Money can’t buy happiness, but it sure can help pave the way. In order to maximize human well-being, having one’s basic material requirements for life is necessary; food, shelter, clothing, and medical care. We could also add contemplation, recreation, and loving relationships to our list of basic requirements necessary for the development of well-being. While I certainly enjoy having nice stuff myself, I have also had a problem, ever since I was a child growing up in an upper-middle-class environment, with a rather troubling aspect of American culture that tends to judge, as Emerson once wrote, the “esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.” [1]
The mass consumerism and materialism that has become a staple of American culture, has actually deteriorated the well-being and happiness of a large portion of the American population. A recent article in Psychology Today titled, The American Nightmare, highlights how Americans just don’t seem to be very happy overall. According to a study cited in the article, there has been a rise in happiness levels in 19 of 26 countries over the last quarter of a century, but America is not one of them. Apparently, despite the awesome accumulation of material possessions, the U.S. population has become “more miserable.” [2]
We Americans tend to fill every moment with petty tasks and activities that seem to be designed to consume every moment of silent reflection and contemplation. Heaven forbid that an awkward moment of silence should happen to fall. Arthur Schopenhauer [3] once said that “people need external activity because they have no internal activity.” Along with this busyness, the acquisition and consumption of material possessions has reached epic proportions. Where did these “traditions” of continued busyness and the acquiring of material possessions as an end-in-itself come from? The seeds of these traditions can be traced back to the theology of John Calvin with his development of “predestination,” and the concept of “God’s chosen elect” – Ideas have consequences.
“Time is Money”
The Puritans that originally settled here; while often counted in along with our revolutionary heroes, as well as mischievously annexed in with our Enlightenment framers, brought along with them a poisonous meme. This meme has never widely been recognized as a poison, but rather somewhat unintentionally acquired the status of “highest ideal”, i.e., the “American dream.” This is the original source of America’s cultural disorder that we are living in today.
According to our Puritan founders, idle time allowed for spontaneous thinking and creativity, all of which were seen as evil in the minds of Calvin’s disciples. These folks were so adverse to any sort of passion that they actually toned down the book of Psalms, because it was thought to be too poetic. Work to the Puritans was a duty designed to consume all idle time. This idea of work as a “calling” and as a sense of duty designed to keep one busy, was later secularized by Ben Franklin in his famous statement “time is money.”
Franklin continues that “he that can earn ten shillings a day by his labor, and goes abroad, or sits idle, one half of the day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings besides.” Franklin served as a sort of middle-man between Calvin and modernity, in that he secularized Calvinism. As Max Weber notes in his analysis of Franklin’s sentiment, here we have the idea that it is the “duty of the individual” to constantly work “toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself.” As Weber maintains this is not “simply a means of making one’s way in the world, but a peculiar ethic.” [4] This ethic – work as an unpleasant duty or “calling”, combined with the endless attainment of money as an end in itself – would one day evolve into the mass confusion and loss of order that has now begun the steady and sure decline of American culture.
Calvin’s “Chosen Elect” and American Exceptionalism
John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” phrase was made famous by Ronald Reagan in his farewell address to the nation back in 1989. Continually we hear political pundits and news networks attempting to disingenuously annex John Winthrop and his merry band of travelers to men like Thomas Jefferson. This is a huge categorical error, a sort of polemic smoke-bomb designed to fog-up our social-political discourse. While Reagan did indeed employ this phrase to help articulate the ideas of freedom and liberty, the Puritan vision for this city was a perfect theocracy; a renaissance of the Jewish principle of God’s “chosen elect” entering the Promised Land.
This Calvinistic idea of God’s chosen elect that came ashore between the Massachusetts Bay and Charles River would eventually evolve into the concept of “American exceptionalism.” This idea ultimately lead to a sort of intellectual naiveté and psychological passivity, that morphed into the idea that nothing could go so wrong as to not be overcome by Americans because; according to popular opinion, there is a god that holds America in special favor: “America is God’s special little creature; America will always be the leader of the world. We will elect a savior that will stop the Obama cancer that is growing” – So they chatter. And so we push on, rolling rocks faster and faster, never looking back, resisting contemplative thought at every opportunity, faster and faster; stampeding over each other every Christmas season in celebration of American style gluttony. While all of this feeds and keeps the material economy steaming along, our psychological economy is near non-existence.
In the Puritan world, how was one to tell who should be counted among God’s “chosen elect?” This was a major centerpiece of early American culture, and the answer they came up with was that, the people whom God had blessed with material possessions were to be counted as among the “elect.” This concept of the chosen elect also had much to do with the religious tests that were required for holding public office in the colonial world, and is specifically why Madison, Jefferson, and others put an end to religious tests of any kind in Article VI of the Constitution.
This idea of the special elect eventually evolved into Americans equating net-worth with self-worth. The common American secular cliché “keeping up with the Joneses” can be traced back to this Calvinistic “elect” theology. You wouldn’t want to be kept out of the kingdom after all. This is why people go in debt today. Maintaining a facade is expensive, far beyond the grasp of many Americans – so, we charge it; we toss it on the card, we take out loans, and we go in debt. We must keep busy, and the fuel that sustains the perpetual busyness is money. The problem is to be found within ourselves, not the “other guy.” The reason the government is in debt is because the people are in debt. You can never change the government until there is a change in the psychology of the citizens within the polis. No election, no politician, no political party, and no flavor of Christianity will bring about the changes that are necessary for cultural development. Changing the individual people or entire political party in the government is easy; you just pull the lever and cast your vote. Changing one’s own psychology however, is extremely difficult, and is why most people focus on “the other guy.” Reading a book takes mental effort, watching TV does not. Sitting quietly and thinking an idea into the furthest reaches and darkest corridors of one’s own mind takes work. Parroting the opinions of others is easy.
Psychological Economy
Leo Strauss called attention to an understanding that many of our Founding Constitutional framers also held; that our flavor of republicanism required citizens who were cultured, or as the Greeks would say, “Familiar with things beautiful.” Strauss writes that a “democracy is the regime that stands or falls by virtue; a democracy is a regime in which all or most adults are men of virtue,” and that “virtue seems to require wisdom” with a large number of the citizens “having developed their reason to a high degree.” Democracy properly understood is “meant to be an aristocracy which has broadened into a universal aristocracy.” [5] The direct opposite occurred not long after America left the starting gates of history; when a great religious swell of gross-reductionism flattened the Enlightenment free spirit that held liberal education in highest esteem, hurling “society” into a nosedive, down into mass democracy and materialism. It was as if Madison and Jefferson had shot a flare into the night sky; it shone bright and illuminated the possible horizon, but quickly petered out. The Enlightenment demolished English aristocracy, and created an American meritocracy, which then crashed and burned into today’s mass mediocrity.
Franklin helped to secularize the Calvinistic principles that ultimately lead to the total rejection of any sort of aristocracy, or any higher authority. Even worse than this, leisure time itself became the American sin, which lead to our general disrespect toward education, educated intellectuals, and science that is so pronounced within American society today. Thomas Jefferson, reflecting the hopes of Enlightenment thinkers, wrongly predicted that America would soon be inhabited by a people who had moved on past religious superstition. As historian Gordon S. Wood reports; as Enlightenment Age men, our founders truly believed that the “gloomy superstition disseminated by ignorant illiberal preachers” would most certainly be “dispelled by the rays of science, and the bright charms of rising civilization.” [6] These men were not adverse to material commerce or personal wealth, but this new-found wealth produced by the creative forces of free markets, must be accompanied by a liberal, or cultivated mind. Religion in general, and Calvinism in specific, helped to derail the “original intent” of our founders.
Calvin’s “calling” mutated into the modern “specialists,” where one’s higher education now consists, to a great degree, of learning all the specific details of one’s particular rock they are to roll up the American hill for a price. This has helped to poison our psychological economy, transforming the human internal calling of one’s own nature into the drudgery and routine of the tolling iron bells, as depicted in Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, which captured in song the anxiety of modernity with the words “Don’t sit down; it’s time to dig another one.”
Liberal education, according to the understanding of Enlightenment thinkers, was far more than a means for getting a job, but was to serve as a “counterpoison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture,” and to the “inherent tendency to produce” [7] nothing but “specialists without spirit, [and] sensualists without heart.” The ironic thing is that this society of hard working specialists actually believes they have “attained a level of civilization never before achieved.” [8]
-Reflections In A Muddy Pond -Zetema Metadoxa
[1] Emerson, The Works of Emerson, Black’s Readers, (1942), p. 113
[2] Sandler, Lauren, Psychology Today, March/April, (2011)
[3] Schopenhauer, Arthur, Essays and Aphorisms, Penguin Books (1970), p.178
[4] Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Allen and Unwin, (1930), p. 17
[5] Strauss, Leo, Liberalism Ancient & Modern, University of Chicago Press, (1968), p. 4
[6] Wood, Gordon, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, First Vintage Books, (1991), p.330
[7] Strauss, Leo, Liberalism Ancient & Modern, University of Chicago Press, (1968), p. 5
[8] Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Allen and Unwin, (1930), p. 124