Love Is Stronger than Debt
Eugene McCarraher
http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2013/mayjune/love-stronger-than-debt.html?paging=off
If the last five years of American politics have demonstrated anything,
it's that Marx's dictum about the modern state couldn't be more
indisputable: our government is the executive committee for the common
affairs of the bourgeoisie. Now more than ever, our liberal democracy is
a corporate franchise, and the stockholders are demanding an
ever-higher return on their investment in America, Inc. Over the last
four decades, the Plutocracy has decided to repeal the 20th century, to
cancel the gains and protections won by workers, the poor, and others
outside the imperial aristocracy of capital. Enough of this coddling of
those Ayn Rand vilified as "moochers" and "looters." Return the country
to its rightful owners: the "Job Creators," the Almighty Entrepreneurs,
those anointed by Heaven to control the property interests of the
American Empire. Endowed with the Divine Right of Capital, they deserve
our thanksgiving and reverence, for without them we would not deserve to
live, such common clay are we.
Lest anyone think that the re-election of President Barack Obama
invalidates this judgment, think again. Mitt Romney may have been a more
egregious and openly disdainful lord of the manor, but Obama has
compiled an impeccable record of imperial corporate stewardship. Despite
all the hype about a rising progressive coalition of non-whites and
young people, there is no reason to believe that Obama's second term of
office will be any less a model of deference.
The Plutocracy's beatific vision for the mass of Americans is wage
servitude: a fearful, ever-busy, and cheerfully abject pool of human
resources. Rendered lazy and recalcitrant by a half-century of mooching,
American workers must be forced to be free: crush labor unions, keep
remuneration low, cut benefits and lengthen working hours, close or
narrow every avenue of escape or repose from accumulation. If they
insist on living like something more than the whining, expendable
widgets they are, reduce them to a state of debt peonage with an
ensemble of financial shackles: mortgages, credit cards, and student
loans, all designed to ensure that the wage slaves utter two words
siren-sweet to business: "Yes, boss." It's the latest chapter in the
depressing story that David Graeber relates in Debt:
debt as an especially insidious weapon in the arsenal of social
control. "There's no better way to justify relations founded on violence
… than by reframing them in the language of debt," he writes, "because
it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something
wrong."
Alas, we're living in the early, bewildering days of the demise of the
American Empire, the beginning of the end of that obsession-compulsion
known as the Amerian Dream. The reasons are clear, if often angrily
denied: military hubris and over-extension; a stagnant monopoly
capitalism with a bloated financial sector; a population on whom it's
dawning that low-wage labor is their inexorable fate; ecological
wreckage that can only be limited or repaired by cessation of growth.
The patricians' task will be threefold: finessing the increasingly
obvious fact of irreversible imperial decline; convincingly performing
the charade of democracy in the face of popular vassalage; and
distracting or repressing the roiling rage and tumult among the plebs.
How will the elites maintain and festoon their ever-more untenable
hegemony?
Empires have always evaded but eventually accepted their impending
senescence: first, willful, vehement denial, and redoubled, often
violent devotion to the imperial customs and divinities; then the slow,
entropic apocalypse of demoralization and retrenchment. As imperial
twilight descends, a brisk if melancholy market of fashions in
acquiescence will undoubtedly arise. Reconciled to the dystopian
prospect of a world engulfed in war and famine, the affluent will sport a
variety of brands of what Simon Critchley dubs "passive nihilism," a
withdrawal from politics into tasteful, well-guarded enclaves of
resignation. Radical visions may revive as well, but right now they're
dispiritingly feckless. Looking at first like a pentecost of utopia, the
"Occupy" movement has dismally failed to gain any popular traction, in
part because of the utter mediocrity and incoherence of its demands.
"Fairness" is populist pabulum; "we are the 99%" is a slogan, not
serious political analysis. The injustice and indignity of capitalism
have seldom been so openly wretched, but as Graeber ruefully observes,
just when we need "to start thinking on a breadth and with a grandeur
appropriate to the times," we seem to have "hit the wall in terms of our
collective imagination."
Don't expect any breadth or grandeur from the Empire's Christian
divines. Across the board, the imperial chaplains exhibit the most
obsequious deference to the Plutocracy, providing imprimaturs and
singing hallelujahs for the civil religion of Chrapitalism: the
lucrative merger of Christianity and capitalism, America's most enduring
covenant theology. It's the core of "American exceptionalism," the
sanctimonious and blood-spattered myth of providential anointment for
global dominion. In the Chrapitalist gospel, the rich young man goes
away richer, for God and Mammon have pooled their capital, formed a
bi-theistic investment group, and laundered the money in baptismal fonts
before parking it in offshore accounts. Chrapitalism has been America's
distinctive and gilded contribution to religion and theology, a
delusion that beloved community can be built on the foundations of
capitalist property. As the American Empire wanes, so will its
established religion; the erosion of Chrapitalism will generate a moral
and spiritual maelstrom.
What will American Christians do as their fraudulent Mandate from
Heaven expires? They might break with the imperial cult so completely
that it would feel like atheism and treason. With a little help from
anarchists, they might be monotheists, even Christians again. Who better
to instruct them in blasphemy than sworn enemies of both God and the
state? Christians might discover that unbelievers can be the most
incisive and demanding theologians. As Critchley asserts, " 'God' is the
first anarchist, calling us into struggle with the mythic violence of
law, the state, and politics by allowing us to glimpse the possibility
of something that stands apart." By inciting us to curse and renounce
the homespun idolatry of Chrapitalism, Critchley and Graeber can point
Christians back to a terrible but glorious moment in their history: when
the avant-garde of the eschaton were maligned as godless traitors. We'll need that dangerous memory in our frightful if doubtless very different time.
An anti-globalist firebrand and renowned anthropologist at Goldsmiths,
University of London, Graeber has been touted as a guru for Occupy,
writing portentously in the Guardian that it represents "the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire." Debt
should be read as a scholarly barrage in that colloquy on imperial
decay. Indeed, Graeber himself tells us that his is an Important Book.
"For a very long time, the intellectual consensus has been that we can
no longer ask Great Questions." Graeber's Great Answer is a tour de
force of interdisciplinary erudition, a sprawling, disheveled, and
fascinating mess of a book. After 200 pages of anthropology, economics,
sociology, and philosophy—even a bit of religion and theology—the
history of debt unfolds as a magpie collection of anecdotes: stories
from around the globe about coinage, slavery, markets, trade, and law.
The last two centuries get jammed into the last 40 pages; the last 40
years into the final thirty. It's a rambling, ill-focused account, and
it's not at all clear by the end of the volume exactly what the Great
Answer is.
Graeber's history is less engrossing than his vigorous diatribe against
the sado-science of economics—the ethical nexus of Chrapitalism—and his
sustained assault on this phony discipline will endure in the annals of
schadenfreude. There's been a Himalayan rise in the inflation
rate of arrogance among economists since the 1970s, and having failed to
see the current turmoil coming, practitioners of the dismal science
should be required to eat a daily helping of humble pie. Their account
of history (where they pretend to know any) has been discredited for
over a century; drawing on an ample anthropological and historical
literature, Graeber shows that money and markets emerged, not from Adam
Smith's "natural liberty," but from the need of ancient states to
provision their expanding temple-military complexes. From its "myth of
barter" to its truncated, utility-maximizing humanism, economics,
Graeber contends, has "little to do with anything we observe when we
examine how economic life is actually conducted." Historically
illiterate and morally cretinous, economics—not theology—is the most
successful confidence game in the history of intellectual life, a
testament to the power of avarice to induce and embellish human
credulity.
In Graeber's view, economics' most nefarious impact on morality is its
perverse account of social relations, especially those revolving around
obligation and interdependence. Graeber distinguishes between
obligations—the incalculable owing of favors, as when you give me
something, and I owe you something back—and debt as a
precisely enumerable obligation, and therefore calculable in terms of
equivalence and money. Conceivable only when people are treated not as
human beings but as abstractions, equivalence is the categorical
imperative of pecuniary reason, and it sanctifies the self-righteous,
skinflint buncombe that parades as an ethic of "character." Isn't paying
one's debts the basis of morality and dependable personal character?
Especially when translated into money, the quantification of debt can
justify a lot of indecent, horrific conduct. Can't pay me back? I'll
take your daughter, or foreclose on your home, or demand austerity
measures that result in famine, disease, or destitution.
Graeber's alternative to debt and its moral atrocities is communism:
"from each according to their ability, to each according to their
needs." (Not, note well, according to their "deserts.") Knowing that
he'll face a fusillade of umbrage about "totalitarianism," Graeber
insists that communism "exists right now" and lies at "the foundation of
all human sociability." Our lives abound with moments of everyday
communism: we don't charge people who ask us for directions, and if we
do, we're rightly considered jerks. Communism is not
"egalitarianism"—which, as even Marx observed, partakes of the boring,
inhuman logic of equivalence—and in Graeber's view, it doesn't entail
any specific form of property. (An unromantic admirer of peasant
societies and their moral economy of "the commons," Graeber appears to
endorse what anthropologists sometimes call "usufruct," in which
property becomes a kind of trusteeship dependent on the performance of a
function.) A communist relationship—between spouses, lovers, friends—is
not only one in which accounts are not kept, but one in which it would
be considered "offensive, or simply bizarre" to even think of doing so.
Love keeps no record of wrongs—or rights.
Thus communism restricts or negates a "freedom" conceived solely as
lack of restraint. As Graeber explains, "freedom" has meant several
things: release from debts, as in the biblical notion of "redemption";
friendship, as derived from the German freund, connoting amicable solidarity; and unfettered power, or libertas,
enshrined in Roman jurisprudence, the right of a patriarch to do
anything with his possessions. And as Graeber reminds us, those
possessions included his family: famulus meant slave, while dominus, or master, derived from domus,
or household. (Remember that next time you're tempted to swoon to
claptrap about "family values.") The notion of absolute ownership of things originated in the absolute ownership of people. Roman libertas
leavens the mean-spirited ideal of "freedom" in liberal capitalist
democracies. As "self-ownership," freedom both makes property a right
rather than a function and turns a right into a kind of alienable
property. Of course, capitalists have every interest in getting us to
see "freedom" this way, since "self-ownership" entails the notion that
we can give away, sell, or rent out our freedom. As 19th-century
craftsmen and workers understood better than we do today, wage labor is
the slavery of capitalism: if you don't own the means of production, you
work for those who do—unlike chattel, you enjoy the dubiously ennobling
privilege of choosing your master.
Graeber affirms redemption and friendship against the command economy of libertas.
Friends and lovers don't treat each other as servants or vendable
objects, so freedom should be "the ability to make friends," the
capacity to enter into human relations that are uncoerced and
incalculable. And since friends are naturally communists, they'll live
without thinking of their relations in a way that leads to double-entry
bookkeeping; they'll live in the light of "redemption," which isn't
about "buying something back" but rather about "destroying the entire
system of accounting." To create a more humane and generous world, we
must unlearn our moral arithmetic and throw the ledgers into the
bonfire. A communist society of friends requires the abolition of
capitalism.
Hence the expectation, after 500 pages, of a Great Answer with "breadth
and grandeur"—but Graeber fails to deliver anything more than
exhortation and tepid reformism. "History is not over … surprising new
ideas will certainly emerge," he assures us; popular movements are
having "all sorts of interesting conversations." Yet Graeber's own call
for "a Biblical-style Jubilee" is magnanimous but disappointingly banal.
A wholesale cancellation of consumer and international debt seems bold,
but it's fundamentally conservative: it would liberate debtors while
maintaining the existing arrangement and logic of capitalism. Property
forms do matter; we can't treat them with the cavalier
indifference that Graeber exhibits. To end the tyranny of debt, we would
have to cultivate a political imagination that sees well beyond a
jubilee.
While Graeber asserts that some great conceptual breakthrough could
arise "from some as yet completely unexpected quarter," he pretty much
dismisses religion as a source of moral and political innovation.
Religion parrots the language of money and debt: "forgive us our debts,
as we forgive our debtors" as the Lord's Prayer pleads, and religions
often speak of the debt we owe to God or some other cosmic force.
"Redemption" meant buying back, and the Atonement is often conceived as
Christ's paying a debt we sinners owe to God. And besides, as Graeber
observes, Christians don't take their own Savior at his word. Christian
bankers and creditors don't forgive their debtors; why should God
forgive them their sins? Yet Graeber concedes that Christianity harbors
traces of a moral and ontological revolution against the regime of debt.
"Redemption" could point to the destruction and transcendence of
equivalence; as Thomas Aquinas and other medieval theologians explained,
"our relation with the cosmos is ultimately nothing like a commercial
transaction, nor could it be." You can pay off the bank or the
bartender; how do you square a "debt " to God?
Graeber drops the point and moves on; Critchley makes "our relations
with the cosmos" the central concern of his incisive volume. A
philosopher at the New School for Social Research, Critchley has written
often and profoundly on ethics in the wake of God's apparent death,
especially in Infinitely Demanding (2007),
where he sought to explain and overcome the demoralization he sees in
liberal societies. Tracing what he calls their "motivational deficit" to
the "felt inadequacy of secular conceptions of morality," Critchley
proposed an account of moral and political agency in terms of
"dividualism," where the self is incessantly called and divided by
"fidelity to an unfulfillable demand." We can and should never be "at
one" with ourselves; we can and never should be "authentic." The energy
for political transformation resides in our "endless inauthenticity,
failure, and lack of self-mastery."
With his new book, Critchley joins other left radicals—Slavoj Zizek,
Alain Badiou, and Terry Eagleton—who seek in theology not some balm for
disappointment, but a tonic to sharpen the mind and revive the spirit of
anti-capitalist struggle. Presented as a modest portfolio of
"experiments in political theology," Critchley's volume is a rich,
audacious attempt to plumb the meaning of faith, the most sustained
left-atheist engagement with Christian theology since the work of Ernst
Bloch. Struck by Oscar Wilde's bracing assertion in De Profundis—"everything
to be true must become a religion"—Critchley provides an exacting and
indispensable reflection on the nature of political commitment.
From Hobbes and Locke to Rousseau and Marx to Rawls, Nozick, and
Foucault, the modernity of modern politics has been thought to reside in
the rejection of any conception of political order rooted in nature or
divinity. But by grounding the political completely and unreservedly in
the human, this apparently "secular" mode of politics requires that the
human be "unchallengeable"—in other words, sacred. All
political order depends, Critchley maintains, on allegiance to a
"supreme fiction" whereby a people becomes a people—an "original
covenant," as he puts it. Whether it's fascism, communism, or liberal
democracy, modern political forms, Critchley contends, comprise "a
series of metamorphoses of sacralization." In this view, the American
civil religion is an especially brazen displacement and renaming of
sacral devotion.
This is a provocative and unsettling claim, for it counters the tale of
modernity narrated as "secularization" or "disenchantment." First told
by Marx and Max Weber, it's been given a Christian re-statement most
recently by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age
(2009). I've long thought that religious intellectuals give too much
credence to the "disenchantment of the world," and that they need, not
to call for some reactive "re-enchantment," but to tell a new story
about modernity. (As readers may know, I'm finishing a book that makes a
Critchleyan claim about the history of capitalism.) For those who want
to challenge the very narrative of "secularization," Critchley will be an invaluable interlocutor, if not quite a kindred spirit.
Still, Critchley's account of "the sacred" remains utterly human and
terrestrial—it echoes a lineage that extends from Ludwig Feuerbach to
Norman O. Brown—and it underlies the promise and failure of his attempt
at a political theology without God. Honoring its "infinite demand," the
dividualist self commits to a truth that is fundamentally religious—a "troth,
the experience of fidelity where one is affianced and then betrothed."
This is a powerful and persuasive phenomenology of faith as unswerving
devotion. But from whom or what does this infinite demand to which we
betrothe ourselves originate? Critchley summarily rules out any origin
"external to the self … any external, divine command, any transcendent
reality." It seems that in Critchley's telling, we marry ourselves.
Polonius is right: to thine own self be true.
This religious fidelity to ourselves behooves both love and communism.
In two chapters on Pauline theology and the late-medieval movement of
the Free Spirit, Critchley hints at a radical politics sustained by
faith and suffused by love. Perusing the writings of Marguerite Porete—a
learned, lyrical Beguine mendicant who died at the stake in
1310—Critchley affirms her belief that sin could be overcome in this
life through a mystical, quasi-erotic union with the Spirit, and that
such a union requires what Simone Weil called a "decreation" of the ego
in the transformative crucible of love. Love, for Porete, is a
strenuous, intrepid pilgrimage into self-annihilation; "love dares the
self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty"; in Critchley's
words, love is "the audacity of impoverishment," an exhilarating,
paradoxically enriching loss, an abandonment of all security for the
sake of communion—friendship—with divinity.
Thus, as Critchley interprets Paul, "who I am is not in my power";
called and divided, my identity requires "a certain affirmation of
weakness." The self is not a seizure and assertion, but rather "the
orientation of the self towards something that exceeds oneself." Freedom
is not, as in Roman and liberal capitalist libertas, some
"virile assertion of autarchy," but rather "the acknowledgement of an
essential powerlessness." Freedom comes through submission to the
anguish of love; it is not the possession but the endurance of all
things. "Love," Critchley writes compellingly, "is not as strong as
death. It is stronger."
For Porete and the Free Spirit, love and poverty—tokens of friendship
with God—entailed a "faith-based communism," in which the wealth of God
is held in common by all, without regard for class or status. (As
Graeber emphasizes, friends and lovers are communists.) At the same
time, "there is no longer any legitimacy to moral constraints … that do
not directly flow from our freedom"—freedom understood as friendship
with God. In Pauline terms, love is the law of our being.
Though (wrongly) condemned by the Inquisition for sexual libertinage, the Free Spirit was less about doing than about changing
what you want. A revolution of desire must both precede and accompany a
revolution of politics. The Free Spirit explored the outer limits
adumbrated by Paul and the earliest Christians—"rejects and refuseniks,
the very filth of the world," as Critchley glosses Paul, who produced a
"political theology of the wretched of the earth." Reading Paul
(properly) in an eschatological light, Critchley sketches what he calls
the Christian meontology: "an account of things that are not"
together with an account of things that are, but are passing. (Like,
say, the American Empire.) Meontology is the historical and political
analogue to dividualism: we are called and divided from the present,
beckoned to "see the world from the standpoint of redemption." We are to
live as if the new world already is, and as if this world were already not—not
cutting deals with the transient and god-forsaking powers and
principalities of the age. Living as a vanguard, Christians reside—or
better, travel—within the radical insecurity of time, since the parousia could occur at any moment and render all our calculations foolish.
Critchley clearly believes that the contemporary left must recuperate
something of this eschatological faith, but his political theology
founders on his avowed dismissal—and misconstrual—of Christian ontology.
"To be is to be in debt," he writes, and "original sin is the
theological name for the essential ontological indebtedness of the
self." There are two problems with this account of ontological "debt."
If, as Critchley holds, there is no "transcendent reality," then to whom
or what do I "owe" this "debt"? To the "infinite demand" of whom or
what do I owe my faith and commitment? If Critchley's "dividualism" is
right, I owe it to myself—but I suspect that any debt that I owe to
myself will be a fairly easy tab to settle, with ever-negotiable terms
of repayment to myself as my lenient creditor.
In other words, I'm sinful—and here Critchley makes another mistake. Sin does not name our "ontological indebtedness"—this makes existence sinful in itself, which makes the calamity
of sin incomprehensible. Graeber comes closer to getting it right when
he remarks that sin "is our presumption in thinking of ourselves as
being in any sense an equivalent to Everything Else that Exists … so as
to be able to conceive of such a debt in the first place." Sin is not
only a refusal to acknowledge our "indebtedness"—it's the very idea of
our indebtedness itself, the notion that our ultimate relation to God is
that of dependence, not of loving friendship. It's not just that we
desired to be independent of God; it's that we didn't trust
God, didn't desire his friendship. So when Critchley writes that
Christian love rests on a conviction of "the absolute difference between
the human and the divine," he forgets the Incarnation, where the divine
entered into the human, and the human was raised to the level of
divinity. (Following Paul, the Church Fathers would elaborate the
Incarnation in the doctrine of theosis, or the deification of humanity.)
Being Christian consists in realizing that we don't "owe" God a single
thing; it's not as though, in giving, he's parted with something, and
become poorer or more diminished because of it. I would argue that this
perversion of our relationship with God lies at the root of the American
Dream, the delusion that the endless pursuit of libertas and
wealth is an offering to God. Turning God into a ruthless creditor, we
pile up money, achievements, property, and empire to settle the debt.
And when the money runs out, the achievements fade, the property
depreciates, and the empire crumbles, we wail about losing his favor, as
if he's found us unworthy of lending on account of a low cosmic credit
score.
In his magnificent sermon, "Poverty and God," the late Father Herbert
McCabe reminds us that God is our Creator, not our creditor, nor some
demanding investor in our earthly pursuits. "God makes without becoming
richer … it is only creation that gains by God's act." (As Henry Miller
once put it, "God doesn't make a dime on the deal.") Thus, God is
literally poor because he "has no possessions … nothing is or acts for
the benefit of God." We can't "give back" to God, or win his love with
an impeccable credit history. His delight is to be with, not hound his
children, like a rude collection agent; what parent thinks of a child's
life as a loan to be repaid or a debt to be squared?
Come to think of it, the God of Jesus Christ has no business sense at
all, and violates every canon of the Protestant Ethic. He pays the same
wage for one hour of work as for ten, and recommends that we lend
without thought of return. (Finance capital could not survive a day with
this logic, which is one excellent reason to recommend it.) He's an
appallingly lavish and undiscriminating spendthrift, sending his
sunshine on the good and the evil. He has a soft spot for moochers and
the undeserving poor: his Son was always inviting himself into people's
homes, and never asking if the blind man deserved to be cured. How can
you run a decent economy this way?
He calls us his friends, and friends share all things; as Thomas Merton
knew, "to be a Christian is to be a communist." And divine friendship
is to live without debts by "throwing ourselves away"—giving (not
charging) according to our ability, and receiving according to our need.
"To aim at poverty," McCabe said, "to grow up by living in friendship,
is to imitate the life-giving poverty of God, to be godlike." By
comparison, the American Dream is a shabby hallucination. As the
American Empire totters and slides into history's graveyard of hubris,
the glorious poverty of friendship will be our only hope of moral
renewal. It's a model of another, very different empire, one innocent of
creditors and debtors: the people's republic of heaven, the realm of
divine love's utterly unearned, unarmed, and penniless dominion.
Eugene McCarraher is associate professor of humanities and history at Villanova University. He is completing The Enchantments of Mammon: Capitalism and the American Moral Imagination.
Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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