Marilynne Robinson - The Death of Adam - Essays on Modern Thought

Acton worked free of what might seem to be the commonsense connection between the tendency of a theology to encourage persecution and the actual numbers of the victims of its agents and enthusiasts. Historically speaking, this is a nonsensical way to proceed. I suspect it has its origins not in comparative religion — if either Acton or Bainton were competent to make meaningful comparisons, they were not inclined to make them — but in those new German historical methods that were so influential at the time. Max Weber, perhaps the most effectively dismissive of all the writers on Calvinism, was another exponent of these new methods. His The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism associated Calvinism with a joyless, ascetic acquisitiveness, which, so long as it had a basis in theology, reflected anxiety about one’s salvation, and, when it lost its religious rationale, outlived it joylessly, making of modern life an iron cage, an insupportable tedium. Weber allows that there has been capitalism since Babylon. In his view Calvinists did not invent it, but they accelerated its development. They created its modern spirit with their asceticism, their anxiety for worldly proof of divine favor, their adaptation of Luther’s concept of vocation to create a powerful work ethic. (Curiously, Weber ranks beside these influences certain advances in methods of bookkeeping.) His proof of a special relationship between Calvinists and capitalism was that in Germany, at the time he wrote, Calvinists were more prosperous than Lutherans and Catholics, and were overrepresented in the universities and the professions. A yet more brilliant sociologist might have found other possible explanations for these facts.

By comparison with Lutherans, Calvinists lack gemütlichkeit — they are not good fellows. Weber says you can see this in their faces. This is the new historical method. This is how spirit becomes a term suitable for use in economic analysis. I suppose I am unfair in saying that for Weber a prejudice is a proof. He offers none of the usual criticisms of capitalism in itself — that it is exploitive, that it is crisis prone, that it creates extremes of wealth and poverty. His criticism is that, in its “modern” form, those who prosper from it do not enjoy their prosperity. He knows and says that Calvin did not encourage the accumulation of wealth, and that he insisted the “church” — in this sense, the elect — do not prosper in this world. He does what Acton does. They both argue that a social group defined by them as the people who adhere to or have been acculturated by a particular theology, are, with generalizable and world-historical consistency, peculiarly inclined to behave in ways precisely contrary to the teaching of that theology — tolerantly, in Acton’s case (though he would never acknowledge that, in practical terms, a relative disinclination to persecute does equal tolerance), and, in Weber’s case, acquisitively and in the manner of those attempting to achieve salvation by works — the very thing Calvin strove most ardently to discourage. For Acton, the supposed spirit of the theology makes the actual conduct of Calvinists in the world of no account. For Weber, the supposed spirit in which they act in the world makes the theology of no account. Surely it is fair to wonder if any of this amounts to more than personal animus — which was the preferred historical method of much of the Western world at the beginning of this bitter century.

I know Weber’s book has been long and widely thought to merit respect. Try as I may, I can find no grounds for this view of it. (He, like Acton, is said to have been spectacularly learned. He wrote analyses of the ethics and social forms of Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and ancient Judaism. But then, if he used the gemütlichkeit method, he may have found this fairly light work.) In fairness to Weber, he considered his conclusions in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to be merely tentative, likely to be superseded when “comparative racial neurology and psychology shall have progressed beyond their present and in many ways very promising beginnings.”

In these essays I consider questions that influence, or are influenced by, the way we think about the past, and therefore the present and the future. Cynicism has its proof texts. An important historical “proof” very current among us now is that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence unconscious of the irony of the existence of slavery in his land of equality. The most ordinary curiosity would be a sufficient antidote to the error of imagining that Jefferson was such a knave or fool as this notion implies. Jefferson attacked slavery as a terrible crime in the first draft of the Declaration, in which he said of the English king:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.

The passage was edited out before the document was approved, and published by Jefferson in his autobiography, with the remark that its excision was owed to the pusillanimity of the Congress, who feared offending friends in England. If those interested in Jefferson’s thought were interested enough to look at what he wrote, they would find the powerful attack on slavery in his Notes on Virginia, and more elsewhere to the same effect. Granting the difficulties of the question, it is surely useful to bear in mind that Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, did explicitly assert the “sacred rights of life and liberty” of the enslaved people, as an aspect of their human nature. Now he and his period are undergoing aggressive reinterpretation on the grounds that they lacked just this insight, to the disparagement of ideals we once found moving and useful. All this occurs on the strength of seemingly universal ignorance of important and accessible fact, an ignorance which blossoms as quasi-scholarship and seeds the wind. How are we to read someone capable of such gross blindness and hypocrisy as Jefferson must have been? With hostility or condescension, or not at all. More precisely, still not reading him, we will now regard him with ill-informed condescension rather than with our traditional ill-informed respect. This change is already palpable and full of consequence. An honorable ideal sounds to us now like patent self-deceit, like the language of complacent oppression.

Surely it is fair to ask what benefit justifies the polemical use of defective information. For it is characteristic of the long campaign of dysphemism otherwise known as the public discussion of American history that its tone is one of a moral superiority to its subject so very marked as to make ridiculous any other view of a matter than the one that is most effectively dismissive — Thoreau’s mother laundered his shirts. A complex view of history must necessarily reincorporate in it lovely and creditable things, simply because the record attests to them, as well as to venality and hypocrisy and vulgarity. It is clearly true that the reflex of disparagement is no more compatible with rigorous inquiry than the impulse to glorify. And it is simply priggish to treat ambiguity as a synonym for corruption.

Once, and for millennia, people painted human figures on their jars, carved them into their city gates, made pillars and pilasters of them, wove them into tapestries, painted domed heavens full of them, made paintings of them bent over books or dreaming at windows or taking their ease on the banks of rivers. Human figures decorated lamp stands and soup tureens and the spines of books. Now they seem never to be used decoratively, as things pleasing in themselves. Advertising uses them to part us from our money, implying that we should compare ourselves and our lot to the supposedly acquirable condition of well-being these insinuating images represent to us. They are vendors or cadgers who, in their subtler way, only want to get a foot in the door. We defend ourselves from the appeal they have for us, just as, if they were flesh, we would resist, or take offense at, their earnest gaze and their firm handshake.