a minority - not in Hollywood, not in Washington, and not even in New Haven, Ithaca, or Chicago.

You are of course correct about the powers that be. But my quarrel is with the "clerisy," as Coleridge and I call it: the intellectuals. They are against capitalism, or have been since 1848. My book tells why they are mistaken to be so.

One more thing: you write, "we capitalists have a plan-a plan that has actually worked-to make the working class rich and ethical." That is exactly the problem - you identify the good life with the wealthy life.

No I don't, not even in that sentence. Notice "and ethical." The point of the book, which you miss because the review missed it and you are relying on the review (I spent many hundreds of pages making it in fifty different ways) is that "rich" is not the only element of the good life. I am attacking my economist colleagues. But on the other hand it's unethical, isn't it, to want people to remain poor? That's what will happen if capitalism is crushed. How do I know? It did in India 1947-1980 and in China 1948-1980; not to speak of the USSR , or fascism in Spain.

Aside from the fact that global capitalism simply displaces our need for an impoverished working class to the third world,

That's mistaken, and if you will study economics you will see that it is. If you get your economics from a mix of Marx and Augustine, you will have a harder time seeing it. This so-called "need for an impoverished working class" has in fact resulted during the past decade in the fastest rise of world income in history. I mean the billions made better off in China and India among other places. Capitalism makes the working class better off materially. (I thought you had conceded that?) And, as I said, spiritually. I know you find this hard to believe. Unless you wish to stay with your present opinions merely because they are your present opinions, read and ponder.

The ethos of capitalism sees others as threats, as competitors for scarce resources.

No. It's the ethos of humanness, having nothing especially to do with capitalism. What capitalism mainly does, on a gigantic scale, is well illustrated by the internet itself: allow cooperation (not competition) with distant folk. Think of how many people contributed by cooperating to making the keyboard you are typing on.

there is no way around it - the anthropological premise upon which capitalism is founded sees the humans in terms of individual, acquisitive consumers.

That is mistaken, though you are quite right that some of my economist colleagues delight boyishly in imagining it is so. It isn't. People make themselves in consumption, as the anthropologists note, in every society. One anthropologist explicit about this was, for example, the late Mary Douglas.

Capitalism fails if people are not in fact this way, and so rather than "reckoning honestly with human nature," the effect of marketing is to actively create this sort of human.

That's not true. But to face up to the massive evidence you would be well advised to read my book and the works it cites. (It's another matter, I repeat, if you do not wish to face up to the evidence. In that case, stick with what you think now. Don't read people who disagree with you.)

By contrast, Christian anthropology sees the human as an other-oriented, self-giving person whose being was given to her as a gift in the first place and because of that has no need to defend (and create!) it with the accumulation of stuff. This forces it to lay its ax to the root of any capitalistic construction of virtue.

Not so, even in theological terms. Consumption is not the accumulation of stuff. And if you lay the ax to capitalism you are left not with a workers' utopia; it seems from the evidence of the 20th century that you are left with gulags and extermination camps and a materially and spiritually impoverished proletariate.

Sincerely,


Deirdre McCloskey