Glorious Causes

The Irrationality of Capitalism, War and Politics

Yale R. Magrass, Charles Derber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367263195
• eBook ISBN: 9781000186383
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Drawing on historical cases of the American South before and after the Civil War, Europe – especially Germany – between the world wars, and the United States in Vietnam and its aftermath, this book takes a historical approach to explain the problems of capitalism and democratic leadership in western democracies today.

Capitalist democracies proclaim equality, material prosperity and comfort but produce extreme differences in wealth and power. They promise security and peace, but deliver frequent wars. The promises broken, elites often turn to other visions- partially borrowed from feudalism- to win public support. Nations turn to honor, nobility and war as a way of winning over workers and legitimating the capitalist system itself.

Capitalism's contradictions often have produced a cultural divide. One side, "cosmopolitans" – urban, see themselves as citizens of the world, not one region or country – identify as secular, preach multi-culturalism, entertain state welfare systems, and are cautious about going to war. Their opponents, "traditionalists," breed among people who feel left behind, anxiousness and insecurity, often embracing community, tradition, God and family.

The devastation of the world wars and the Third Reich led Europe to forgo visions of empire, militarism and glory and focus upon improving the quality of life for their own citizens. Although the United States does not need to experience comparable trauma, they should follow Europe's example- forget glory and instead build a better life for the American people. The last chapter will consider how such a change could emerge in the US and who might help fight for it.

1
An Irrational Cultural Divide

Cosmopolitans vs. Traditionalists

Chariots of Fire¹ won the Oscar as Best Picture in 1981. It is the story of Harold Abrahams, the son of a financier – a capitalist who may be rich, but as a Jewish Polish immigrant to England, lacked pure aristocratic blue blood. Harold entered Cambridge University immediately after World War I, when it was still largely a finishing school for aristocrats. At that time, Cambridge University provided upper class students with servants who had aristocratic airs and manners. When Harold was out of hearing range, the servants gossiped to each other that with a name like Abrahams, he wouldn’t be joining the choir.²

At Cambridge, Abrahams became a champion runner but to improve his skill so he would have a serious chance at winning in the Olympics, he hired Sam Mussabini, a Turkish professional trainer. The Dean of Cambridge summoned Abrahams to his office to advise Harold that hiring a coach is not something a gentleman does; he is to rely on his innate ability, implying it must be in his blood. When Abrahams refused to obey, the Dean remarked that as a Jew, Harold must worship “a different God.”

At the Olympics, the Prince of Wales met with most of the British running team. This is the same prince who later would become Edward VIII, the king who was forced to abdicate, ostensively for marrying Wallis Simpson, an American capitalist without blue blood, but more likely, because he supported Hitler. Even though Abrahams was a British citizen and the Prince supposedly represented all of the British people, Harold was not invited to meet him. While Abrahams’ victory would be Britain’s victory, the prince invited the rest of the British team to dinner. However, he remarked that if you win, I will pay, but if Abrahams wins, you will pay.

Economic Winners: Cultural Losers

Under capitalist values, hiring a trainer to help you win the race is admirable. Under feudal values, it is a different story. Few people would want to return to the material conditions of feudalism. The richest feudal king or queen could not imagine the cell phones, the computers, the cars, the televisions that even the relatively poor have under capitalism. Electricity and indoor plumbing were unknown. For a feudal peasant, 35 was a long life. Any food other than bread and porridge was a luxury. In their huts, peasants would sleep on straw covering the dirt floor. Even Karl Marx, perhaps the greatest opponent of capitalism who ever lived, believed capitalism had to mature in order to create the wealth and technology which would make possible the humanistic socialism he hoped would replace it.

There is no question that capitalist economics, science and technology triumphed over feudal approaches, but the dominance of capitalist values is less clear. The feudal community, at least the way it is romantically remembered, offered a sense of belonging, order and meaning which capitalism undermined. Capitalist ideology promises material prosperity and the opportunity to compete to achieve it. There is no concept of ultimate purpose. Indeed, some capitalist theorists dismiss the search for ultimate meaning as an irrational fantasy. Like science, capitalism offers external objectively observable criteria to measure success and failure – mainly how much wealth you possess. How well you do is apparent here on earth. Western Feudalism is grounded in Christian religion. Jesus comforted: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven … Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”³ The ultimate reward is in the world to come. It has been mocked as “pie in the sky when you die.” No matter how miserable you are in this life, there is always hope for better in the next. For a feudal peasant, faith was the highest virtue. The righteous feudal peasant accepted his place within the “great chain of being,” obeyed and did not challenge authority or hierarchy. These are the same traits a capitalist employer would want in his lower ranked employees including janitors, maintenance workers, assembly line crew and cashiers, but he would need independence and creativity among his professionals and managers.

Under capitalism, failure is failure. Your fate is yours as an individual. If you didn’t make it, there is something wrong with you and that’s it. The capitalist promise of equality is contradictory. Everyone has an equal chance to compete but competition produces winner and losers. So, it is an equality which produces inequality. As Chuck Collins⁴ pointed out, some people begin the race much closer to the finish line than others.

The feudal promise is vague enough that you can never be sure if it has been fulfilled or not. Whatever you can see in this world, you can never know what will happen in the next – especially since that world is inherently inaccessible to empirical observation. Even if all the empirical evidence suggests all you can look forward to is poverty, misery, disease and death, you can be vindicated as part of some greater cause. Your reward need not be individual; it can come through the victory of your community, nation or lord. To someone for whom capitalism did not deliver prosperity, an idealized memory of feudalism might be an attractive alternative. In the modern world, children are raised with feudal fairy tales, told by the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote them in the 1800s, after the emergence of capitalism. Most children see them animated by Disney, one of the largest capitalist corporations, as little girls dress as Disney princesses. Although capitalism may have destroyed feudalism, it may find that feudal values helped maintain stability and would thus have a motive to restore them, at least in mutated form.

For much of the population, who never achieved the capitalist dream, the feudal sense that they do not have to rely upon themselves as individuals, that they can be part of some greater cause can offer vindication and a path to self-respect. This discomfort with capitalism and nostalgic yearning for the feudal past may have always existed, but it becomes more acute during crisis, when there is all the less reason to have faith in the capitalist dream. Capitalists can promise to share the wealth with the 99% in times of prosperity when the pie is expanding. In the immediate years after World War II, American economic dominance was so assured, that a large part of the white 99% could be offered a prosperity their parents could hardly dream of. In the 1970s when America showed signs of decline, capitalists protected their wealth by sacrificing the security and prosperity of the rest of the population. They closed factories or moved them abroad. In response, Ronald Reagan came to power, not by restoring the standard of living but by referring to feudal values of honor, valor, tradition and national greatness. In the 1930s as Weimar Germany collapsed, the corporate elite allowed Hitler to come to power. The Nazis offered a more extreme feudal-like vision of racial greatness and glory, which required exterminating Jews.

Early capitalists were merchants – often Jews and Gypsies – who were shunned in an aristocratic Christian society which looked down upon usury and working for a living. Their main interest was making money, not glory or valor through combat. Compared to aristocrats, they had a practical utilitarian mentality and could hardly understand dying for honor. In pre-capitalist societies, war for war’s sake was often seen as an intrinsic good, a way to achieve honor and prove gallantry. As Christian aristocrats and knights led armies of peasants, they certainly sought plunder and booty, but they saw victory in battle as proof they held a special essence and were above the common lot. Courage and willingness to die showed worthiness. They sometimes claimed their higher status was sanctioned by God.

However as the capitalists shifted from peripheral outcastes to a class powerful enough to challenge the aristocracy for domination, they came to see the great fortunes that could be amassed by building vast empires through conquest. They learned that using armies to control other countries can lead to cheap raw materials, labor and markets. They saw that building weapons could be one of the most successful ways of achieving opulence. Although they may have not been particularly interested in militaristic glory, they embraced the money that could be made from war. They now needed a population who would be willing to fight and “support the troops.” However, few would be willing to kill and die to find oil for Exxon. Feudal promises of heroism and national greatness would be much more likely to bring people to cheerfully march to the frontline.

Irrational Rationality

Capitalists rejected feudal irrationality and substituted science and progress to win workers to their side. But this was a fatal strategy. Their rationality not only lacked the feudal appeal to emotion but also brought an “irrational rationality” that left workers behind and forgotten. It offered neither the appeal of feudal irrationality nor fulfillment of capitalist promises.

Unlike aristocrats, capitalists put profit first. In peace or in war, capitalist profit depends upon forever introducing new products and procedures. Innovation is essential, so it regards progress, science and technology as virtues. Market exchange requires treating virtually everything as a commodity, something with measureable quantifiable monetary worth. Even humans are commodities, whose labor can be bought and sold, either voluntarily or through slavery. Accordingly, capitalism also needs mathematics, rationality and logic, as it shuns the sacred – the idea that things and people have intrinsic worth, valuable in themselves and not reducible to something else. Ayn Rand treated capitalism as the fulfillment of rationality: “The moral justification of capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consistent with man’s rational nature.”⁵

Capitalism also promises equality – equality of opportunity – where everyone has an equal chance, regardless of where they were born, to rise or fall according to their ability and ambition. Capitalism may value rationality, but it carries its own irrationalities. You can ask how logical it is to claim equality when the average corporate CEO is paid over three hundred times the average worker.

Capitalism and science are actually twins, both born in the enlightenment of the 1600s and 1700s or the “age of reason,” when tradition was supposed be abandoned and science was supposed to replace faith as the path to knowledge and truth. Science elevates rationality to among the highest virtues. Although it treats faith as a dirty word, it rests on faith in the fundamentally unprovable assumption that all truth is ultimately learnable through human logic – largely mathematical – and observation. Enlightenment science prided itself as challenging feudal religious authority, but it created a new class of experts whose special wisdom was beyond question by anyone lacking their exceptional training and talent.⁶ Anyone who doubted them is dismissed as ignorant and biased, an unforgivable sin. Whatever they prescribe is not a personal opinion, but objective truth. Claiming such enlightened understanding can either breed awe or resentment. It can produce a sense in much of the population that either 1) they are so brilliant that we cannot understand them and must simply accept their judgment on faith, or 2) they are arrogant elitist snobs who hold us in contempt and we need not listen to them.

The enlightenment was a reaction against feudalism and led to the industrial revolution, along with political revolutions in Britain, America and France. Perhaps more than the rest, the French Revolution viewed itself as the logical outcome of the enlightenment. It illustrates the irrationality of rationality. In its attempt to overcome the alleged superstition of the Catholic Church, it created a new religion, a Cult of Reason, where reason became literally an object of worship. Churches, including Notre Dame, were converted into Temples of Reason, with festivals and ceremonies venerating enlightenment ideals. In the Feast of Reason, everyone would revere a woman, acting as the Goddess of Liberty and dressed in red, white and blue – treated as sacred colors.⁷ Statues of philosophers replaced statues of Jesus and saints. In their attempt to rationalize everything, they tried to measure almost everything as a power of ten. They introduced a new calendar which replaced the week with ten-day periods. That meant that peasants and workers would not get every seventh day off, but every tenth. This provoked anti-revolutionary feelings among peasants and workers who sensed that rather than being liberated from the aristocracy and the Church, their exploitation was being intensified.⁸ Some of the effort to use decimals to impose rational measurements was successful. The revolutionaries created the metric system, which is still in use in almost all non-Anglo-American countries.

By the early nineteenth century British industrial revolution, capitalism and science melded, again accompanied by the irrationality of rationality. Calling themselves utilitarians, English philosopher Jeremy Bentham and his disciple Edwin Chadwick developed a calculus weighing pleasure against pain and convinced Parliament that codling the poor did them a disservice by undermining their incentive to uplift themselves. Bentham was certain that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Not Such a Wonderful Life
• Chapter 1 An Irrational Cultural Divide: Cosmopolitans vs. Traditionalists
• Chapter 2 The South Shall Rise Again: Finding Glory in Defeat
• Chapter 3 Stabbed in the Back: The Master Race Shall Be the Master
• Chapter 4 America Becomes Exceptional But Europe Prospers
• Chapter 5 Weimar America: Vietnam, The Left, The Right & Reagan
• Chapter 6 Making America Great Again: The Reagan in Trump and the Failures of Anti-Trumpism
• Chapter 7 We Can’t Afford Glory: Turning Toward Equality and Human Survival
• Notes
• Index