BrinkLindsey.com – The Age of Abundance

A couple days ago in his “Best of the Web” column, James Taranto took a shot at Michael Bloomberg for bemoaning the nation’s distressing level of scientific illiteracy. The Bloomberg comment in question:

“It’s probably because of our bad educational system, but the percentage of people who believe in creationalism is really scary for a country that’s going to have to compete in a world where science and medicine require a better understanding.”

Taranto, who admits to not sharing the “creationalist” view himself, nonetheless lambasted Bloomberg’s remark as “appalling in its arrogance and ignorance. He suggests that anyone who believes in the biblical account of creation is unqualified to do medical research or any other kind of science. This is a complete non sequitur, and it is belied by” the stories this week about Isaac Newton’s apocalyptic crystal ball-gazing.

Now, since Bloomberg is toying with a presidential run, he may have been unwise to denigrate the beliefs of 42 – 60 percent of his fellow citizens. But he’s got a point. And the fact that Isaac Newton wasted a good chunk of his immense brainpower on trying to predict the end of the world doesn’t undermine that point one bit.

Newton’s fascination with biblical prophecy is well known; it’s in the news this week simply because some of his manuscripts revealing that fascination just went on exhibit in Jerusalem. By the way, Newton was equally obsessed with alchemy. If, perchance, distressing numbers of Americans still believed you could turn lead into gold with a philosopher’s stone, would Taranto think that was okay because Newton believed it, too?

Newton’s irrational side is simply evidence of the fact that, 300 years ago, the scientific worldview was still in the process of emerging from the primeval soup of supernaturalism and superstition.

I caught a glimpse of that transition years ago while visiting Florence. At the Museum of the History of Science there, Galileo’s middle finger is on display, encased in glass on a marble stand:

I’m a sucker for sacred relics, so I had already seen a whole bunch of saints’ bones on that trip. And then to see the father of modern science idolized in similar fashion — it struck me as such a fitting symbol of the new era’s dawn, when science and superstition were still thoroughly jumbled together.

Given that the scientific worldview had to emerge out of a pre-scientific intellectual milieu, it was inevitable that many of the greatest pioneers of the scientific approach would still have one foot firmly planted in the old realm of spirits and miracles. Copernicus, for example, was a monk; Kepler was an astrologer and mystic.

Today, however, the differentiation of the scientific worldview from traditional conceptions of the cosmos is considerably farther along. A 1998 survey of National Academy of Sciences members found extremely high levels of religious skepticism: only 7.0 percent believed in a personal God, and only 7.9 percent believed in immortality.

Bloomberg was right. The fact that creationism remains so widespread in our country is not a good thing. Yes, you can be a scientist while believing all kinds of weird things outside your field. But, practically speaking, it’s pretty much impossible to be a working biologist if you buy the Genesis story as fact. And given all the possibilities for revolutionary biological breakthroughs in the coming years, it’s a shame that our pool of potential biologists is smaller than it otherwise could have been.

The past is another country — a dirt-poor country, that is.

In my book, I tell the story of Jacob Riis, the Danish immigrant who eventually found his calling as the chronicler of the Lower East Side’s les misérables. His 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives, was a powerful prod to the social conscience when it was written; it is an equally powerful prod to the historical imagination today.

It is difficult for us to conceive how poor our country was just a century or so ago. Yet in the New York of Riis’s day, approximately 100,000 children lived on the streets, eking out survival by selling newspapers, blacking boots, begging, and stealing. “In warm weather a truck in the street, a convenient outhouse, or a dugout in a hay barge make good bunks,” Riis wrote. “Two were found making their nest once in the end of a big iron pipe up by the Harlem Bridge, and an old boiler at the end of the East River served as an elegant flat for another couple.”

Riis arrived in the U.S. in 1870.  After three years of odd jobs and a stint of begging, he finally found steady work as a police photographer for the New York Tribune.

How the Other Half Lives is illustrated with Riis’s photographs — including the one above, entitled “Children Sleeping on Mulberry Street.” Here’s another great shot — “Five Cents Lodging, Bayard Street”:

The great sociologist Max Weber took a famously dour view of both capitalism and the larger phenomenon of modernity that capitalism anchors.

Here is his celebrated evocation of the “iron cage” at the end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage….

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”

And here, his equally familiar proclamation of “disenchantment“:

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental, nor is it accidental that today only within the smallest and intimate circles, in personal human situations, in pianissimo, that something is pulsating that corresponds to the prophetic pneuma, which in former times swept through the great communities like a firebrand, welding them together.

These are profound critiques, and they have been echoed ever since by those unreconciled to capitalism and the mass affluence it eventually brings. For a recent example, see my review of Benjamin Barber’s latest book. Again and again, the same charges are leveled: the bourgeois life is a trap and a spiritual wasteland.

It’s ridiculous to try to answer Weber in a blog post. Here I just want to make one lighthearted point. No doubt Weber would have found much to disapprove of in contemporary America, but at least one thing is for sure: this is no dreary, technocratic dystopia. The arid, suffocating world of relentless, dehumanizing rationalization that Weber warned of has not come to pass. Not only in our personal lives, but in our public lives as well, magic and flights of fancy abound. We call this enchanted public realm pop culture.

In Lead Us Into Tempation, the marvelous James Twitchell made this point with specific regard to the phantasmagoria of modern marketing (pp. 67-68):

While we may have lost the superhuman beings and regions of classical and Christian mythologies, we have not lost our desire to link with this parallel world. It is, after all, a source of abiding comfort to think we are not alone. Just on the far side of the margin are others who care about us…. What characterizes commercial culture is that this parallel world, our utopian otherland, has been populated by new and beneficent spirits, spirits magically residing not in nature, holy books, magical signs, or chants but in objects as mundane as automobile tires, rolled-up tobacco leaves, meat patties, green beans, and sugar water. The Man with a Thousand Faces simply has a few more, and he spends most of his time inside containers on shelves down at the A&P.

More on this in the next post.

Today is May Day, the old high holy day of socialism.  A fine occasion, then, to recall Karl Marx’s prophecy of the transition from the “realm of necessity” to the “realm of freedom” — in other words, from the Age of Scarcity to the Age of Abundance.

Here, as far as I know, is Marx’s only use of these wonderful expressions (from Capital, vol. III):

 In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.

Pretty dense stuff — what is Marx driving at? First, that freedom consists of freedom from blind (i.e., not under conscious human control) forces, including not only nature but the unplanned workings of the market economy.  And second, that the achievement of such freedom (through communism) will liberate us to realize our full potential as human beings (”that development of human energy which is an end in itself”) by liberating us from the organized division of labor (”The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite”).

Friedrich Engels conflated these two steps in this somewhat snappier formulation (from Anti-Dühring):

Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then for the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature because he has now become master of his own social organisation. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history — only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.

Marx and Engels were right that expanded control over natural forces would someday lead to a much fuller development of human capacities than had ever before been possible.  They were tragically wrong, however, to think that this expanded control would take the form of centralized, socialized control of the division of labor. The realm of freedom would be achieved through markets, not five-year plans. 

Further, although capitalist wealth creation has led to the shortening of the workday (and the working life as well, through education on the front end and retirement on the back end), it didn’t turn out that people would choose to fulfill only their basic needs through the organized division of labor. Today most of our working day is devoted to enabling the purchase of all manner of luxuries that aid in the quest for self-realization.  And for increasing numbers of us, the workday itself is a vital, central part of that quest.

Liberation from natural forces through technology? Absolutely! Liberation from the market? To some extent, yes, but mostly liberation through the market.

That’s the story I seek to tell in The Age of Abundance. And that’s why I titled the first chapter of the book “The Realm of Freedom.”