–JOHN CALVIN
TIME WAS, THE AMERICAN CHARACTER CONTAINED A strong Calvinist streak. It involved a sense of the prevalence of sin, particularly the sin of pride, in human affairs. And it inculcated wariness about perils to the soul lurking in everything, including–in fact, especially-in prosperity. Americans long ago banished such gloominess and learned to relax. They have risen to the sunlit uplands of today’s enlightened enjoyment of life. Let the good times roll.
Modern Americans have an index of the goodness of the times. It is the Dow Jones industrial average, and it is on a roll. It is 100 years old, having begun on May 9.6, 1896. It closed that day at 40.94. On Nov. 14, 1972, it reached 1000. It reached 2000 15 years later; four years after that it reached 3000. In another four years, it reached 4000. Nine months later it passed 5000. Now it has passed 6000.
There are few Calvinists now, few wet blankets at the movable feast of American advancement. And no acrid aroma of vinegar. What you smell is perfume.
In an afterword written for the 20th-anniversary edition of his seminal 1976 book, “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,” Daniel Bell writes: “It is striking that in every major city in the world, from New York to Helsinki to Tokyo, every large department store one enters displays cosmetics and fragrances spread across its ground floor.” It is striking evidence that what once was “the tension between asceticism and acquisitiveness” has been resolved in favor of acquisitiveness.
Until recently, writes Bell, modem capitalism was thought to depend on “the asceticism sanctioned by Calvinism and early Protestant thought, which exalted work as a calling and encouraged savings by the delayed gratification of impulses . . . Yet over time, the drive to acquisitiveness has won out. In fact, contemporary capitalism can exist only if the machinery of gratification and instant demand is well oiled, usually with cosmetic fragrance.” By now, “marketing and hedonism” have become “the motor forces of capitalism.” The “shift from production to consumption as the fulcrum of capitalism” was fueled by “the invention of the installment plan, the most’ subversive’ instrument that undercut the Protestant ethic. Against the fear of going into debt, there was now the fear of not being credit worthy.”
There may be some residual Calvinism in the American soul: the country is piling up unprecedented levels of consumer debt while insisting on the moral, as opposed to merely prudential, imperative for a constitutional amendment to require balanced budgets. But Americans seem content. And the complaint of conservatives, who sometimes seem to be the least content, is that today’s economic dynamism is too anemic. It is, perhaps, an odd conservatism which embraces so unconditionally the capitalist ethos. As Bell writes, that ethos involves “rejection of the past” and “commitment to ceaseless change,” which implies, inescapably, “the idea that nothing is sacred.” Surely some conservatives find that that last idea has a vinegary taste.
American conservatism needs what it once had, the spirit of John Adams, who (as described by Joseph J. Ellis in “Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams”) “seemed to seek out the illusions and excesses of the age, then press against them with all his might, as if he equated thinking with performing a set of mental isometric exercises.” Today Adams would push against the insufficient appreciation of the federal government’s historic contributions to two conservative goals, commercial vigor and the vitality of civil society. Consider the postal service.
Theda Skocpol, a Harvard sociologist, says that just as Prussia at one time was less a state with an army than an army with a state, the early United States was “not so much a country with a post office, as a post office that gave popular reality to a fledgling nation.” In the 1850s and 1840s more than three quarters of all federal employees were in the postal service, and between the Founding and the Civil War, 85 percent of the growth of the federal government was in that one department. Today’s conservatives, enamored of what Skocpol calls “a depoliticized and romantic localism,” should, she says, understand how the growth of the postal service contributed not to the suffocation but to the flourishing of intermediary institutions.
The ability of even the remotest communities to communicate beyond their boundaries stimulated a national consciousness, which was to come in handy in 1861. Special low postal rates enabled metropolitan newspapers to be distributed by mail, with smaller newspapers taking copy from them. “Voluntary associations,” writes Skocpol, “soon learned to put out their message in ’newspaper’ formats, to take advantage of the mail. Emergent political parties in Jacksonian America were intertwined with the federal postal system. Party entrepreneurs were often newspaper editors and postmasters, and postmasterships quickly became a staple of party patronage.” Today, comprehensive disparagement of the central government’s utility should not be a characteristic of conservatism, many of the sinews of which are in large organizations (e.g., the National Right to Life Committee, the Christian Coalition, the National Rifle Association) that contribute to civic vitality because they have such useful mailing lists.
So federal activism (the Interstate Highway System is a contemporary case in point) is not invariably part of a zero-sum transaction, subtracting from the strength of other sectors of society. Which is why conservatives, who control the government’s lawmaking branch, should remember the axiom (it is Paul Valery’s) that often “our most important ideas are those that contradict our feelings.”
