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Even if they dismiss Dewey’s “common faith” as religious twaddle, intellectuals eager to reclaim him for a revitalized progressive politics have emphasized this positive conception of corporateness. Fastening onto his pronouncement in Individualism that “we are in for some kind of socialism,” they overlook his proviso: “a socialism that is capitalistic.”
Advertisers enclosed the mind and soul in an “advanced system of dream-manufacture,” a liturgical enterprise of “make-believe” invested with “the accumulated make-believe of past decades and past centuries.” Trafficking dishonestly in faith and hope—certainly not in charity—advertisers practiced a “modern priestcraft” not unlike that of the Middle Ages. Defining “the material, oral, and spiritual content of the Good Life,” their slogans, images, and trademarks comprised the iconography of capitalist faith.
In Detroit, Rorty saw the full magnitude of Fordist enchantment. Even the unemployed and destitute were entranced by the vision of technological deliverance.
Mesmerized by the mass production of dreams, both middle- and working-class citizens believed that “human life could flourish as a kind of parasitic attachment to an inhuman, blind, valueless process, in which money begets machines, machines beget money, machines beget machines, money begets money.”
After leaving Detroit and driving through the Midwest, Rorty dismissed the populist sentimentality of his comrades in the Popular Front. Farmers, he observed, were “oppressed and dispossessed capitalists, still pretty much dominated by the individualist business man’s psychology.”
Depressed by his journey, Rorty abandoned the class struggle for what his comrades would have called idealism. If there was to be a final conflict—“which I doubt,” he added tartly—it would not take place between classes, but between “intelligence and stupidity, between sanity and fanaticism, between justice and injustice, between freedom and tyranny.”
Under cover of bureaucratic and technological sobriety, reason and enlightenment morphed into the administered
delirium of productivity.
A fetish complex in constant production, the culture industry “now impresses the same stamp on everything”: exchange value, marketability, and the pecuniary soul of capitalism.24 With all avenues of escape from commodity culture apparently closed, workers embraced the moral and political imagination of their managers and technocrats. The mechanization of communion that began with scientific management ended in the administration of dreams. Yet Adorno and Horkheimer also discerned a return of the repressed, a regression into primordial superstition and credulity that ratified the corporate
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the populations of industrial societies regressed into “pre-historical” modes of thought and belief. Among intellectuals, Horkheimer observed a resurgence of “forced naivete,” attempts to revive older forms of metaphysics and conviction discredited by enlightenment, especially Buddhism
The astrologer is a strangely insipid oracle, Adorno wondered, whose “sobriety, nay overrealism” seems out of synch with his invocation of fateful celestial motions.
Adorno resolved the conundrum by contending that, far from being an escape into utter irrationality, astrology was an enchanting representation of real life, a mythology of corporate capitalism.
“The stars seem to be in complete agreement with the established ways of life,” he marveled; the “opaqueness and inscrutability” of the astrological forces, together with their depersonalized and “merciless”...
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the deities of traditional religion, while exacting, were also intimate and merciful, the transcendent powers invoked in astrology are “abstract, unapproachable, and anonymous”—just like the bureaucratic monoliths in which many of Righter’s fans were employed. Thus, if religion had at least preserved the possibility of resistance to injustice, astrology and the occult enjoined an exotic subordination. Thoroughly aligned with the instrumental reason of the state and corporate bureaucracy, the new spirituality assumed a role as “guardian angel of the established order.”
Adorno wrote in a luminous and enigmatic passage, was one that contemplated the world as it would look “from the standpoint of redemption.” Rather than offer consolations dressed up in faddish progressive politics, such philosophers should reveal how “indigent and distorted” the world appears when illuminated by “the messianic light.”29 Philosophy done in this way was painful but fruitful, he reasoned, since unrelenting critique inevitably suggested a utopian image of its opposite. If Adorno echoed Randolph Bourne, who had praised “malcontentedness” as “the beginning of promise,”
While the white invaders marauded the country with their money and brutally extractive technology, the Indians “spent their ingenuity in another direction, in accommodating themselves to the scene in which they find themselves.” Likewise, the Mexicans examined by Chase displayed a grandeur and grace inaccessible to acquisitive and industrious whites. In Mexico: A Story of Two Americas (1931), Chase juxtaposed two very different communities: Tepotzlan, the Mexican village studied by the anthropologist Robert Redfield, and “Middletown,” the Midwestern city explored by Robert and Helen Lynd.
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“revolutionary fires already kindled,” he proclaimed, “which are destined to bring a new renaissance, a new reformation, yea a new pentecost.”
“Now there is a new Pentecost,” he told a black congregation in Missouri in 1936. The disciples received God’s anointment and power “when they were organized … so Pentecost is unity.”
“Speed now the day when the plains and hills and all the wealth thereof shall be the people’s own … we shall be Thy tenants alone.”
In “I’ve Seen God,” for instance, West bore witness both to the grandeur and to the profanation of divine creation. “I’ve seen him smile / In the several hues of a rainbow / I’ve felt his warm breath / In the mists / The sun sets up / From the plowed dirt / After the summer rain”; but God also stared out from “the gaunt eyes / Of a factory worker,” and West “heard him groan / From the hungry throats / Of miners’ children.”
This was not Ransom’s “God of thunder” but rather the Saviour crucified by avarice.
Where Ransom thought Americans should revive submission to a harsh and punitive God, Day offered the imitation of Christ: living in voluntary poverty, bearing the crosses of the poor and rejected,
Committed primarily to improving the aesthetic quality of church liturgy, art, and architecture, some liturgical reformers, such as the Benedictine Virgil Michel, considered the Eucharistic meal to be a template for social relations. Just as those who receive the Eucharist do not enjoy Christ as an exclusive possession, so natural goods should be shared.
As Michel summarized the ideal, “what belongs to all belongs to each and what belongs to each belongs to all.”
Vida Dutton Scudder.
Mumford is the American Ruskin, a romantic critic of capitalism who, though more affirming of modern technics, denounced the religion of productivity and professed that there is no wealth but life. Indeed, “life”—richness of experience, variety of action, fertility of body and imagination—lay at the heart of Mumford’s Romantic humanism, a way of being in the world as, in his words, “holiness, beatitude, and beauty.”
A community low in production yet high in creation is richer, Mumford contended, than a more “productive” society whose quantitatively greater volume of objects and services is corrupting and deliberately obsolescent.
The alleged disenchantment of the world introduced, not a brave new world of secular reason and justice, but a “religion of power” embodied most frightfully and destructively in industrial capitalism.
As a spirit and icon of the lust for domination that propelled the capitalist economy, the machine was a “new demiurge that was to create a new heaven and a new earth,” a “new Moses that was to lead a barbarous humanity into the promised land.”
the lust for mammon obviated “any other mode of life or form of expression except that associated with the machine.”
Enchanted by the prospect of absolute dominion mediated by money and machinery, the religion of power mandated the imposition of a sterile technological despotism over the natural and human worlds; imbued with a lifeless sensibility, the leviathan scale of modern society entailed an economy and culture of death.
“Megalopolis,” as Mumford dubbed modern urban life in The Culture of Cities, “subordinates life to organized destruction” in war and industrial enterprise. “By putting business before every other manifestation of life,” Mumford charged in Technics and Civilization, “our mechanical and financial civilization has forgotten the chief business of life:
“a man could achieve godhood,” he mused, but the power acquired was “ripped loose from his flesh and isolated from his humanity.”
Meanwhile, ideologues elevated a “maniacal intensity of work” to the level of moral principle; both capitalist and proletarian were enslaved to the rhythms of mechanization. Even the ideal of democracy degenerated into a “psychological rationalization for machine industry,” as workers exchanged control over the means of production for a plethora of commodities.35 Life under the spell of paleotechnic enchantment was as brutish as it was productive.
In Sticks and Stones, Mumford described the American obsession with riches and technology as religious enthusiasm.
The typical American was “enchanted,” Mumford wrote, by “dreams of a great fortune in real estate, rubber, or oil.” He saw ritual and stigmata in the despoliation of nature by industrial development: in the American cult of the religion of power, “the smoke of the factory [is] incense,” he wrote, and “the scars on the landscape [are] the lacerations of a saint.”
the American skyscraper, Mumford wrote, is “an architecture, not for men, but for angels.”
Because workers identified justice and dignity with greater access to commodities, the class struggles triggered by industrial exploitation led to higher wages and improved working conditions, but “the fundamental conditions remained unaltered.”
Mumford perceived that Marxists shared with capitalists an enchantment with the paleotechnic drive for colossal productive power. In his view, Marx’s willingness to favor the expansion of productive forces over the freedom and dignity of workers left a blemish on all forms of socialism. Because they considered capitalism a necessary (albeit excruciating) phase in the dialectical unfolding of history, the left, Mumford feared, endorsed a socialist acquiescence in the remorseless religion of power. The socialist celebration of capitalist ingenuity and dynamism sanctioned a ritual sacrifice of
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Exerting personal control over their words and images, writers and painters defied the paleotechnic system simply by pursuing their passions, living as “useless creatives” in the midst of a civilization given over to utility and panoptical management.
Just two years after the publication of his greatest book, he left New York in 1936 to live in Amenia, a rural town eighty miles north, where he remained for the rest of his life. His departure from his lifelong home, he later told his friend and fellow generalist the architect
Roderick Seidenberg,
reflected his growing pessimism about American civilization. “This society is as fatally doomed as Roman society was in the third century.” While its “case” is not “irremediable,”...
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The Great Gatsby has been read by at least four generations of readers as a meditation on “the American Dream”: the allure and ultimate emptiness of a life devoted to the pursuit of “success,”
In Gatsby, Fitzgerald examines the metaphysical insolence that fuels the rage to accumulate. Assigning a role to Gatsby once reserved for God, Fitzgerald suggests that capitalist ambition is a quest for human divinity.
Fitzgerald himself tells us that Gatsby’s self-invention is a grasp for divine creative power.
But Jimmy’s enterprise in self-help goes much further than moral discipline. As Nick observes in the key metaphysical passage of the novel:
The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty … to this conception he was faithful to the end.
For Agee, the modesty of that goal was no reason to abandon the struggle: it remained a sacrilege that a furious angel was crucified on the cross of property.
So if, like Agee, they grasped the true depth of their desire, communists would have to do more than contend for control of the means of production. In league with other terrestrial angels, they would have to transform their fury at injustice into the patient love of the unjust.
