Toward a Capitalistic Renaissance
24/June/2009 08:29 Filed in: Weekly
Column
Volume 11, Issue 25
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There is beginning in this land and around the world a groundswell of common people sensing what seems to indicate that we are sojourners in an epic time.
Bankrupt are the bastions of American enterprise, the auto industry. It seems that like their railroad brethren, they did not recognize the business school standard, which they were in the transportation business, rather than creators of automobiles. Of course the railroads were helped to their demise by General Motors and Standard Oil, which bought up privately owned public transportation, shut them down, and eliminated true market choice for American land based conveyance.
Automobiles were preceded in stupendous change, by the meltdown catastrophe of the financial universe. From which the concept too big to fail has now redefined the wisdom of Forrest Gump, “Stupid is, as stupid does, don’t mean nothin’.”
Let’s see – cheap monetary policy, coupled with easy credit, financially leveraged to the utmost, speculating in unregulated commodities, or bundled in high-risk real estate securities did not last forever. It sure seems our enlightened leadership believed that it would and even more amazing, that they can bring it back just like before.
Of course the oil players are back at it again, betting that economic recovery and unlimited demand increases are just a fall economic recovery away.
Then recent news indicates that solar activity is at a long time low, creating cool temperatures and the potential for a greatly decreased world food supply. All the while global warming alarmists are still promoting an agenda, that mankind can control climate by limiting carbon emissions and animal flatulence, or just have everyone painting their roofs white.
What is missing in the debate of TV pundits discussing the this or that, is that it really isn’t about this or that at all. The real issue is the concept of human enlightenment. Broken down into its most basic tenet we see the inability of humanity to save itself from itself. The problem is not at all about the stuff, the problem lies within the philosophies or religions of man.
While many would say we need a religious revival to set the record straight, the history of religious revivals really isn’t that much different than what we have just discussed. Furthermore while they have had some localized effects, many times those effects are short lived and the accompanying legalism has quickly exacerbated any positive results.
What is needed is a common solution. What we describe as common sense. The problem with all this, in the above scenarios (and many more) seems to have been caused by a total lack of common sense, most of the time reinforced by common arrogance or narcissism.
Looking at our current state of affairs it looks like common sense does not apply. The reason for that is that our educational system does not recognize the reality of the common reality. Put another way we are all too specialized to understand anything outside our specialty. In essential liberal truth, we really are a product of our environment.
Just as the United States is the most capitalistic nation in history, it is also the most specialized. What we have failed to understand is the linkage is cause and effect. The success of capitalism, going back to Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” is based primarily upon the specialization of labor to do specific tasks and do them well.
Smith believed that an “Invisible Hand” governed the creation of wealth through the application of financial capital. The interpretation of just who or what constituted the hand was dependent upon the capitalist, God, karma, the Force, but for our discussion the important fact was that the “Invisible Hand” was not the hand of the capitalist entrepreneur. The capitalist used specialization of his work force to put the hand into motion thereby creating new wealth.
Just as with the Founders of the American republican experiment, that specialization always was to take place within a well-understood common moral framework. In other words there was a right and a wrong, there also was good an evil and human progress and enlightenment must always take place within that tension. The Founders and Smith understood the reality of natural law as the basis of common reasoning and regulation.
Furthermore they believed that wealth was best illustrated in the accumulation of private property. To believe that today’s consumerism is truly private property in the classic capitalistic model, seems to stretch the limits of credulity. Perhaps when consumerism is linked with excessive credit, the better model is a modern type of feudalism or slavery, which true capitalism should efficiently replace.
So back to the specialized auto industry. The car salesman sold you a dream of a gift of personal transportation that you deserved. The finance manager found some company that would finance the dream with nothing down. The service manager hoped you would return the vehicle for all routine services. The car dealer dreamed of being a pillar of the community. Together with the car manufacturer and the auto unions, everyone did quite well financially. All the specialists never looked beyond the present, because the future is always better than the past. That is the essence of the American Dream.
What got lost in the auto industry and on most Americans was the fact the car was just a mode of transportation, a quite expensive and generally reliable mode of transportation, but still just a car. Much of the expense and profit was created essentially for kitsch, only obtusely related to the transport reality.
A similar discussion could take place over the recent real estate bubble, but in that case much of the hype was for kitsch as a sound investment, one you could liquidate at anytime in the future for substantial gain.
The excesses of capitalism has long been a feature the American landscape. Perhaps the spin on real estate speculation being the most consistent. Our public land grants to railroads to build to the Pacific being one of the most overt. The concept of “build it and they will come, and you will get rich,” took on new meaning. The problem was if they came, the land could not support most of the comers, and those who managed to make it, didn’t make enough for the railroads to make a profit. The lack of common sense again shows its timely reality.
Throughout history there has been an enlightened effort to curb the excesses of capitalism. Most of those rely heavily upon some sort of enlightened government elite to moderate and regulate the robber barons, the speculators, or just the evil schemers. This enlightened minority is but a bureaucratic bumbling of specialization, again not understanding the principles of common natural law upon which true capitalism soundly based.
President Obama seems to be taking his election victory as a mandate to not let this current crisis go to waste, even though it seems that all he has done is to shift the deck chairs on the Titanic from the laissez faire deck to the new deal deck. His enlightened specialists don’t seem to realize that the world economy just hit a big iceberg, there is a hole in the hull, we are taking on water rapidly, and the pumps are failing. Thankfully we are told this will be all over soon. His enlightened specialists have come to our rescue, and lifeboats are not needed because, we can hope to change the iceberg through melting liquidity, (once called excessive debt).
Long before the Enlightenment came the Renaissance. Renaissance means essentially revival or rebirth. What the world needs now is a revived or reborn enterprise paradigm in which capitalistic wealth creation is again focused upon the Invisible Hand and not just the hand of man grabbing anything that he thinks he might want at the expense of others.
The Renaissance man was not known for his specialization but his generalization. The broad basis of the renaissance experience allowed for an unique perspective that a specialist could not comprehend. The proverb “A jack of all trades, master of none” seems to make good sense in the world of the specialist. In actuality many Renaissance leaders were truly broadly gifted and used those gifts to greatly develop both the breadth and depth of human civilization.
Simplifying greatly, the Renaissance began as human reason sought to understand a Creator who had designed human personalities to do more than struggle to exist and to take up space upon this earth. Mankind, created in the image of God, was uniquely given the task to create, not ex nihilo, but use his human gifts to recreate the given universe toward the fulfillment of human opportunities as stewards of God’s creation. This reordering of creation begins with the understanding of natural law, first relating to common human morality, but extending to all God’s wisdom, specifically through God’s word in unity with His creation.
As this humanization of western culture took place, about midway through the continuum from Renaissance to Enlightenment, occurred a profound Christian religious awakening called the Reformation. That Reformation again focused Christianity beyond mundane pious religious practices, to the finished work by the death of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, on a Middle Eastern cross for the justification of sinful humanity. Three days hence he was raised from the dead according to the scriptures and the testimony of many reliable witnesses.
In our context this gospel of Jesus Christ fulfilled not only the requirements of natural law but also the specific law of God required personal holiness, through the covenant of unmerited Grace. This reality is as wonderful today as it was two thousand years ago, but religious intolerance has severed the gospel’s linkage with common and natural law and human aspirations.
Fast-forwarding to the present world, conventional wisdom, is based upon total naturalism. God does not exist, hence natural law does not exist. When we speak of the “rule of law” the concept only includes human produced statutes and regulations. The former preeminence of natural law or even common law has been systematically expunged from the record.
Furthermore the human conscience is just a remnant of some primitive community affirmation ritual. This ultimately means that everyone does what is right in their own eyes. Taken to its true logical conclusion human civilization can no longer exist except as feudalism or fascism. Those who consider themselves more highly evolved attempt to rule others as a chosen elite. This we see all too common in those who today seek individual leadership. Therein lies the circle by which we return to feudalism and the dark ages, when human class structures dominated and unknown were the human virtues of freedom, liberty, and security.
A cumulative progress of common and specific revelations of God and nature led to both Smith’s opus “Wealth” and the founding of the American republic based upon the freedom of religious tolerance. That religious tolerance is still the most suppressed human freedom on earth and is again the focus of those specialists who seek to control the future by their grossly limited humanity.
If we were to truly understand the demise of late twentieth century prosperity you will find that religious and natural intolerance are the underlying diseases. Religious intolerance only rarely becomes submissive because of the underlying predilection of humans to sin both against others but also towards God. The cure for that disease has always been the unmerited grace of God.
However throughout history and until very recently all humans, either as individuals or as communities continually had to deal with the natural law of planet earth. Just as with Babylon in the Biblical book of Genesis, urbanization has always been humanity’s best attempt at overcoming that reality.
What modern urbanization has done is create jungles much more hostile than there wild counterpart. Real noise and white noise of the city has the effect of sequestering the anxiety that without God we are really alone. The noise and the action keeps everyone running away from themselves in search of nothing attainable. As a consequence everything is never enough, because the yearnings of the human spirit can only be calmed by gifts of the spirit. By definition materialism is devoid of spirit and therefore can only make the journey more frustrating – like an addiction to narcotic drugs.
Contrary to what you hear from all the pundits, rich and famous, leaders in Washington and around the world, human enlightenment and knowledge is not going to overcome the vinegar pickle we have created, for salvation is not a human attribute.
We will learn that hope for the sake of hope is at best idolatry. At least hope in material stuff has a form and hopefully a function. We create money like it has no value, because in itself it has no energetic value. That energetic value and that wealth creation must come from humans with a capitalistic renaissance worldview. That worldview understands that human enterprise only functions successfully within the constraints of common moral and natural law. These laws are the reality of absolute limits and not human based wishful thinking nor evil manipulation.
That hopeful future is perhaps best described in an ancient song sung by Old Testament Jews on their way up to the Temple in Jerusalem for their God prescribed feasts. Psalm 121, pretty much summarizes the understanding of God’s grace as part of our own pilgrimage.
Psalm 121 – A Song of Ascents.
I will lift up my eyes to the hills—
From whence comes my help?
My help comes from the LORD,
Who made heaven and earth.
He will not allow your foot to be moved;
He who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, He who keeps Israel
Shall neither slumber nor sleep.
The LORD is your keeper;
The LORD is your shade at your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day,
Nor the moon by night.
The LORD shall preserve you from all evil;
He shall preserve your soul.
The LORD shall preserve your going out and your coming in
From this time forth, and even forevermore.
Podcast
>>PDF copy
>>Print view
There is beginning in this land and around the world a groundswell of common people sensing what seems to indicate that we are sojourners in an epic time.
Bankrupt are the bastions of American enterprise, the auto industry. It seems that like their railroad brethren, they did not recognize the business school standard, which they were in the transportation business, rather than creators of automobiles. Of course the railroads were helped to their demise by General Motors and Standard Oil, which bought up privately owned public transportation, shut them down, and eliminated true market choice for American land based conveyance.
Automobiles were preceded in stupendous change, by the meltdown catastrophe of the financial universe. From which the concept too big to fail has now redefined the wisdom of Forrest Gump, “Stupid is, as stupid does, don’t mean nothin’.”
Let’s see – cheap monetary policy, coupled with easy credit, financially leveraged to the utmost, speculating in unregulated commodities, or bundled in high-risk real estate securities did not last forever. It sure seems our enlightened leadership believed that it would and even more amazing, that they can bring it back just like before.
Of course the oil players are back at it again, betting that economic recovery and unlimited demand increases are just a fall economic recovery away.
Then recent news indicates that solar activity is at a long time low, creating cool temperatures and the potential for a greatly decreased world food supply. All the while global warming alarmists are still promoting an agenda, that mankind can control climate by limiting carbon emissions and animal flatulence, or just have everyone painting their roofs white.
What is missing in the debate of TV pundits discussing the this or that, is that it really isn’t about this or that at all. The real issue is the concept of human enlightenment. Broken down into its most basic tenet we see the inability of humanity to save itself from itself. The problem is not at all about the stuff, the problem lies within the philosophies or religions of man.
While many would say we need a religious revival to set the record straight, the history of religious revivals really isn’t that much different than what we have just discussed. Furthermore while they have had some localized effects, many times those effects are short lived and the accompanying legalism has quickly exacerbated any positive results.
What is needed is a common solution. What we describe as common sense. The problem with all this, in the above scenarios (and many more) seems to have been caused by a total lack of common sense, most of the time reinforced by common arrogance or narcissism.
Looking at our current state of affairs it looks like common sense does not apply. The reason for that is that our educational system does not recognize the reality of the common reality. Put another way we are all too specialized to understand anything outside our specialty. In essential liberal truth, we really are a product of our environment.
Just as the United States is the most capitalistic nation in history, it is also the most specialized. What we have failed to understand is the linkage is cause and effect. The success of capitalism, going back to Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” is based primarily upon the specialization of labor to do specific tasks and do them well.
Smith believed that an “Invisible Hand” governed the creation of wealth through the application of financial capital. The interpretation of just who or what constituted the hand was dependent upon the capitalist, God, karma, the Force, but for our discussion the important fact was that the “Invisible Hand” was not the hand of the capitalist entrepreneur. The capitalist used specialization of his work force to put the hand into motion thereby creating new wealth.
Just as with the Founders of the American republican experiment, that specialization always was to take place within a well-understood common moral framework. In other words there was a right and a wrong, there also was good an evil and human progress and enlightenment must always take place within that tension. The Founders and Smith understood the reality of natural law as the basis of common reasoning and regulation.
Furthermore they believed that wealth was best illustrated in the accumulation of private property. To believe that today’s consumerism is truly private property in the classic capitalistic model, seems to stretch the limits of credulity. Perhaps when consumerism is linked with excessive credit, the better model is a modern type of feudalism or slavery, which true capitalism should efficiently replace.
So back to the specialized auto industry. The car salesman sold you a dream of a gift of personal transportation that you deserved. The finance manager found some company that would finance the dream with nothing down. The service manager hoped you would return the vehicle for all routine services. The car dealer dreamed of being a pillar of the community. Together with the car manufacturer and the auto unions, everyone did quite well financially. All the specialists never looked beyond the present, because the future is always better than the past. That is the essence of the American Dream.
What got lost in the auto industry and on most Americans was the fact the car was just a mode of transportation, a quite expensive and generally reliable mode of transportation, but still just a car. Much of the expense and profit was created essentially for kitsch, only obtusely related to the transport reality.
A similar discussion could take place over the recent real estate bubble, but in that case much of the hype was for kitsch as a sound investment, one you could liquidate at anytime in the future for substantial gain.
The excesses of capitalism has long been a feature the American landscape. Perhaps the spin on real estate speculation being the most consistent. Our public land grants to railroads to build to the Pacific being one of the most overt. The concept of “build it and they will come, and you will get rich,” took on new meaning. The problem was if they came, the land could not support most of the comers, and those who managed to make it, didn’t make enough for the railroads to make a profit. The lack of common sense again shows its timely reality.
Throughout history there has been an enlightened effort to curb the excesses of capitalism. Most of those rely heavily upon some sort of enlightened government elite to moderate and regulate the robber barons, the speculators, or just the evil schemers. This enlightened minority is but a bureaucratic bumbling of specialization, again not understanding the principles of common natural law upon which true capitalism soundly based.
President Obama seems to be taking his election victory as a mandate to not let this current crisis go to waste, even though it seems that all he has done is to shift the deck chairs on the Titanic from the laissez faire deck to the new deal deck. His enlightened specialists don’t seem to realize that the world economy just hit a big iceberg, there is a hole in the hull, we are taking on water rapidly, and the pumps are failing. Thankfully we are told this will be all over soon. His enlightened specialists have come to our rescue, and lifeboats are not needed because, we can hope to change the iceberg through melting liquidity, (once called excessive debt).
Long before the Enlightenment came the Renaissance. Renaissance means essentially revival or rebirth. What the world needs now is a revived or reborn enterprise paradigm in which capitalistic wealth creation is again focused upon the Invisible Hand and not just the hand of man grabbing anything that he thinks he might want at the expense of others.
The Renaissance man was not known for his specialization but his generalization. The broad basis of the renaissance experience allowed for an unique perspective that a specialist could not comprehend. The proverb “A jack of all trades, master of none” seems to make good sense in the world of the specialist. In actuality many Renaissance leaders were truly broadly gifted and used those gifts to greatly develop both the breadth and depth of human civilization.
Simplifying greatly, the Renaissance began as human reason sought to understand a Creator who had designed human personalities to do more than struggle to exist and to take up space upon this earth. Mankind, created in the image of God, was uniquely given the task to create, not ex nihilo, but use his human gifts to recreate the given universe toward the fulfillment of human opportunities as stewards of God’s creation. This reordering of creation begins with the understanding of natural law, first relating to common human morality, but extending to all God’s wisdom, specifically through God’s word in unity with His creation.
As this humanization of western culture took place, about midway through the continuum from Renaissance to Enlightenment, occurred a profound Christian religious awakening called the Reformation. That Reformation again focused Christianity beyond mundane pious religious practices, to the finished work by the death of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, on a Middle Eastern cross for the justification of sinful humanity. Three days hence he was raised from the dead according to the scriptures and the testimony of many reliable witnesses.
In our context this gospel of Jesus Christ fulfilled not only the requirements of natural law but also the specific law of God required personal holiness, through the covenant of unmerited Grace. This reality is as wonderful today as it was two thousand years ago, but religious intolerance has severed the gospel’s linkage with common and natural law and human aspirations.
Fast-forwarding to the present world, conventional wisdom, is based upon total naturalism. God does not exist, hence natural law does not exist. When we speak of the “rule of law” the concept only includes human produced statutes and regulations. The former preeminence of natural law or even common law has been systematically expunged from the record.
Furthermore the human conscience is just a remnant of some primitive community affirmation ritual. This ultimately means that everyone does what is right in their own eyes. Taken to its true logical conclusion human civilization can no longer exist except as feudalism or fascism. Those who consider themselves more highly evolved attempt to rule others as a chosen elite. This we see all too common in those who today seek individual leadership. Therein lies the circle by which we return to feudalism and the dark ages, when human class structures dominated and unknown were the human virtues of freedom, liberty, and security.
A cumulative progress of common and specific revelations of God and nature led to both Smith’s opus “Wealth” and the founding of the American republic based upon the freedom of religious tolerance. That religious tolerance is still the most suppressed human freedom on earth and is again the focus of those specialists who seek to control the future by their grossly limited humanity.
If we were to truly understand the demise of late twentieth century prosperity you will find that religious and natural intolerance are the underlying diseases. Religious intolerance only rarely becomes submissive because of the underlying predilection of humans to sin both against others but also towards God. The cure for that disease has always been the unmerited grace of God.
However throughout history and until very recently all humans, either as individuals or as communities continually had to deal with the natural law of planet earth. Just as with Babylon in the Biblical book of Genesis, urbanization has always been humanity’s best attempt at overcoming that reality.
What modern urbanization has done is create jungles much more hostile than there wild counterpart. Real noise and white noise of the city has the effect of sequestering the anxiety that without God we are really alone. The noise and the action keeps everyone running away from themselves in search of nothing attainable. As a consequence everything is never enough, because the yearnings of the human spirit can only be calmed by gifts of the spirit. By definition materialism is devoid of spirit and therefore can only make the journey more frustrating – like an addiction to narcotic drugs.
Contrary to what you hear from all the pundits, rich and famous, leaders in Washington and around the world, human enlightenment and knowledge is not going to overcome the vinegar pickle we have created, for salvation is not a human attribute.
We will learn that hope for the sake of hope is at best idolatry. At least hope in material stuff has a form and hopefully a function. We create money like it has no value, because in itself it has no energetic value. That energetic value and that wealth creation must come from humans with a capitalistic renaissance worldview. That worldview understands that human enterprise only functions successfully within the constraints of common moral and natural law. These laws are the reality of absolute limits and not human based wishful thinking nor evil manipulation.
That hopeful future is perhaps best described in an ancient song sung by Old Testament Jews on their way up to the Temple in Jerusalem for their God prescribed feasts. Psalm 121, pretty much summarizes the understanding of God’s grace as part of our own pilgrimage.
Psalm 121 – A Song of Ascents.
I will lift up my eyes to the hills—
From whence comes my help?
My help comes from the LORD,
Who made heaven and earth.
He will not allow your foot to be moved;
He who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, He who keeps Israel
Shall neither slumber nor sleep.
The LORD is your keeper;
The LORD is your shade at your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day,
Nor the moon by night.
The LORD shall preserve you from all evil;
He shall preserve your soul.
The LORD shall preserve your going out and your coming in
From this time forth, and even forevermore.
Podcast