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Now let me backpedal a bit. My point here is not to say that the various theories of where the Miracle came from are entirely wrong. My objection is to any argument that singles out one factor and says, “This—and only this—is why it happened.” Nearly all truly complex and important phenomena have multiple mutually dependent factors that lead to their creation. Why did World War II happen? Why are you the way you are? Any attempt to focus on a single discrete mono-causal explanation is folly.
And capitalism is far, far more complicated. The reason I call the emergence of the Miracle a miracle is simply this: No one intended it. No single thing made it happen. It was an unplanned and glorious accident.
Again, consider the crude version of the Weberian thesis. Even if you grant that Protestantism “created” capitalism, you must also acknowledge that this isn’t what Protestants, starting with Luther, had in mind. Martin Luther despised usury in all its forms (no doubt in part because of his virulent anti-Semitism). No seventeenth-century Puritan preacher said, “If you get rich you’ll get into Heaven.” They said, “Behave this way, and it’s more likely that God will find you worthy.” The changes in behavior elicited by this stern and pious instruction were never intended to be a get-rich-quick scheme. That would be the so-called prosperity theology, a very recent creation closely associated with televangelism. (Donald Trump’s “spiritual advisor” Paula White is of this sect.)41
Similarly, the pluralism that made capitalism possible wasn’t a product of some high-minded ideal about how to structure society. The religious tolerance that starts to emerge in Europe after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 was far less a product of theological changes than it was of political and military exhaustion. The Treaty of Westphalia ended the “wars of religion” in Europe. Those wars, running off and on for more than a century, took an enormous toll on Protestants and Catholics alike. In their wake, as historian C. V. Wedgwood put it, the West began to understand “the essential futility of putting the beliefs of the mind to the judgment of the sword.”42 In other words, Protestants and Catholics alike settled on a modicum of tolerance as “the last policy that remained when it had proved impossible to go on fighting any longer,” in the words of Herbert Butterfield.43 The social space created was an advance in liberty, but that was nobody’s first choice. Rather, it was an accidental by-product of military futility.
If I have to offer my own explanation for where the Miracle comes from, I will second the argument put forth by Deirdre McCloskey in her awe-inspiring multivolume work on the birth of capitalism. Her answer, in brief: The Miracle is an attitude, expressed in new ideas and the rhetoric that accompanies them. “The North Sea economy, and then the Atlantic economy, and then the world economy grew because of changing forms of speech about markets and enterprise and innovation.”44 These new forms of speech made innovation possible by recognizing innovation as a good thing. Innovation dies on the drawing board without a climate that welcomes and rewards it. The Chinese and Arab advantages in technology amounted to little in the long run, because the political and religious climate proved inhospitable to sustain innovation, because innovation disrupts the status quo and undermines the powers that be. The Chinese inventor Bi Sheng, after all, invented printing centuries before Gutenberg.45 The Japanese had guns, but then banned them because they recognized the threat they posed to the aristocracy of the sword-wielding warrior class of the samurai.46
For centuries, Christian—and Protestant!—rulers alike were hostile to innovation for the same reason. For instance, in 1548, Edward VI, Henry VIII’s successor, issued A proclamation against those that doeth innovate…In her paper “ ‘Meddle Not with Them That Are Given to Change’: Innovation as Evil,” Benoît Godin recounts the story of Henry Burton, a Puritan Church of England minister. Burton accused the Church of innovating doctrine against the king’s wishes in two pamphlets in 1636. He was called before the court to defend himself. The court found that Burton, not the Church, was guilty of innovation. They sentenced Burton to prison for life—after cutting off his ears.47 And this was Protestant England, the supposed ancestral homeland of liberty.
But then something happened. “About the end of the seventeenth century,” Joseph Schumpeter writes in Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process, the English political establishment “dropped all systematic hostility to invention. So did public opinion and the scribes.” It was this remarkable, unprecedented, miraculous change in attitudes that made the Miracle possible. The way people talked and thought about how the world worked changed. “The economy is nothing without the words supporting it,” McCloskey writes, “whether conventional wisdom or creative entrepreneurial projects.”48
I am almost wholly convinced by this. For 100,000 years, the great mass of humanity languished in poverty. This great flat line of material misery plodded along unchanged until attitudes changed in England and Holland, not just among intellectuals or aristocrats, but among the common people, particularly the bourgeois—the mostly urban middle and upper middle class of professionals, artisans, craftsmen, merchants, and other laborers who did not till the soil. Prior to that, notions of betterment, innovation, and improvement were seen, literally, as heresy. “Curiositas,” or curiosity, was a sin, and the innovator a heretic.
For millennia vested interests—bureaucrats, aristocrats, guilds, and priests alike—formed coalitions of common interest to stifle innovations. A few examples from Joel Mokyr (by way of McCloskey):
• In 1299, Florence banned bankers from adopting Arabic numerals.
• At the end of the fifteenth century, scribe guilds of Paris managed to fight off the adoption of the printing press for two decades.
• In 1397, pin manufacturers in Cologne outlawed the use of pin presses.
• In 1561, the city council of Nuremburg made the manufacture and selling of lathes punishable with imprisonment.
• In 1579, the city council of Danzig ordered the secret assassination of the inventor of a ribbon loom—by drowning.
• In the late 1770s, the Strasbourg council barred a local cotton mill from selling its wares in town because it would disrupt the business model of the cloth importers.49
This is an ancient and universal story of elites seeking to protect their privileges and incomes from the gales of change. It is why the emperor of China burned his oceangoing vessels in 1525 and the Turkish caliph banned the printing press in 1729.50 The merchant guilds that dominated much of Europe and the world for the better part of a thousand years endured not because they met economic demand but because they—with the help of the crown and the church—restricted it. They “limited competition and reduced exchange by excluding craftsmen, peasants, women, Jews, foreigners, and the urban proletariat from most profitable branches of commerce,” writes Sheilagh Ogilvie. “Merchant guilds and associations were so widespread and so tenacious not because they efficiently solved economic problems, making everyone better off, but because they efficiently distributed resources to a powerful urban elite, with side benefits for rulers.”51
Hostility to innovation and free trade was grounded in a broader worldview that saw money itself as the root of all evil. From the time of antiquity until the Enlightenment, trade and the pursuit of wealth were considered sinful. “In the city that is most finely governed,” Aristotle wrote, “the citizens should not live a vulgar or a merchant’s way of life, for this sort of way of life is ignoble and contrary to virtue.”52 In his Republic, Plato laid out one vision of an ideal society in which the ruling “guardians” would own no property to avoid tearing “the city in pieces by differing about ‘mine’ and ‘not mine.’ ” He added that “all the classes engaged in retail and wholesale trade…are disparaged and subjected to contempt and insults.” Furthermore in his hypothetical utopian state, only non-citizens would be allowed to indulge in commerce.
A citizen who defies the natural order and becomes a merchant should be thrown in jail for “shaming his family.”53
In ancient Rome, “all trade was stigmatized as undignified…the word mercator [merchant] appears as almost a term of abuse,” writes Professor D. C. Earl of the University of Leeds. Cicero noted in the first century B.C. that retail commerce is sordidus [vile] because merchants “would not make any profit unless they lied constantly.”54
Early Christianity expanded this point of view. Jesus himself was clearly hostile to the pursuit of riches. “For where your treasure is,” he proclaimed in his Sermon on the Mount, “there will your heart be also.” And of course he insisted that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
The official teaching of the Catholic Church echoed these sentiments for centuries, holding that economics was zero-sum. “The Fathers of the Church adhered to the classical assumption that, since the material wealth of humanity was more or less fixed, the gain of some could only come at a loss to others,” Jerry Z. Muller explains.55 As Saint Augustine put it, “Si unus non perdit, alter non acquirit”—“If one does not lose, the other does not gain.”56
The most evil form of wealth accumulation was the use of money to make money, i.e., usury. Lending money at interest was unnatural, and therefore invidious. “While expertise in exchange is justly blamed since it is not according to nature but involves taking from others,” Aristotle insisted, “usury is most reasonably hated because one’s possessions derive from money itself and not from that for which it was supplied….So of the sorts of business this is the most contrary to nature.”57 Aristotle was right that finance is contrary to the natural order; it is also the driver of incredible prosperity and human betterment.
Despite all this, the case is often made that Christianity gets the credit for the Miracle. And, in broad strokes, I am open to the idea that without Christianity, the Miracle may never have happened. But that is not quite the same argument as Christianity caused the Miracle (and it certainly did not intend it). However, the lesser claim, that Christianity was a necessary ingredient, certainly seems likely.
Jesus said that his followers should render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, establishing that there were in fact two realms, which Saint Augustine called the “City of Man” and the “City of God.” The City of Man was for temporal rulers, the City of God for ecclesiastical ones. When the Western Roman Empire fell, the Church remained in Rome as a religious authority. This established the principle that the Church would serve as the conscience for the realm. This really was a significant advance, creating one of the first and most important mental divisions of labor in the Western mind. Jesus’s admonition of separating the realm of faith and the realm of rulers was an imperfect arrangement, to be sure, but this distinction served as an important check on the arbitrary rule of kings by introducing the idea that even rulers were answerable to a higher law. This was in marked contrast with Chinese emperors and Islamic sultans. While Christians had to render unto Caesars, Muhammad played the role of both Caesar and Jesus, and the political system he left behind recognized no space between secular and religious authority. Without that space, institutional pluralism and the division of meaning are impossible.
Also, some insist that Christianity—I would argue borrowing from Judaism—invented, or introduced, the idea of individual rights. Larry Siedentop, in his Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, argues that by the fifteenth century the internal logic of Christianity’s emphasis on the individual conscience had made the Enlightenment all but inevitable.58
Again, maybe. Then again, maybe not. It is quite simply impossible to know. There were certainly countless Christian regimes and movements that were hostile to innovation, individual liberty, and pluralism. Would the Miracle have happened if they had won their battles?
But, again, my aim here is not actually to discredit or rebut any of the serious arguments for why the Miracle happened, because I think many have merit. But all of the material factors are meaningless absent the broader context of culture. Biologists can grow just about anything in a lab, but they can’t grow anything without the right medium.
At the end of the day, it is impossible to authoritatively answer the question of why beyond simply documenting that it happened. Why do certain ideas take hold and others do not? Why did the ideas of a Jewish carpenter in a backwater province of the Roman Empire capture the minds of millions and ultimately conquer the empire itself? The devout Christian can argue because they were true. But, as a sociological question, the only answer is that they just did.
The more important question is: Will it last?
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McCloskey is a great optimist about the Miracle’s prospects. I hope that optimism is warranted. But it seems to me axiomatic that an explanation of capitalism’s birth grounded entirely in the power of ideas and words opens itself to a depressing rejoinder: What words and ideas can create, words and ideas can destroy. Whatever we can think ourselves into, we can unthink our way out of. And here we must consider what I believe is the most persuasive theory of why capitalism might be fated to vanish either from the earth or at least from America and the West. To do so, we must first look at the most influential and famous prophecy of capitalism’s demise, made by Karl Marx.
According to Marx the working classes—the “proletariat”—were the sole source of all economic value. The “real” value of any good or service is derived not from the price it fetches in the market, but from the amount of time and effort put into it by the laborer. Hence, under Marx’s “labor theory of value,” when a factory owner sells that product at a profit, that profit is “surplus value” and by its nature exploitative and unjust. Indeed, for Marx, the economic ruling classes were akin to vampires, and his writing is full of bloodsucking imagery (which at the time was often a thinly veiled and occasionally explicit anti-Semitic reference to greedy Jewish moneylenders).
In Marx’s futuristic fairy tale, the workers of the world would one day in the near future recognize that they were merely wage slaves and, having attained class consciousness, would overthrow their masters, seize the means of production, and live in a new utopian world where they would live very much like modern noble savages, working as much or as little as they wanted in a state of blissful harmony.
There are three things that need to be said about Marx’s romantic vision. First, it truly was romantic, grounded in profound alienation and paranoia about the society he lived in. Second, for all of its pseudo-scientific jargon, Marxism was not a modern, forward-thinking project. Rather, it was a modern-sounding rehabilitation of ancient ideas and sentiments.59 For the Christian, the meek would inherit the earth; for the Marxist, the workers would.
And, third, Marx’s vision was entirely wrong. The idea that the inventor or the entrepreneur creates no value by bringing an idea into the world is ridiculous. According to Marx’s economic analysis, the inventor of a better mousetrap doesn’t create any value; only the workers who put it together do.
But it was Marx’s political or sociological analysis that really missed the mark. To understand why, we need to look to Joseph Schumpeter, one of the great economists of the twentieth century. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), Schumpeter argued that capitalism was ultimately doomed. But not remotely for the reasons Marx had predicted.
“Schumpeter turned Karl Marx on his head,” writes biographer Thomas K. McCraw. “Hateful gangs of parasitic capitalists become, in Schumpeter’s hands, innovative and beneficent entrepreneurs.”60 Schumpeter saw—and explained—earlier than almost anyone that the power of capitalism stemmed in large part from the liberation of, and tolerance for, entrepreneurs. The entrepreneur is the engine of innovation, and innovation is what drives economic growth by finding new opportunities for wealth where mere investors and managers saw onl
y the way we’ve always done things.61
One of Schumpeter’s key insights—and quite radical at the time—was to look at economic actors as entities over time, and economics generally as an evolutionary process. The market is constantly changing, and companies that are monopolies one minute fall prey to innovative firms that render them obsolete the next minute. The driver of that process was what Schumpeter famously called “creative destruction.” Schumpeter applied the same insight to capitalism itself, and concluded that capitalism itself would fall prey to a kind of social analogue to creative destruction.
His analysis is rich and complicated, but I will highlight the three essential components as they relate to my argument.
First, capitalism is relentlessly and unsentimentally rational and efficient. The free market tends to wipe away tradition and ritual in the name of profit. This is a wonderful thing when the traditions and rituals it is corroding are based in bigotry and oppression. But like water seeking its own level, the capitalist tide doesn’t stop at clearing away bad forms of tradition, custom, and sentiment. It carves a path through the social landscape heedless of the social value certain institutions and customs provide. Or, as Schumpeter puts it, capitalism “creates a critical frame of mind which, after having destroyed the moral authority of so many other institutions, in the end turns against its own; the bourgeois finds to his amazement that the rationalist attitude does not stop at the credentials of kings and popes but goes on to attack private property and the whole scheme of bourgeois values.”62
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