Mr. Smith Goes to Mouseland

Max Weber -- a culture analyst -- found it difficult to form a commitment to rational politics. He thought capital "R" Reason itself was a matter of choice, a value placed on the world by human action, and not an inherent quality of being itself. Allan Bloom, on page 150 of his book The Closing of the American Mind, wrote that "Weber was witnessing a struggle of the Gods for the possession of man and society, the results of which were unpredictable...there was no theodicy to sustain him in his travails." These ideas, Bloom observes, were natural effects that were bound to follow on the heels of Nietzsche's obituary for the death of God.

A deeper reading of Weber would be needed to identify those substitute "Gods" he claimed were struggling for the soul of man, but one of them was almost certainly the supernatural embodiment of the gospel according to Adam Smith. Some of Weber's best work involved an analysis of the relationship of the Christian and work ethics. As summarized by Ernst Troelsch's critique of Weber's ideas (in The Economic Ethic of Calvinism), the Protestant disposition consisted of capitalistic qualities:

1. Systematic division of labor;

2. A feeling for profit and advantage;

3. The abstract duty of work; and

4. The attitude toward property as towards something great which ought to be maintained and increased for its own sake.

Said just that way, the virtues of Smith's economics might be said to reach further into the human psyche than merely into the minds of industrialists. Feelings for "advantage" and "the duty of work" are human qualities that -- if they are real -- dignify humankind whether capitalist, socialist, or hunter-gatherer. But humankindus Americanus is essentially only one of these. He is capitalist (but only to the core). He worships, among others, the Smithian God.

It is perhaps not coincidental that the hands of Yahweh and Smith's God are both less visible, and thus more shrouded in mystery, than the hands of the animistic and iconic Gods that inhabited the realm of pre-historic man. So any apparent contradiction between the works of Christian and Capitalist man can be rationalized -- at least in primitive minds -- by the standby shibboleth, "The Lord works in mysterious ways." We may not understand why it is necesasary to wage war in order to export Christianity to the infidels, but we may be assured, by the material benefits of capitalism, that murder and destruction must number among the inscrutable means employed by the Lord to bring about his Kingdom on earth.

If it were not so obviously the case, that the Christian west has been more greatly blessed than the pagan east, we might be less prone to ascribe righteousness to those bearing the sword and the cross as the dual instruments of "progress." We might even in our wildest flights of fancy begin to understand something from the Sermon on the Mount that we have been blind to see by the confusion of Smith's and Yahweh's hands on the levers of history. We might -- God forbid -- begin to see murder, not as mere "collateral damage," but as a sin.

But then, if we ever do make the mistake of seeing ourselves as the creators of the mythological Gods, and ourselves as the creatures who have defined the values that act as determinants in our decision-making apparatus, we shall be forced to question both Max Weber and Allan Bloom. If as individuals we are compelled by our values to act as we act in every moment of our lives, if all our actions can be understood as rational -- in the sense that "It seemed like a good idea at the time" -- then what Weber understood as irrational activity is and always has been rational in the purest sense of the word: we had reasons for doing what we did. Bloom -- by these same assumptions -- was perhaps not quite so mistaken, but seemed nevertheless to believe that the real values that ought to be adopted by thinking people exist somehow (and somewhere) as virtues to be discovered. His error -- if in fact he has made one -- consists in his failure to give proper weight to the human role in defining those virtues. He seems to believe that the human mind has been "closed" by a failure to pay attention to clues or hints or whatevers that exist as detectable entities.

But as I say, Bloom was closer than Weber to what I regard as the truth. If our choices are determined by our understanding of what is good for us, and if our knowledge is determined by nothing but real things and real ideas, then in a manner of speaking, the clues and hints of true goodness are indeed out there (or in here, to say it more properly). From the human viewpoint, the world works rationally, in that nothing happens that cannot in theory be explained as an effect of a knowable cause. If an ideal set of values exists, it must somehow exist as a potential outcome of human action, probably, of reasoned thought.

The problem is the same one that crops up in Smith's invisible hand economics. It is certainly the case that if all industrialists act to produce the greatest profit for themselves, and if it is true that all market transactions involve a fair trade of products, it still does not follow that the result will produce anything like an ideal world. Some of the products, and thus some of the fair trades, may be absolutely harmful to the buyer. Only if human freedom is elevated to the highest rank as an absolute and unquestionable value can the world of fair trades be justified as always ideal, an obvious absurdity. By that standard, all human action freely taken would be good, and any discussion of ethics would be a waste.

More later.