Capitalism and Pleasure

Adam Smith (Scottish National Gallery, given by J.H. Romanes l945)

Is capitalism based on the deferral of pleasure? This was an issue that Max Weber was dealing with in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. If you believe in predestination which was one of the tenets of Protestantism than the difference between the saved and the damned would be demonstrated by their adherence to values of frugality and saving. But forget the religion, if you're a true capitalist you expend effort in order to build your wealth. Those who believe in seizing the day (carpe diem) indulge the pleasure principle at the expense of their principal. While the sybarite might, with his or her Dionysian spirit, delight in wine, woman and song, the capitalist who's more reason bound and Apollonian, to invoke Nietzsche’s famous duality, actually experiences pain at the loss of his potential wealth. The outflow of capital registers as a diminution of spirit. The anorexia of Kafka’s Hungerkunstler (Hunger Artist) is a perversion of the Protestant ethic. It’s capitalism in extremis to the extent that self-deprivation eventually leads to suicide. The legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin pointed out that self-sacrifice is no longer a form of good if it results in doing harm to the self. So it is with the emetic notion of grace. A true capitalist is not an anorexic since his deferral of pleasure is predicated on the notion of future bliss. While the capitalist defers pleasure, he or she does so in the spirit of anticipation. However, the pleasure that results is more like gestation to the extent that by saving he or she derives satisfaction not from the possibilities of enjoying what money can buy, but in seeing his or her nest egg grow.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Inhibition

1883 performance of Ibsen's Ghosts

Is a side effect of capitalism inhibition? If you remember Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the habits of blooming capitalists include a certain frugality, which by definition would imply an avoidance of immediate gratification. It doesn't take much of a leap to conclude that wealth goes hand in hand with repression. If you learned your lessons well (and hence manifest as one of the saved who’s been given God’s grace) you were going to be a person who was wary of the pitfalls of pleasure. Put another way hedonism is a little like using up the gas in your tank with sexual libertinism and promiscuousness finding their monetary equivalent in borrowing. What indeed would Weber’s proto capitalists have thought of today’s huge deficit economies that are constantly financed with more borrowing? Of course, socialist economies have no monopoly on pleasure; the dictatorship of the proletariat has yet to produce its Xanadu. Conversely, there have been numerous capitalists whose appetites would hardly have made them exemplars of the Christian values. But sensibilities leave their residues. The repressive society Ibsen describes in a play like Ghosts can be seen as a product of the manners and mores Weber was writing about in his classic tome. The price of “success” in this dark Nordic world is disease--on both a physical and spiritual level.

Fritz Stern on Jurgen Osterhammel

In his essay/review on Jurgen Osterhammel’s The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (“How We Got to Where We Are,” The New York Review of Books, 5/7/15), Fritz Stern quotes Osterhammel’s quoting of Joseph Schumpeter’s line about Max Weber “his mastery of immense armies of concrete facts” to describe the author of the work under review.  Stern terms Osterhammel’s tome “an instant classic” and makes you almost want to pick up or at least order the 1,167 pages translation. Besides mentioning names like Schumpeter and Weber, he places Osterhammel in the company of historians like Eric Hobsbawm who “as we have become more more conscious of living in a globalized world…have tried to explore and explain how it came about.” But the very erudition Stern brings to his subject  would also seem to mirror the perspicacity that apparently resides in the work itself. Stern opens the essay with the following quote from George Bernard Shaw’s Maxims For Revolution, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Reading Stern’s review is a little going to Urbino and touring the Ducal Palace. The citations that he brings in to access a colleague’s work are like the great works of art that one finds in a tour of a Renaissance village. Stern seduces you with intellect, stunning you with the breadth of his knowledge and the knowledge of others until finally you’re ready to surrender and open up your mind and heart to a book you hadn’t previously had the time or necessarily the desire to read. But then again isn’t there something about the name Jurgen Osterhammel that beckons?

American Gigolo

There's a “pregnant" scene in Paul Schrader's l980 movie American Gigolo when a beautiful woman offers herself to Richard Gere. Since Gere makes his money from women who actually pay for his services even a willing hottie is looked at as the kind of pro bono work that’s not worthy of even mild interest. In fact the prospect of  inviting pulchritude appears to make him want to vomit. If you’re one of the mass of men or women who live lives of quiet desperation, this particular scene might be consoling as you think about the rumors that all of France is having passionate sexual adventures which come to a steamy climax in Sodoms like St. Tropez while you sit in the boondocks of some Salingeresque prewar Manhattan apartment hoping that your significant other doesn’t catch you sneaking a view of an itinerant breast, penis other  fetishistic objectification on Cinemax After Dark. Let’s say you were transported into a parallel universe where instead of being a neurotic middle aged New York man or woman you were transported to being a sexy young Parisian vamp or say the Richard Gere character or one of the stars of the Showtime series Gigolos, that is to say a desirable looking male prostitute. Now promiscuous sex would be nothing special at all; inflation would have devalued its currency. In your old incarnation someone might invite you over for a bite, meaning a little lunch or dinner. As the Parisian vamp, it’s a bite of your nipple. If your suitor is not satisfied he or she may have to go downtown where another part of you becomes the plat du jour. But it’s all the same. "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree...” begins the famous Coleridge poem. Max Weber talked about the "routinization of charisma" in which the fervor of the sect becomes institutionalized as a church and so it is with sex. Like everything else even hot sex with lots of different people can become just one more element of quotidian reality, or as H. Rap Brown said about violence, “as American as cherry pie.”

Max Weber Didn’t Plow the Field

photo: Adrian Pingstone

In a review of Peter Ghosh’s Max Weber and 'The Protestant Ethic'; Twin Histories (TLS, 2/13/15) Duncan Kelly quotes Weber as saying “I am not a donkey and do not have a field” on the subject of academia. Kelly earlier remarks about Weber, “He never wrote a big book, neither founded or had any interest in founding a school, and never cared about the accoutrements of academic fame even as those around him recognized his presence and power.” Weber may not have written a big book, but along with The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism , he was responsible for coining terms like the “the routinization of charisma” that left an indelible imprint not only on sociology but thought in general. He was part of a school of German sociology that included George Simmel and Ferdinand Tonnies that had an almost novelistic reach and which turned inquiries that could have been undertaken with dry analysis into poetry. Those who practice sociometrics and look at the discipline of sociology as a science might not cotton to many of Weber’s assumptions. Weber’s concept of “disenchantment” whereby scientism looked askance upon metaphysical suppositions perhaps reflects a world that would eventually cast wandering intellectuals of the kind he himself epitomized aside. Today a lot of people know a lot about a little, but few people know anything but what they know a little about. Academic disciplines are religions, spewing forth their own jargon, which is often intentionally impenetrable to outsiders. Weber was a true polymath. As Kelly says, “In a relatively short life, the sheer bulk of what he wrote about with seriousness, purpose and commitment, from agrarian history to rationality and music, from abstract methodological pronouncements  to the workings of the stock market, from the major world religions to war and revolution, is staggering.”  Weber would probably have disagreed with the seventh and last proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”