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Economic Absorption of the Sacred

Economic Absorption of the Sacred

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:36 pm by Peter Leithart

Economic Absorption of the Sacred 2017-09-06T23:36:42+06:00 Peter Leithart

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In a chapter of Robert Wuthnow’s Rethinking Materialism: Perspectives on the Spiritual Dimension of Economic Behavior , Emory’s John Boli explores the “economic absorption of the sacred.” For Boli, the sacred is not some distinct realm of culture but rather the “deep structure” of culture, “comprising the fundamental ontological, epistemological, and procedural assumptions that ground social behavior.”

His argument is that “the sacred order which structures individual action in American, Western, and, increasingly, world culture is primarily ‘represented’ in the economic realm.”

Three misconceptions make it difficult for us to grasp the real nature of “materialism” in the modern world. First, we fail to recognize that there is a moral/sacred order operative in the economic realm, a moral/sacred order that is difficult to align with traditional religious and moral orders. Second, our materialism is not materialist; it is “a way of constructing and expressing meaning symbolically.” We mioss the “spirituality of economic behavior” that is not reducible to simple acquisition and consumption and ostentatious display. Finally, we don’t recognize that “the monetarization of social life is not essentially an economic process.” We attach monetary values to objects because of a larger “institutionalized quest for rationality, which requires a standard metric comparable across all social settings.” This in turn leads to a mistake about the nature of capitalism, which we see as a “system of production and exchange” rather than “a model of value creation through the rationalization of activity by rational actors.”

Boli professes himself anguished over materialism, but believes that we cannot really deal with it until we recognize the depth of the issue: “we are dealing with a highly institutionalized economic religion that must be confronted on its own terms.” Confronting this religion is all the more difficult because many of the values of this religion are “truly sacred to us.” Can we desacralize the economic without “destroying the foundations for the ‘good society’ we perpetual millenarians carry around in our heads.”

How did we get to this? Boli says that the source for materialism is “the emergence of autonomous economic morality.” Once agriculture and then manufacturing were conceived as autonomous arenas of human action – autonomous, that is, from the religious demands of medieval Christendom – it became possible to formulate the justification and standard of economic life in terms of “instrumental rationality.” Whatever contributed to improvement of “wealth and efficiency was economically “good.”

Following Durkheim, he identifies the sacred with the social. The “fundamental social units, processes, and purposes” that ground the West are liable to sacralization. We know them well, Boli claims: “The individual, the state, the national polity, the ethnic group – these are some of the basic units, highly reified as the building blocks of social organization. Technical rationalization, monetarization, formal organization, voluntaristic association, reflexive social monitoring, revolution – these are the self-evident mechanisms for treating human problems. Progress, equality, justice, self-actualization, liberation – these are some of the institutionalized processes that are to be realized in the Western project.” To be sure, we argue over what these mean and how they are to be put into effect, but “they constitute the platform upon which the Western edifice is built.”

Durkheimian sacralization can be applied to these processes and values fairly mechanically, and Boli thinks it works. Individuals are sacred, as are states. Boli, though, thinks that the reality is more dynamic, dialectical, and interesting. Following Ellul, he argues that “the forces of desacralization are themselves sacralized in and through the desacralization process. By disenchanting the world, desacralizing forces acquire the spiritual aura stripped away from the formerly sacred; they are themselves constructed as loci of ultimate power, danger, truth.” Medieval sacred order, the natural and spiritual worlds of Christendom, were overthrown by rationalization, capitalism, differentiation, technique. But each of these processes is then sacralized – sort of like Girard’s scapegoat, who is hated and cast out only to be elevated to godhead.

Because the economic realm is “the sector par excellence of universal rationalization,” and also “a sector of highly elaborated indivudalism,” it partakes of the sacredness of sacred descralizing forces.

Boli recognizes that the situation is complicated because sacredness has been sought and found in all sorts of other arenas of modern life – “science, technology, medicine, politics, sex, sports, music, religion.” Sociologists find priesthoods aplenty, icons and fetishized sacraments, holy places in the mall and the arena. Is this coherent? Boli says it is: “sacralization goes on in each differentiated sector, with each sector oriented to different aspects of the sacred order.” The sacred order of each sector may be incompatible with the sacred order of the other sectors. Each sector has its own priesthoods, not necessarily recognized by the priests of the other cults.

In what ways does the economy manifest traits of the sacred? Drawing on Parsons, Douglas and others, Boli suggests that the economy is seen as “the source of both great power and great danger.” The economy is a “manic-depressive neurotic,” brimming with energy one moment and slumping into passivity the next. It is “a changeling,” with divine attributes – “mysterious, unknowable, intransigent, despite the best managerial efforts of the associated clergy.” Like the sacred, the economic realm attracts and repels; it is a thing of beauty, it is horribly ugly and clumsy. The economy is “a primary source of good and evil.” The economy produces “‘goods’ that have ‘value,’ and the expansion of the sum total of that value is perhaps the ultimate purpose of the political system” (as Obama is finding!).

Sacred zones are surrounded by rituals. What are the rituals of modern economic life? First, he notes Douglas’s claim that money works only “if the public has faith in it,” or, more precisely, in the institutions that support the money and stand behind it. Passing money from hand to hand is a “ritual affirmation of our faith in those elements of the sacred order . . . that give money its value.” Advertising is another ritual: It “draws upon such sacred elements as self-actualization, autonomous identity formation, and individual rationality to forget links between the consumer and the values embodied in goods.”

How about symbols? In contrast to Durkheim’s clan totems, we in differentiated modern society have diverse totems: “Economic actors and commodities have unique totems: the consumer’s checkbook and credit card, the product’s br

and name and trademark.” Comprehensive economic symbols are abstract, measures such as the GNP, unemployment, national income. Boli concludes that the sacralization of the economic is achieved less by the sacralization of the whole than by sacralization of its parts. He argues that only a single symbol is big enough to represent the economy as a whole: the name “capitalism.”

The upshot of this analysis is that “we now guide our lives primarily in terms of economic religiosity,” conforming ourselves to the sacred order that is at the center of economic activity. Materialism is, he argues, an economic religion.

He cites Douglas and Isherwood’s claim that “goods constitute a system which established the meaning of the self, social position,m trustworthiness, or future intentions,” and adds “for the most part, we do not consume the goods we buy. We display them, flaunt them, hoard them; we incorporate them into the self, liberate ourselves with their aid, use them to confirm our understanding of reality, build our personal relationships around them.” Our “consumption” of games, personal enhancement, adventure, film – this is not materialism, but “the use of material and non-material objects and processes to generate and maintain meaning, order, and purpose.”

What does this do to human experience? Contrary to Marx and Simmel, it does not make “our behavior . . . more impersonal, more instrumental, more manipulative, more acquisitive.” Purchasing clothing is not instrumental rationality at work; rather, it is about presenting and re-presenting the self, including a collective self: “my clothing makes symbolic statements about my family, my ethnic group, my profession, my employer, and so on.” Coupons save money, but they also “strengthen the coupon user’s self-image as an economically rational actor.”

Moralizing about materialism won’t have much effect, Boli thinks. Economic activity is not amoral, but following the guidance of a sacred order. Its morality clashes with traditional Christian morality in some ways, but not in other ways. Moral critiques also fall on deaf ears because of the very differentiation that has given the economic realm a sacredness it lacked before. Religion is an island, not a continent, and the notion that religion saves our souls but leaves us to “obtain the vast array of goodnesses, meanings, and purposes” in the economic realm. Further, religious critiques of materialism often draw on some of the same sacred material that makes up the economic realm: “individual responsibility, the search for authenticity, self-actualization.”

A more plausible response is to attempt to break the links between economic and sacred order: “this means diminishing the reality of the economy, recasting it as being only what the economists have always mistakenly claimed it to be: structures for the allocation of scarce resources to meet the needs of a population.” Take away the symbols – the advertising, the trademarks, the logos, credit cards, and the “sacred tends to wilt.” Boli here suggests “severe restrictions on the inequality of income and wealth,” which of course is only possible by bolstering another potently sacred realm, the state. Besides, this would deal mainly with effects, not with the sacred economic realm itself.

The more perilous but fundamental response would be to desacralize the sacred order. But this is far more earth-shaking that we often think: “we deceive ourselves if we believe we can desacralize the economic order alone. At stake is the desacralization of the individual, the disenchantment of rationality, the questioning of the primacy and value of the nation, the rejection of self-development as an inevitable desiratum, and so on . . . . The sacred order has to be taken on in toto.”

Won’t this desacralization undermine the value of individual persons, destroy the real value of reasoned argument in solving disputes. Boly doesn’t think so. Rather, ” Only by desacralizing can we in fact value people concretely, put genuine reason to work, and make democracy meaningful.” Because the sacred is abstract, ideal, it “makes it possible to sacrifice millions of individuals for the sake of individualism.” Ideals can only be realized, he thinks, if they are not sacred.

In the end, Boli endorses a localized form of “socialism.” He rejects state socialism, arguing that it would leave materialism and its sacred order untouched, perhaps even further entrench it. But “a socialism that also rejects the state by operating at the local level and explicitly rejecting the notion of a master project for sweeping social change has some prospects of fundamentally reorienting contemporary culture.”

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