Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 214

unsure

I don’t often on this blog write from a position of professional expertise. Mainly I’m writing about things I’m not expert in, but am interested in, and am trying to think through. I post these thoughts here not because I have anything to teach anyone but because posting them to the interwebs requires me to form my thoughts with a at least a little more care and precision than they woiuld have if they were rattling around in my brain pan. And maybe they’ll help a handful of people who, like me, are trying to figure a few things out. Which leads me to….

A great many people think they’re interested in politics when they’re only interested in news. I have in recent years grown more and more interested in politics and economics, which is to say, the whole long history of all the ways in which we human beings have tried to live together without killing one another but instead, perhaps, finding some arena of mutual benefit. I think our current obsession with news makes it far harder for us to think about politics, so I have stepped away from the daily grind of “And Now This!” to try to inquire into the principles of political economy.

I don’t see any of these matters as First Things. For some people they are. For some people the ownership of firearms is not a good that may be weighed against other goods, and in that weighing perhaps found wanting, but a primal indicator of Freedom — not to be negotiated away at any price. For others inequality is not one factor among many in political economy but rather the Original Sin of our common life, and as such must be eradicated no matter how high the price. There is no political or economic consideration that rises to that level, for me. I try, instead, to think empirically about what conduces to our common welfare, and what does not. If I thought that communism did that better than other systems of political economy, I’d be a communist.

The big problem for people like me who want to look at these matters empirically is this: almost everyone who writes with expertise about political economy is a True Believer in something, and that often determines how the stories get told. For instance, Thomas Piketty’s famous book is called Capital in the Twenty-First Century, but right from the first paragraph of the book he explains that what he’s concerned with is “the distribution of wealth” and more specifically the unjust distribution of wealth. But that is only part of the story of capital and capitalism. As I commented in that post I link to above, Deirdre McCloskey thinks that wealth creation is the fundamental problem of economics and the history of economics. Piketty shows no interest in that. It’s hard for me not to think that Piketty ignores wealth creation because that would disrupt the clean lines of his story, while McCloskey largely dismisses the agitations created by inequality because that would disrupt the clean lines of her story. Though at least McCloskey has responded to Piketty’s argument, in an essay that strikes me as generous and charitable even though severely critical.

But here’s what bugs me: Can you imagine McCloskey saying, “Having read Piketty’s book, I now see that the argument I made in the two thousand pages of my Bourgeois Trilogy is fundamentally flawed, and I need quite thoroughly to reconsider my position”? I can’t. Can you imagine Piketty saying, “Now that I’ve read McCloskey’s trilogy I see that the Euro-neoliberalism that I’ve been committed to my whole career is fundamentally flawed, and I need to learn to embrace the creative powers of the free market”? Me neither. You’re not even going to hear a scholar say, “The evidence cuts both ways, but I think the preponderance of evidence is on my side.” That’s not how academic life works. That’s not how human life works, generally.

So the experts stake out their positions and defend them to the death, leaving the rest of us to try to sort out the evidence. But that sorting is hard work, and not many will willingly take it on, when it’s so much easier to pick a side and stick with it. Evan Davis of the Spectator thinks that maybe 1% of us will be willing to be confused about Piketty v. McCloskey. That estimate might be on the high side.

inequality

If you listen to politicians on the left, and especially those who call themselves socialists, describe what’s wrong with our country, the word that comes most frequently to their lips is inequality. “The Top 1 Percent’s Share of Income from Wealth Has Been Rising for Decades,”, we learn, and this, surely, is a prime driver of the recent increase in support for socialism.

But Deirdre McCloskey claims in her book The Bourgeois Virtues that

The amount of goods and services produced and consumed by the average person on the planet has risen since 1800 by a factor of about eight and a half. I say “about.” If the factor were four or five, or ten or twelve, the conclusion would be the same: liberal capitalism has succeeded. And like liberal democracy, its success continues. In these latter days the fact should delight and amaze us. Never had such a thing happened. Count it in your head: eight and a half times more actual food and clothing and housing and education and travel and books for the average human being – even though there were six times more of them [than there were 200 years ago].

And in the third volume of her trilogy, she provides even better news:

Hear again that last, astonishing fact, discovered by economic historians over the past few decades. It is: in the two centuries after 1800 the trade-tested goods and services available to the average person in Sweden or Taiwan rose by a factor of 30 or 100. Not 100 percent, understand — a mere doubling — but in its highest estimate a factor of 100, nearly 10,000 percent, and at least a factor of 30, or 2,900 percent. The Great Enrichment of the past two centuries has dwarfed any of the previous and temporary enrichments. Explaining it is the central scientific task of economics and economic history, and it matters for any other sort of social science or recent history.

One could argue that the data McCloskey cites ought to settle the question of whether capitalism is preferable to socialism. Obviously capitalism — or what she prefers to call “technological and institutional betterment at a frenetic pace, tested by unforced exchange among all the parties involved” — has worked wonders. If I am, say, ten times better off than my ancestors were, why should I care if there are other people who are a thousand times better off?

But the fact of the matter is that people do care. Human beings are exceptionally sensitive to such differentials — but not skilled at knowing what they are. In general, people think that they occupy a lower place on the economic ladder than they actually do, estimate their country’s unemployment rate as much higher than it is, and believe inequality to be greater than it is. And these perceptions matter politically, even when they’re wrong, or based on very partial evidence, because of the passion that inequality prompts in people.

Scott Alexander summarizes part of the argument of a recent book by Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov called Secular Cycles:

One thing that strikes me about T&N’s cycles is the ideological component. They describe how, during a growth phase, everyone is optimistic and patriotic, secure in the knowledge that there is enough for everybody. During the stagflation phase, inequality increases, but concern about inequality increases even more, zero-sum thinking predominates, and social trust craters (both because people are actually defecting, and because it’s in lots of people’s interest to play up the degree to which people are defecting). By the crisis phase, partisanship is much stronger than patriotism and radicals are talking openly about how violence is ethically obligatory.

I’m inclined to believe that there’s something to this “secular cycles” theory, largely because it so nicely rhymes with Anthony Burgess’s Pelphase/Interphase/Gusphase model of history, and because there’s a lot of evidence that having money as such doesn’t make people happier but having more than our neighbors does. I don’t know precisely what weight we should give to inequality when we’re thinking about political arrangements, but it seems that a great many people rate it exceptionally highly and would prefer to reduce the gap that separates them from richer people, even at the cost of lowering their absolute standard of living.

So what counts as political wisdom in that situation? Beats me.

Latka

My post earlier today puts me in mind of something. Think of it as an allegory of social media.

In the old sitcom Taxi Andy Kaufman plays Latka Gravas, a mechanic, an immigrant with a funny high-pitched voice. And then at one point Latka starts to transform himself into someone else — into Latka’s idea of a cool guy, a successful guy. He gradually loses his eastern European accent, and his voice drops an octave. To the people he works with he sounds like a lounge lizard, or a parody of a lounge lizard: a guy who reads the articles in Playboy as a guide for self-improvement. He says that his name isn’t Latka Gravas. His name is Vic Ferrari.

Vic thinks he is a sexy playboy; in fact, Vic is a jerk. Finally, all the people in the cab company who have to deal with Vic deputize Alex — the central character in the ensemble, the most well-adjusted and psychologically healthy person available — to confront Vic and, somehow, bring back Latka.

It doesn’t go well. Vic scornfully repudiates Alex and the rest of the crew. He says that everybody liked him when he was the foreign guy with the funny voice, when he was shy, silly, dopey Latka, a figure of fun, a clown. Nobody respected him then. Of course they want that guy back, someone they can all laugh at. Of course that’s who they’d prefer him to be.

Alex, being the mensch that he is, takes all this in, and acknowledges that there is truth in it. People did laugh at Latka, they did treat him as the comical foreigner, and they shouldn’t have done that. All that (ruefully) acknowledged, Alex still wants to make a point. “I liked Latka,” he says. “But I don’t like you.”

what can’t be changed

Many outlets have reported in recent days that Facebook is testing the removal of Likes from posts. Let’s say they do eventually implement this feature. If so, then the first question is whether it will be opt-in or opt-out. That is, will Likes show unless you choose not to show them, or will they be hidden unless you choose to show them?

My guess is that, in either case, and despite the many calls by tech journalists for changing the way Facebook works, most Facebook users will want to keep counting Likes. We need to remember that there are over two billion Facebook users, and hundreds of millions of them have undergone years of operant conditioning: they have been trained to seek Likes, to rejoice in Likes, to be made miserable by the absence of Likes. Many of them have returned thousands and thousands of times to Facebook to check their count of Likes, refreshing their browser tab even when they don’t need to. The habit of measuring their personal value by Likes is so deeply ingrained that it is difficult to see how a significant number of them will break it. Or even really want to.

I don’t think we reckon with this phenomenon often enough, or seriously enough. The major social-media companies have been conducting for the past decade an implementation of B. K. Skinner’s principles more massive than anything we can truly imagine. They have found ways to get billions of people to volunteer for the experiments and devote sometimes hours a day to pursuing them. Operant conditioning at this level works. And its effects are difficult to undo.

One way to see this: often when people get sick of Facebook or Twitter or Instagram and find some other online venue, they simply bring with them to their new location the habits they learned in the previous ones: the snark of Twitter, the rants of Facebook, the posturing of Instagram. It’s like the old line about travel: wherever you go, there you are. It’s hard enough for people to leave Facebook or Instagram or Twitter behind; what’s almost impossible to leave behind is the person that those sites’ algorithmic behaviorism turned you into.

terror and history

This excellent post by my colleague Philip Jenkins reminds us of an earlier era — just 25 years ago! — when America was worried about right-wing terrorists. As I have often pointed out — see here and here — it’s not just the distant past we’ve forgotten, it’s the very recent past. And that forgetfulness makes it very difficult for us to come up with appropriate and proportionate responses to our current problems.

presentism revisited

A follow-up to my recent post on a certain variety of chronological snobbery: I see that Louise Doughty has nominated her top 10 ghost stories. Their dates:

1987
1898
2015
2017
2017
2010
2002
2009
1983
2001

So: seven of the ten best ghost stories ever written have appeared in the past 18 years. Amazing! How do we account for the fact that just in this century writers have gotten so good at ghost stories — so much better that people who came before, like Arthur Machen and M. R. James and Charles Dickens? It’s a mystery.

inaccessible

Of all the many task-management apps available for the Apple platforms, the one that fits my needs best, by far, is Things by Cultured Code. And if I’m using the iOS version it’s a sheer delight. I can organize everything from small daily tasks, to lists of movies I want to watch, to complex multi-stage projects. It’s beautifully designed and has lots of power when I need it.

But often I work on a Mac, and when I do, Things makes me miserable. I blink and strain my eyes until they hurt, I crane my neck towards and away from the screen. After anything more than five minutes I’m frustrated and in pain. The reason: the makers of Things have since day 1 of the Mac version of their app — twelve years ago — refused to allow users to adjust the size of any text in the app. They like text small and so they keep it small. But my aging eyes can no longer adjust, even with my fairly sophisticated lenses. So sometimes even when I have to use the Mac I will pull out an iOS device rather than struggle with the text on the Mac version of Things.

It’s not rare for software companies to do less than they might, and probably less than they should, to make their apps accessible to people whose senses don’t function peecisely as a healthy 25-year-old’s do. But it is really rare, these days, to find a company as actively hostile to non-ideal users as Cultured Code. It’s hard to imagine a usability feature more basic than the ability to adjust text size. But they won’t do it. I have a lot of money and time invested in their apps, but it looks like I’m going to have to turn to an alternative that’s actually less well-suited to my workflow.

(And dear reader, please do not respond to this post by giving me advice. Whatever you think I ought to do in this matter, I have tried it, and I do mean whatever. And while I have you on the line, please don’t ever give anyone advice, about anything, unless they explicitly ask for it.)

chronological snobbery

The novelist Hannah Beckerman was asked, “I’m an English lit postgraduate who’s slipped into a reading rut since my final exams – what are some good books to get me back into loving literature?” Here are the first publication dates of the books she recommended:

2006
2016
2013
2010
2014
2015
2015
1995
1997
2000
2002
2017
1959–1994 (Paley’s stories)
1937
2017
2019
1988
1926
1989
1999
2015

Also, all of them are written in English and by people from England, Scotland, Ireland, and the USA. The two major temporal outliers (1937 and 1926) are both children’s books, and there are no adults-only (or -primarily) novels from before 2002.

Is it really likely that all the books that might be recommended to someone who wants to “get … back into loving literature” are from our culture, our language, our time? And that none of them are poems or plays?

compromises

In yesterday’s post I quoted from Deirdre McCloskey’s work on bourgeois life, and I want now to return briefly to that. Late in the first volume of her trilogy she refers to a 1945 book called The Economic Order and Religion:

It develops that Knight and Merriam are arguing that social life in a large group with thoroughgoing ownership in common is impossible. That is what they believe Christian love entails. Their source is always the gospels, never the elaborate compromises with economic reality of other Christian writers, such as Paul or Aquinas or Luther, or the thirty-eighth article of the Anglicans: “The riches and goods of Christians are not common, as touching the right, title, and possession of the same, as certain Anabaptists do falsely boast.”

What, the Gospels aren’t supposed to count? Methinks they count indeed. But I can understand why someone looking at Luke 12:33 and Luke 14:33 might want to quickly turn aside. In any case, it’s not just the Gospels that tell this story: we also have (and Hart cites) the book of Acts and the letter of James. If McCloskey is going to argue that we should imitate “the elaborate compromises with economic reality of other Christian writers,” then she really needs to say why we should follow those “other writers” when they disagree, or at least certainly seem to disagree, with the Gospels, Acts, and James.

And as we think about all these matters we should surely remember Kierkegaard’s comment that most Christians think that the commandments are intentionally over-severe, like setting our clocks ahead half-an-hour to make sure we get up in the morning. (He can’t mean what he says.)

As always: the evidence all seems to point in one direction when you ignore or suppress all the evidence that points in the other direction.

Christianity and capitalism reconsidered

David Bentley Hart’s essay on the incompatibility of Christianity and capitalism, featured in the new issue of Plough Quarterly, strikes me as absolutely essential — an argument that everyone who wants to think seriously about Christianity and the social order ought to reflect on and find a response to. That argument is not, in its broad outlines, new — but it does condense some vital points and express them in vigorous prose.

But before getting to Hart: One of the most frustrating elements of the current debates about Christianity and American life is the vagueness and abstraction of the relevant terms. When certain Christians decry “the liberal order,” what do they mean? My friend and colleague David Corey has offered a deeply intelligent and extremely useful response to Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed in which he points out that while liberalism is intrinsically associated with the securing and preservation of freedom, “freedom” has been defined by the key theorists of the liberal order in at least nine distinct ways. Which of those do the celebrants of the liberal order celebrate? Which do the denouncers of the liberal order denounce? Often it’s impossible to tell, and it’s highly unlikely that the typical celebrant or denouncer would even understand the question. (So please read David Corey’s essay.)

Of course, most people who make arguments about anything don’t really know what they’re talking about. But it seems to me that arguments about Christianity and politics have an almost unique ability to reduce the intelligence of the people involved by at least a third. We desperately need clarity about what, exactly, we’re arguing about. And that’s where Hart’s essay can help. In the first sentence of his essay he writes, “I have no entirely satisfactory answer to the questions that prompt these reflections; but I do think the right approach to the answers can be glimpsed fairly clearly if we first take the time to define our terms.” And indeed this is precisely where we need to begin.

Unfortunately, this promising opening leads immediately to the least satisfactory element of Hart’s essay, which I am going to address in the remainder of this post, and then go on, in later posts, to describe what I think is very right, or at least very useful, in the rest of his essay.

I have often praised a model of debate that I learned about from my friend Robin Sloan. Here’s Robin’s description of it:

Every so often, the Long Now Foundation here in San Francisco hosts a debate. It might be about nuclear power or synthetic biology or perhaps the very notion of human progress — high-stakes stuff. But the format is nothing like the showdowns on cable news or the debates in election season.

Instead, it goes like this:

There are two debaters, Alice and Bob. Alice takes the podium, makes her argument. Then Bob takes her place, but before he can present his counter-argument, he must summarize Alice’s argument to her satisfaction — a demonstration of respect and good faith. Only when Alice agrees that Bob has got it right is he permitted to proceed with his own argument — and then, when he’s finished, Alice must summarize it to his satisfaction.

David Bentley Hart is not interested in this sort of attempt to reach a common understanding of the terms of debate. Earlier I quoted the first sentence of his essay; but before the first sentence we get an epigraph from Baudelaire that begins, “Commerce is, in its essence, satanic.” At the end of that paragraph he cites the early anarchist Proudhon’s view that capitalism “is a system in which as a general rule those whose work creates profits neither own the means of production nor enjoy the fruits of their labor.” So Hart’s definitions of capitalism are those of its declared enemies. Thus, the incompatibility of capitalism with Christianity is not the argument of Hart’s essay, it is the essay’s premise. That the defenders of capitalism would not accept these definitions is, I suspect, of little interest to Hart.

But I think it should be. Consider Deirdre McCloskey in the first volume of her series of books on bourgeois life, The Bourgeois Virtues: “I mean by ‘capitalism’ merely private property and free labor without central planning, regulated by the rule of law and by an ethical consensus.” Her argument following from this definition is that liberal capitalism (a) makes us richer, (b) lets us live longer, and (c) improves our ethics. From these points she concludes: “Anticapitalism is bad for us.”

I don’t think that Hart would accept any of these points, but I wonder what he might say in refutation. One of the key points of dispute would surely be the characteristic effects of capitalism. Hart writes, “One can also concede that, now and then, the immense returns reaped by the few can redound to the benefit of the many; but there is no fixed rule to that effect, and generally quite the opposite is the case“ — but as we have seen, McCloskey claims that the best research tells us that Hart’s claim is flat wrong, that “generally” capitalist activity is a tide that lifts most if not all boats. (It’s funny how often McCloskey seems to be anticipating Hart, e.g.: “If modern capitalism is defined to be the same thing as Greed — ‘the restless never-ending process of profit-making alone … , this boundless greed after riches,’ as Marx put it in chapter 1 of Capital, drawing on an anticommercial theme originating in Aristotle — then that settles it, before looking at the evidence.” Largely this is because Hart’s critique of capitalism is a very familiar one, as, I’m sure, he would be the first to acknowledge.)

I also wonder whether, given disagreements like the above, it would be possible for Hart and McCloskey to agree on a definition of capitalism, and, if they did, what it would be and how it would affect their respective arguments. But to speculate about such possibilities is to live in a dream world.

I don’t want to try to adjudicate the dispute here. For one thing, it’s not a level playing field: Hart wrote one short essay and McCloskey three long books. I merely want to say that I think Hart could have started from a more neutral definition of capitalism and arrived equally securely at his anti-capitalist stance — indeed, could have arrived there more securely, and made his position more convincing to skeptics. It is even possible that everything that McCloskey says about capitalism is true and that capitalism is still incpmpatible with Christianity, because McCloskey does not tell the whole truth. (McCloskey is a Christian, by the way.) Hart’s essay has an unfortunate beginning, then, but after that it grows stronger. Hart confronts me with some powerful points that I would rather not confront — but I’m going to try to do so.

Everything I have to say from here on is directed to Christians who believe that what the Bible says, or at the very least what Jesus says in the Bible, matters to their thinking about our social and economic life — who believe that, once we understand what Jesus is saying to us, we are bound to obedience.

And that means being so bound even when obedience leads us onto paths that do not, or do not seem to, conduce to our flourishing. That is what I meant when I said that Deirdre McCloskey’s argument — that capitalism makes us wealthier, lets us live longer, and improves our ethics — could be right and even so Christianity and capitalism might not be compatible. Maybe God doesn’t want us to be richer and longer-lived, and maybe there are certain matters of faithfulness that transcend what most people call “ethics” (Kierkegaard famously called this the “teleological suspension of the ethical”). Christianity shares with the other Axial Age religions a thoroughgoing revaluation of what makes for human flourishing. As Charles Taylor points out in A Secular Age, Buddhism and Christianity diverge greatly in doctrine, and yet they have something vital in common:

This is that the believer or devout person is called on to make a profound inner break with the goals of flourishing in their own case; they are called on, that is, to detach themselves from their own flourishing, to the point of the extinction of self in one case, or to that of renunciation of human fulfillment to serve God in the other. The respective patterns are clearly visible in the exemplary figures. The Buddha achieves Enlightenment; Christ consents to a degrading death to follow his father’s will.

Jesus was not wealthy — “Foxes have holes, and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” — and preached “good news for the poor.” He did not live to a ripe old age. His ethics were thought deficient by the leading religious figures of his time and place. Thus capitalism could be everything McCloskey says it is and yet we Christians could be called upon to disavow it.

Hart thinks this is precisely what Christians are called upon to do:

Christ clearly means what he says when quoting the prophet: he has been anointed by God’s Spirit to preach good tidings to the poor (Luke 4:18). To the prosperous, the tidings he bears are decidedly grim: “Woe to you who are rich, for you are receiving your comfort in full; woe to you who are full fed, for you shall hunger; woe to you who are now laughing, for you shall mourn and weep” (Luke 6:24–25). As Abraham tells Dives in Hades, “You fully received your good things during your lifetime… so now you suffer” (Luke 16:25). Christ not only demands that we give freely to all who ask from us (Matt. 5:42), with such prodigality that one hand is ignorant of the other’s largesse (Matt. 6:3); he explicitly forbids storing up earthly wealth – not merely storing it up too obsessively – and allows instead only the hoarding of the treasures of heaven (Matt. 6:19–20). He tells all who would follow him to sell all their possessions and give the proceeds away as alms (Luke 12:33), and explicitly states that “every one of you who does not give up all that he himself possesses is incapable of being my disciple” (Luke 14:33). As Mary says, part of the saving promise of the gospel is that the Lord “has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away starving” (Luke 1:53).

Gulp.

It is interesting to reflect on the number of Christians who insist that Scripture’s teaching on our culture’s topics du jour (whatever those might be) are explicit and obvious and so incontrovertible that anyone who disagrees with the Preferred Interpretation must be willfully blind — and yet simultaneously insist that the passages Hart quotes are subject to dramatically varying interpretations, and that it would be rash indeed to claim that we are actually literally being told to give all we have away to the poor?

This is why I am so fond of quoting this passage from Kierkegaard’s journals:

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in this world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

I open the New Testament and read: ‘If you want to be perfect, then sell all your goods and give to the poor and come follow me.’ Good God, if we were to actually do this, all the capitalists, the officeholders, and the entrepreneurs, the whole society in fact, would be almost beggars! We would be sunk if it were not for Christian scholarship! Praise be to everyone who works to consolidate the reputation of Christian scholarship, which helps to restrain the New Testament, this confounded book which would one, two, three, run us all down if it got loose (that is, if Christian scholarship did not restrain it).

As I say, I am fond of quoting this passage, but I am also judged by it in ways that make me profoundly uneasy. Kirekegaard’s savagely hilarious mockery prevents me from evading the force of the words of Jesus that Hart cites, and I suppose that’s good; but none of his words can compel me to obedience.

As far as I can tell, I am, as a Christian, bound to sell all I have and disperse the proceeds to the poor; but, also as far as I can tell, I won’t do it. And I won’t do it because I lack the requisite courage. I am afraid that if I obey Jesus on this point my wife and I will spend our final years in poverty and fear, that like Jesus himself we will have no place to lay our heads. I am afraid that if I give everything I own to the poor I’ll have nothing to leave to our son, who seems likely to be facing a more economically precarious life than I have had.

I don’t like being in this situation. I’d be much happier if I could convince myself that “Christian scholarship” is correct when it explains to me that those biblical texts Hart quotes don’t mean what it sure looks like they mean. But Kierkegaard forces me to see just how motivated my reasoning is, how desperately I want to avoid Jesus’s commands. So I suppose I should start praying for courage, shouldn’t I?

All that said, these reflections take us a long way from the question of how compatible Christianity and capitalism are.

The reason the reflections in the previous section of this post don’t bear on the relationship between Christianity and capitalism is simple: Jesus tells me what to do with my money, but He does not what sort of socio-economic order to build, or try to build. The focus of the New Testament is always on what persons do and especially what the ecclesial community, the koinonia, does. The relationship between those acts, that community, and the larger social order remains enigmatic. There’s no question that Jesus brings a revolution against all the existing Powers, but how that revolution is to be made manifest is hard to grasp. His statements about Roman power are famously ambiguous, and his lack of interest in leading or even participating in a political rebellion of the Jews against their overlords seems to have scandalized some of his early followers.

Hart tries to bridge the gap between statement and implication in the following way:

“There can simply be no question that absolutely central to the gospel they [the Apostles] preached was the insistence that private wealth and even private property were alien to a life lived in the Body of Christ.”
“Small intentional communities committed to some form of Christian collectivism are all very well, of course,” but “whatever prophetic critique they might bring to bear upon their society is, in the minds of most believers, converted into a mere special vocation, both exemplary and precious — perhaps even a sanctifying priestly presence within the larger church — but still possible only for the very few, and certainly not a model of practical politics.”
What must be kept in mind is this: “the full koinonia of the Body of Christ is not an option to be set alongside other equally plausible alternatives. It is not a private ethos or an elective affinity. It is a call not to withdrawal, but to revolution.”
In conclusion: “Christians are those, then, who are no longer at liberty to imagine or desire any social or political or economic order other than the koinonia of the early church, no other communal morality than the anarchy of Christian love.”

Before proceeding, I want to pause to digress on something that might be the only thing that really matters here. Deirdre McCloskey describes with enthusiastic intelligence the virtues that bourgeois-capitalist society cultivates; Hart, by contrast, writes of “the anarchy of Christian love.” It is a long-vexed question whether agape is a virtue in the same way that many other traits are virtues.

Since Aristotle, it is common for virtue theorists to describe virtues as finding some golden mean between two vices: hope, for instance, says Thomas Aquinas, may be found between the false extremes of desperatio and praesumptio, despair and presumption: the despairing person doesn’t think there’s anywhere to go, while the presumptuous person thinks that he has already arrived. (The hopeful person knows that she is a wayfarer: she hasn’t yet arrived, but she has a destination clearly in mind.) But while it’s easy to draw such a clear map of hope and its perversions, it’s harder to do that for love. After all, if your love is rightly directed, you can’t love too much.

McCloskey comments that some people who heard that she was writing about “bourgeois virtues” laughed, because they didn’t think that the bourgeoisie have any virtues. But in fact the classical conception of virtue is a useful way to think about middle-class life under capitalism. You don’t want to take unnecessary risks, but you don’t want to sew your money into your mattress either. You don’t want to hoard your resources, but you don’t want to waste them either. You don’t want to work yourself to death, but you don’t want to be lazy and feckless either.

But this balancing act may well be inappropriate to the life of agape, which in the New Testament is so often associated with what from the bourgeois point of view looks like extravagance. If someone takes your coat, give him your cloak also. Praise that old widow for giving all she has, even though a bourgeois virtue would counsel her to hold something back. Don’t try to escape persecution, but rather rejoice in it. Don’t even think about what you should say when called to account for yourself before some court — God will give you the words you need. Don’t try to maintain your emotional equilibrium but rather laugh with those who laugh and weep with those who weep. (Don’t save your money so you can give it to your son when you die.) This, I think, is what Hart means by “the anarchy of Christian love” — it’s a kind of flinging of yourself into the world without counting the cost and in defiance of the consequences. After all, look at what happened to Jesus when he flung himself into the world.

Practicing the bourgeois virtues makes the social world run more smoothly and predictably; practicing anarchic agape makes … we know not what. Hold on to your hat.

Anyway. Let’s posit that what Hart says in those five bulleted points I quoted several paragraphs back is true (especially since, as far as I can tell, all of it is true). Nevertheless: none of it tells us what we should do when we live in a society in which some people are Christians and some people are not. we may be called to revolution, but throughout history revolution has come in many varieties, varieties often incompatible with one another — so which variety is the koinonia supposed to follow? Or is its revolution essentially distinct from all other forms? Even when Hart says that intentional Christian communities don’t provide “a model of practical politics,” that doesn’t tell us whether we should have a model of practical politics. Maybe that precisely what a community of anarchic love shouldn’t have and indeed cannot have. Maybe that’s the nature of its revolutionary impetus. So not a great deal obviously follows from Hart’s argument.

But the primary imperative that surely follows is this: Do not make an idol of capitalism, do not see it as an ideal, do not see it as God’s Way, do not take it as a model for how to live. We are forbidden that by Scripture. In that sense capitalism is certainly incompatible with Christianity.

But having said that, it does seem to me that you could agree with Hart’s points and still hold a position fairly close to McCloskey’s, which is that capitalism, or rather the liberal social order which exists symbiotically with a market economy, is, for Christians and for everyone else, “pretty good.” Not great, not without significant flaws, but good enough to be going on with, and better than the available alternatives. Christianity is compatible with the liberal capitalist order in the sense that one can be a Christian within that order, though not easily and not without making trouble for yourself and for others.

But that doesn’t mean that one should be content with such getting by. The key question, I think, is to ask what, if we agree that Christianity is revolutionary, we mean by “revolution.” If you read Hannah Arendt’s great book On Revolution you will discover that the term has had many meanings over the centuries, not all of which are compatible with one another, and at least some of which — the violent overthrow of a government, for instance — surely cannot be reconciled with Christian faith and practice.

A related question — for Christians who are commanded to sell all they have and give to the poor, and to share all things in common — would be: May we strive to instantiate a political order that forces everyone within it to sell all they have and give it to the poor, regardless of whether they are Christians? I worry about this, because the track record of Christians when given the power of political coercion is tragically poor. Should not penitence for past sins, if nothing else, cause us to hesitate before attempting to enforce our convictions on those who do not share our faith?

Perhaps the best strategy would be to see if, in whatever political order we happen to find ourselves, we are able to be obedient to the commandments of King Jesus, at least for a period of time. Because we are unlikely to get other people interested in following a revolutionary banner that we ourselves aren’t strong enough to hold up.