[Buddha-l] what wld buddha buy

[Richard Hayes]

On Fri, 2008-12-19 at 11:24 -0500, Curt Steinmetz wrote:

> I prefer Rodney Stark's thesis to Max Weber's. Stark holds that 
> Capitalism is inherent in Christianity itself, not just in the 
> relatively modern form of Protestantism.

Weber's famous hypothesis still holds up pretty well, I think. His claim
was that capitalism (the investment of private money in corporations to
help finance their operations) emerged as a result of the combination of
two attitudes that, in the Europe of his time, were prominent in
Protestantism but not in Catholicism or Judaism. Those two attitudes are
a very strong emphasis on integrity, and an attitude of what Weber
called secular asceticism. The emphasis on integrity is found in
Catholicism and Judaism, but the extreme wariness of indulgence in
pleasures is found most prominently in certain forms of Protestantism.
The emphasis on honesty made Protestants successful in business, because
people prefer to trade with honest brokers. But it was, says Weber, the
Protestant reluctance to spend their money on entertainment, the arts
and music---not only in secular contexts but in religious
contexts---that led to Protestant merchants accumulating more money than
they knew what to do with. Investing in other businesses, along with
generous donations to charitable causes, was for Weber the "spirit of
capitalism" that sprang from the Protestant ethic of wariness of
pleasure and other frivolities.

It has always seemed to me that if Weber had known more about Buddhism
and Islam, he would have seen the same dynamics in both of those
religions that he saw in Protestantism. I have to qualify the claim
about Buddhism. It does not seem to me that most forms of Asian Buddhism
have the same dread of aesthetic pleasure (even in sacred settings) that
the low-church Protestants have. My observation of Western Buddhism,
however, is that it's often more Protestant than Protestantism. I think
the Western Buddhist ethic makes the Protestant ethic pale in
comparison. What saves Western Buddhists from being the biggest
capitalists on the block is that so many Western Buddhists are academics
and poets rather than engineers and merchants. It's hard to be a
capitalist when you have no spare money to throw around.

I was just given a copy of an interesting-looking book by Douglas Gwyn
called "The Covenant Crucified: Quakers and the Rise of Capitalism." I
have read only the first half of the introduction, so I do not know
Gwyn's argument in detail. The back cover of the book, however, gives
the bare bones of his argument. His claim is that in the 17th century,
when the Quaker movement began in England, there was a huge intellectual
battle raging between covenantism and contractualism. The earliest
Quakers, he claimed, were strong advocates of covenant and were
essentially trying to recreate the dynamics of Jewish notions of
covenant (that is, an arrangement not merely between peoples but among
peoples and God, an arrangement in which compassion and forgiveness are
obligatory among human beings, because justice is in the hands of God).
In placing an emphasis on covenant, the Quakers were fighting against
the stream of Enlightenment culture, which was strongly advocating
contract theory (a contract being an arrangement just between people
without reference to any transcendental dimension). 

Gwyn's claim is that part of the intense antipathy between Quakers and
Cromwell's Puritans was that they took different sides on the
covenant-contract issue. In particular, Gwyn argues that the
contractualism of Cromwell's Puritanism turned salvation into a
commercial commodity. (I don't know how; I just know this is what the
blurb on the book says that Gwyn's claim is.) As Quakers resisted that
move, they were imprisoned and often beaten to death by mobs---a pattern
that continued in early America. I gather that Gwyn sees the evolution
of Quakerism in subsequent years as something of a tragedy in that
capitalism eventually conquered the Quakers rather than vice versa. (The
tired joke in Quaker circles is that the Quakers set out to do good and
end up doing well.)

As I say, I have not read Gwyn's book yet and so am not yet in a
position either to defend or criticize his hypothesis. I take it,
however, that it does try to show that the situation even among
Protestants may have been considerably more complex than Weber portrayed
it.

I'm fairly confident the Buddha would buy Gwyn's book (or trade the
contents of his begging bowl for it) and give it to all his Jewish,
Muslim and Unitarian friends for a Christmas present.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico