Eugene McCarraher is building a name for himself by his indelibly scathing reviews of intellectual poseurs. A while back he lambasted Christopher Hitchens in a memorable review entitle “This Book Is Not Good.” In this month’s Books & Culture, he unleashes his critical eye and devastating wit on Deidre N. McCloskey’s new book, The Bourgeois Virtues. “The market in capitalist apologetics has been getting more crowded of late, creating a brisk and voluminous trade in the wares of ideology,” and McCloskey’s book is just another in a growing list of economia gloriae from the likes of David Brooks, Dinesh D’Souza, and the National Review, which rhapsodize the happy state of affairs that global capitalism has brought about. One of the silliest things about this crew is their persecution complex. All of them have somehow latched onto the Limbaugh position that fiscal conservatives are a threatened minority, facing opposition at every level of the communist-dominated structures of the elite. I honestly don’t know what country these guys live in. It certainly isn’t the one where consumerism weasels its way into every nook and cranny of my life, and wont let me alone even to watch a baseball game. At any rate, this crew’s “counter”-narrative runs along the lines of Capitalism being an overall force for making everyone richer (=happier), even if it might be happening at an exponentially increased rate for a few. As D’Souza frames it, the poor in America don’t starve, they just drive a Honda instead of a BMW. Or as McCarraher perceives with a little less nationally-confined point of view, there are just as many sweatshops as there have always been, but the people working there have never made as much money! As you can guess, McCarraher ruins any desire to read this book, all of whose comfortable neo-conservative aphorizing you’ve already heard anyway. Central to McCloskey’s endorsement of Capitalism is her naïve affirmation that virtue is a completely personal affair that needs only to be left alone by the government in order to flourish. McCarraher demolishes her argument with the basic Christian insistence that virtues must be inculcated in and by a virtuous community.
Virtue is utterly personal, McCloskey implies, and any attempt to “systematize” Christian love will rob it of its authenticity. Whatever you make of that claim, it’s certainly not unconventional. In fact, it’s arguably been the ideological basis of Anglo-American resistance to social reform of almost any kind….But in emphasixing the discrepancy between public “preachment” and personal conduct, bohemians and leftists have also preserved an insight that’s central to the virtue tradition: virtue can’t be merely personal. From Aristotle to macIntyre, champions of the virtues have insisted that they can only be exercised properly in a community, be it a polis, a commune, or some other arrangement of human affairs that encourages the performance of those practices indispensable to flourishing. Indeed, those practices arethose arrangements, and if virtues only exist in those practices, then they are always already social, comprising a “system,” to use McCloskey’s pejorative.
More to the point, if virtue is, as McCloskey maintains, “compatible with” capitalism, she’s implicitly conceding that capitalism as a system is not virtuous. The bourgeois who cuts wages and benefits, speeds up the pace of factory or office work, introduces technology that deskills or unemploys, or makes useless or tawdry products in an ecologically destructive way, may be a very nice person, good to spouse, children, neighbors, and pets. He or she may donate money to the poor, time to the local soup kitchen, or informed attention to the arts. But none of that changes anything about the injustice, waste, and fraud of the capitalist system.
Adam Stewart takes as gospel Eugene McCarraher’s amusingly written but silly review of my recent book, The Bourgeois Virtues. I have tried for a couple of months to get McCarraher to chat about his numerous sillinesses, and to fess up to a few, without success.
Dear Professor Mccarraher:
I wrote some time ago about your review of my book, extending a hand to you and inviting serious dialogue. Am I to take from your silence that you are uninterested, or did I merely fall into some In Box (Lord, do I know about that) from whose bourne no traveler returns?
Sincerely,
Deirdre McCloskey
PS: In case (as so often the case) the problem is the e-mailing itself, here’s what I said:
Dear Professor McCarraher:
I just read your amazing review of The Bourgeois Virtues with much admiration. An author certainly can’t complain about a hostile reviewer who engages.
Let me make a few points in response seriatim. Perhaps we can improve each other’s arguments, and stop the yelling.
Anti-capitalism being “the high orthodoxy of the West”: surely it is. Note the word “high.” You seem to weigh what you correctly describe as the “parade of twaddle” from the middle- to low-brow equally with the best that has been thought and written. I don’t suppose you would disagree that on the intellectual and artistic heights in sheer volume the attacks on capitalism outweigh the defenses since 1848? Perhaps we can work out some way of settling this factually, but the answer seems obvious. If you can show me otherwise I will be very interested to hear how, since Volume 4 depends on this alleged fact.
That your students value accounting more than poetry is not evidence on the heights. In fact, your opening sarcasm about “I hate the middle class” testifies to what most professors and poets feel.
I think we agree about the superficiality of Friedman, Florida, and the like. I am not disdainful of what I can learn from them, but I agree that they do not go deep, which is to say that they don’t ask why one would wish to have a flat earth or a creative class.
I’ve not received grants from the likes of Olin. Poor, poor Deirdre. I’m not popular with right wingers, as being unreliable and willing to talk to Marxists. A professorship anyway is enough of a grant, as I’m sure you’ll agree. But the source of funding does not make someone a servant of two masters. Your sneers at Novak need some rethinking. There’s nothing theologically absurd about a life in business as a spiritually relevant one. I know it’s fun to rant and sneer at, say, St. Thomas; but have you actually read and thought about his discussion of market work?
I’m sorry you found the book “awful” and “bloated” and so forth. It’s long because it needs to be, because the high orthodoxy demands a response. If one put together two books by your heroes would that constitute “bloating”? I’ve never grasped why an intellectual would complain about an argument because it is long and complex.
You have no conception of my other work, in rhetoric and in economic history, so I’d suggest that you either read it or lay off trying to refer to it as if you have. I learned that tip a long time ago from the late Cliff Geertz, who would say that one had to read into a writer before quoting her or using her. It’s a good test for scholarship, which you elsewhere accuse me of failing.
Polonius: well, sure. As Orwell said, roughly, the situation is so desperate that it is the duty of us all to state the obvious! But, really, is the offending statement (directed at economists who do not believe it) so silly in context? I think not.
There’s a crucial point here. You’ve not realized—or at any rate not acknowledged (perhaps the chapters on it were simply too many, and your eyes glazed over)—that the implied reader for the book is not only you on the left, as much as I love you all (just finished dear Eric Hobsbawm’s autobiography), but also (as I repeatedly say) my dear friends on the right, and in particular economists who think that Prudence Only rules. You’ve missed about half of the point of the book. More like two thirds. You are so intent on assaulting my case for capitalism that you miss my own assault on the prudence-only versions of it. I find this astonishing, and pretty good evidence, actually, that you didn’t read the book.
The invective of your writing suggests that you were so vexed by the book that you could not coolly consider it.
“Lack of style”: that’s a new one on me. And in a rambling, abusive piece like yours such charges do come across as self-refuting.
As to the luminaries on the back cover, did it ever occur to you that if such a range of folk found the book good (like the curate’s egg, in parts), it might be just that? I know you are sure of your position. What would shake it?
“Disdain for intellectuals” is not of course my game, or else I would not go to so much trouble to engage with them, would I? It’s unfair to tar me with that, one of numerous little unfairnesses of phrase that you indulge in, and I ask you now for an apology. Let’s test your intellectual and ethical seriousness, eh?
My disdain is for intellectuals who won’t learn anything about economics, yet disdain it. And I say repeatedly that I have similar disdain for intellectuals who won’t learn anything about theology, but disdain it. I was just last month at a strange gathering at the Salk Institute of scientific atheists. I was the only confessed Christian, I believe. What struck me is their self-confidence about things they knew little about.
What exactly is “unfortunate” about quoting Alasdair on the definition of virtue? So what if he remains hostile to capitalism?
“A fondness for charts”: ah, I detect a non-quantitative person in Our Reporter! There are, what, five of them? “Fondness”? You don’t know economics books, I gather!
Making merry of my title of distinguished professor, by the way, makes you look small. When an assistant professor has done a little more he’ll be in a better position to sneer at someone who has written many books. I remember that my early book reviews, before I had written any books myself, were fierce like yours.
You claim that I do not wish to systematize the virtues. This is a silly remark, since I spend vast swathes of the book doing just that. What do you make of my chart?—ah, I remember, you don’t do charts. I get the strong feeling that you are so outraged that anyone would undertake to defend capitalism as a ethical system that you lose your ability to read. You say I use “system” as a pejorative. I suppose this comes from a hasty reading of the section on Orwell and Austen? What I criticize are 3″x5″ card versions of ethical reflection, such as Kant and especially Bentham. You don’t get this, either.
You claim to know about the injustice, waste, and fraud of the capitalist system. But you have no reply—none—to the many arguments I make that the capitalist system is good for people, that is, for your and my poor ancestors and for us, materially and otherwise. You merely repeat the socialist line c. 1930, as iterated by Ruskin and Marx and Dorothy Day. “We’re aspiring to . . . a system that makes it easier to be good.” So am I, and my system has the merit that it actually, in practice, achieves such ends. Yours achieves, yes, the Gulag, the Great Leap Forward, show trials, dachas for party hacks, and poverty for the rest. Cuba, with Haiti, is the only part of the western hemisphere whose income per head has gone down since 1959, not sharply up. I don’t suppose you would argue that Cuba is an ethical success.
You really must have a look at Eric’s book, where he struggles to defend his lifelong communism. He admits (p. 150) that “the ‘really existing’ socialist economy [viz., East Germany], clearly inferior to the capitalist one [viz., West Germany], was not working at all.” He admits (p. 127) that: the “children of the October Revolution. . . have collapsed, . . . leaving behind a landscape of material and moral ruin. . . . [It} must now be obvious that failure was built into this enterprise from the start." His only defense is yours, that we should keep the idealism alive. That's wonderful for the intellectuals and party members who espouse it; but it doesn't do a thing for the working class. We capitalists have a plan---a plan that has actually worked---to make the working class rich and ethical.
I do not know what is question-begging (unless you are misusing the phrase in the usual way it is to mean "giving rise to questions") about claiming on the evidence that bourgeoisies are old. I didn't say "history" is about the bourgeoisie. On the contrary: it's mainly about stealing, from Cain to communism. "What economic system isn't regulated by law and ethics?" you ask indignantly. Well, let's see: how about that of Mao's China? Or Nero's Rome?
Your biggest and best point is that I am talking mainly about individual, not systemic, virtue. That's right, and a problem I try to face in volume 2. But you might have noted, if you did read those parts, that I said so in Volume 1. It's a reviewer's vice to use the author's own admission of fault against her without acknowledging that she thought it up first! Perhaps the passages didn't catch your glazed eyes:
p. 29: "If capitalism is to be blamed for systemic evils then it also is to be given credit for systemic goods, compared not with an imaginary ideal but with actually existing alternatives."
p. 32: "The claim on the left, in short, is that regardless of the individual capitalist's virtue or vice the system of capitalism leads to evil. The claim is mistaken."
and especially p. 248:
"Smith, Tocqueville, and Marx each had invisible-hand explanations of why good or bad in people can lead to bad or good in the system. But observe that they held on to their non-invisible-hand indignations, about mercantilists corrupting the British state or intendants over-centralizing pre-Revolutionary France or Mr. Moneybags engorging the national income.
"The dilemma is that private good is neither necessary nor sufficient for public good. The dilemma shows among the American Founding Fathers, as David Prindle among others has noted. John Adams doubted “whether there is public Virtue enough to support a Republic”; yet James Madison expected political competition, like economic competition, to make it “more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried.” Adams stands for a civic republicanism depending on individual virtue, Madison for a liberalism depending on constitutional structures. Either individual virtue is necessary for the polity to thrive, or else ingenious structures can offset the passions with the interests.
'Set aside for the present book, that is, the potentially paradoxical details of “social teleology.” I will return to it in Bourgeois Towns: How a Capitalist Ethic Grew in the Dutch and English Lands, 1600-1800 [now two books for the price of one] I hope. At least we can agree, following Aristotle, that person-by-person the whole set of pagan virtues is desirable for the telos of the person herself: ‘No one would call a man happy [makarion] who had no particle of courage, temperance, justice, or wisdom.’”
And in any case I give plenty of arguments and evidence that capitalism as a system works better than the available alternatives, systemically, arguments and evidence you reply to merely by saying they are scandalous—you don’t actually argue.
I’m going to pause here, at about the place in your charming rant where you write “Indeed, this definition obscures. . . .” and see what I get from you by way of reaction. If just more yelling, I guess we can agree to end our colloquy. But if you are willing to listen, I am, too, and perhaps we can learn something.
Sincerely,
Deirdre McCloskey
Hi Deidre – thanks for stopping by. You are certainly welcome to use my blog as a means of soliciting a response (my friend Halden has notified McCarraher by email, so I’d hope to see his comments here), but I personally would counsel leaving shorter responses on blog comments, in accordance with the nature of the genre. If you’re interested in posting a constructive response to the review, though, I would certainly be willing to host a guest post.
At any rate, I do admit that my little blurb was probably too critical of a book I haven’t read, and I apologize for lumping you in with a critique of neo-conservatism “sight unseen.” That said, if the shoe happens to fit, then I still think would have to wear it.
That critique is the grounds of my fundamental agreement with McCarraher’s position on Capitalism. Whether or not it fits your book or not, I’m not able to say. But insofar as he addresses the broader phenomena that I have experienced from other sources, I do indeed feel that his remarks are in line with the prophetic nature of the gospel. 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. If you are curious about this constructive side of his work, I would recommend the extended abstract for a forthcoming book, “The Enchantments of Mammon,” which you can find in the journal Modern Theology. I and several of my friends are champing at the bit waiting for this book to come out, and that is perhaps why I too readily posted a quote from a review of a book I haven’t read – I’m just really excited by whatever he writes.
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.
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. Aside from the fact that global capitalism simply displaces our need for an impoverished working class to the third world, it’s not because we have a better way of making more money that Christians have to critique capitalism. To paraphrase Daniel Bell, no matter how much potential the free market may have for making us “handsome, rich, and wise,” it is what it does to human relationships that makes it truly evil. The ethos of capitalism sees others as threats, as competitors for scarce resources. There is no way around it – the anthropological premise upon which capitalism is founded sees the humans in terms of individual, acquisitive consumers. 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. 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.
unreal!
Adam,
This is one of the most entertaining blog posts I have ever read.
Thank you!
Getting into email arguments seems to be his/her M.O.
http://deirdremccloskey.org/pubs/gender/bailey.php
[...] blog, there are a couple of interesting comments that have creeped up in the last few days: one by Deirdre McCloskey, in response to Eugene McCarraher’s review of her book, Adam’s own response, and the [...]
I wish I could take the credit for it Christian. Actually scratch that. I’m striving towards coherence. Thanks for digging up that email correspondence. I don’t understand why she would post something like that, when she knows that she her argument actually got destroyed in the interchange!
Ms. McCloskey, I am all for you getting your own voice out and McCarraher’s review may have been reminiscent of Eagleton’s scathing review of Dawkins; however, spamming blogs (http://www.adamsmithslostlegacy.com/2007/11/eugene-mccarrahers-polemic-against_28.html) is not the best way to make academic arguments. This reeks of arguing for public opinion rather than replying to McCarraher on the same level as he reviewed your book.
My blog somehow rendered itself unnavigable to Ms. McCloskey’s attempt to post a comment, so she sent the response to me by email. Here it is, with quotes from my comment in italics:
Dear Mr. McInturf:
I could 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.
here 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 fromt he evidence of the 20th century that you are left with gulags and extermination camps and a materially and spiritually impoverished proletariate.
Sincerely,
Deirdre McCloskey
My question for Ms. McCloskey is this: What does suffering have to do with your understanding of the Christian life? Is there anything worth suffering for, worth dying for? Cannot privation lead to spiritual growth? Does this bourgeois spirituality require self-negation and discipline?
Ms. McCloskey –
Thanks for stopping by to follow up.
As far as Augustine goes, he wasn’t a stoic, and he wasn’t a dogmatic world-denier (although he personally adopted an ascetic lifestyle as a means of penance for his prior abuse of the good things of this world by trying to derive satisfaction from them, and not from God through them). I don’t want to get into an Augustine debate on this strand (although that is always a terrifically fun thing to do in the right setting). The use to which McCarraher puts Augustine is not for a base argument against pleasure. It is specifically for his hamartiology, in which evil is not substantial, but rather a privation of the good. In his participation ontology, all things derive their being from participation in the being of God, and so, insofar as things are estranged from the ground of their being, they do not properly exist. These non-existing entities can only exist as poseurs, pretending to be the good things that really do exist. Often times they get away with it, since we have an innate desire for good, and as this goes unsatisfied apart from God, we settle for the imitation. McCarraher’s point in regards to commodity fetishism is that in the culture of late capitalism, we are witnessing just such a phenomena. Humans have an innate need for sacramental participation in mysterious realities outside of themselves. God’s design is for us to enjoy this through the communal participation in the mystical body of Christ through the Lord’s Supper. Commodity fetishism apes this in a pseudo-religious fashion, promising us a chance to be a part of some larger movement, some social scene or type of personality, by means of our purchases. I could cite endless examples, but since it should be blatantly obvious to any American, I will just mention the IPod, Starbucks, IKEA, Marlboro, and Nike. In all of these examples, we purchase not just a functional product, but also the person we wish we could be. If this is not troublesome or does not seem to be indicative of reality, well, I’m not sure what to say. And besides, the riches of this (specifically American) world are at any rate a pile of crap that only gets sold by the lies of marketing that convince us we need it. I personally am beyond just not being convinced I need the ilth of this world – I’m now convinced that this false sense of need is the main force distracting Americans from their true need, which is the redeemed mode of being in relationship with God and humanity that can only be found in the church.
So, you’re certainly correct in exposing me as no economist. I am a student of Theology and the Bible. This has nothing to do with whether or not I am accurate in my denunciation of cultural phenomena that are the products of the capitalistic ethos.
I am no advocate of Socialism, and though McCarraher has yet to publish any constructive account of his political views, I can infer that we part ways in this regard. However, we are both in agreement that to some extent in agreement with the Yoder/Hauerwas/Cavanaugh view of the church and not the nation-state as the sole political allegiance and identification for Christians. This means that I do not accept the constructive vision of communism or socialism. I am one of those who selectively appropriates marxism and critical theory for its negative effectiveness as a critique of capitalism, and am not ashamed to receive the Barthian “nein!” even if it comes from the mouth of a dog!
I agree with Gutierrez in understanding the Biblical witness as depicting poverty as a scandalous condition. This does not mean that the alleviation of poverty by selling our souls to mammon therefore acceptable. Capitalism tells us that everybody will become richer if everyone is more selfish. This may be the case. Yet the sort of people we become in the process also have an incredibly difficult time of meaning it when they say “Jesus is Lord.”
The third wold is not spiritually impoverished. If you wish to continue believing this, by all means do not visit a church in India, China, Romania, or Brazil.
Peace,
Adam
I second Christian’s question, specifically as to how Ms. McCloskey engages Johann-Baptist Metz’s critique of a bourgeois Christianity, who pretty much covers each question Christian is asking and is know for his political theology – could we so easily find a more relevant theologian? I suppose, but Metz is the first person to come to mind and seems relevant in his own way.
Dear Mr. Stewart:
I just came across your latest reply. I appreciate your willingness to engage (though I perceive that you still haven’t cracked my book: it’s cheap on amazon!)
I know you believe you have economics and capitalism pegged. But as Cromwell said to the Presbyterians, “Consider in the bowels of Christ that you may be mistaken.”
The most surprising of your replies is that you do not reckon that your confessed ignorance of economics has any relevance to the soundness of your opinions about capitalism. How would you feel if I offered opinions about theology, and said the same thing? I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.
I raise the point because it is the biggest obstacle to the church taking a fruitful attitude towards relieving world poverty. Instead of reading in economics enough to find out that some of the simpler solutions (e.g.massive government-to-government foreign aid) don’t work, church people feel comfortable with the conventional pieties. It is to substitute self-comfort for actual good to the poor. It reminds one of the medieval attitude that the main purpose of charity was not to actually relieve suffering (after all, that was the poor’s cross to bear) but to collect credit for oneself as a Charitable Person.
Regards,
Deirdre McCloskey
Wow, this was a bit of a surprise – I thought I had the default victory. I made the point that, although I am not trained in economics, that does not negate the possibility of my observations of the effects of capitalism on the mores of our society being true. Our question here is not whether capitalism succeeds in making people rich, but whether it makes them good. I gave an argument about why, at least in its contemporary North American Permutation, it is an enemy of Christian discipleship. I can’t see that you’ve addressed that argument in your latest comment.
I would agree with you that the welfare state is not the solution to human suffering. I’m more a fan of distributism types of arrangements, although the implementation thereof is a big question. For me, as with most things, I find my default answer to be: start doing it in the church, and it will commend itself abroad.
I’m not sure how you isolate the substitution of self-comfort for genuine good as a particularly medieval problem. That seems to be a fairly universal temptation.