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Strip everything away, and what this argument is really saying is that freedom and political equality are to blame. Is that really where we want to hang our hats?
I will explain…
Let us set aside, until later, questions about the political system that the Enlightenment fostered (democracy, for shorthand). Let us focus instead on its key philosophical products.
The Enlightenment said this:
Using reason and logic, we have deduced what our instincts have been telling us for a while now: That ontological authority is a fiction. That there are no fixed classes of highborn and lowborn. That, “None comes into the world with a saddle upon his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.”
In most places, for most of human history, hereditary authority was the norm. It was simply accepted that some were born to rule and others born to be ruled. The Enlightenment set that notion on the path to extinction.
The results were profound. And arguably the most visibly potent results were economic in nature…
(“Capitalism” is a freighted term. For purposes of discussion, let us use the word “market.”)
Markets have existed as long as humans have been able to communicate and trade. Economic markets have, throughout history, varied in their degree of freedom. Some have been entirely free. Some have been more tightly managed by some form of government power.
Yet it was only after the Enlightenment that we began the economic rocket ride we’re currently on. Before that, for all of human history, nearly everyone lived on the modern equivalent of three dollars a day. In 1800, wealth (and thus living standards) suddenly hockey-sticked, and that figure rose by 2,900 percent—so suddenly that, from a bird’s-eye historical view, we can say that it happened almost overnight.
Why?
The Enlightenment’s gift was the recognition of ontological equality, and the growing political equality that emerged from that recognition. Once we began doing away with caste systems…once we began welcoming economic contributions from an ever-increasing portion of the human population…that is when the rocket ride began.
A lot has happened since—some of it really great; some of it monstrously awful. But are the philosophical revelations of the 17th and 18th centuries, and the open economic markets they engendered, really to blame for all the awful things?
The Marxists, and most of their leftist progeny, predictably say yes. “Capitalism,” in their parlance, ceases to be an economic term and becomes a synonym for…well, for pretty much everything that isn’t leftism. Western governments and their actions. Democracy. Exploitation. Baseball and apple pie. Colonialism. Poverty. Ever-cheaper consumer goods. Everything bad that happens in every country. It’s all “capitalism.”
As if exploitation hasn’t existed throughout all of human history. As if the USSR didn’t pick up right where the tsars left off and colonize everything they could get their hands on. As if poverty hadn’t been the norm for nearly everyone for nearly forever. The argument would be laughable if it weren’t taken so seriously in academia and throughout our institutions.
Nonetheless, the rest of us must not fall victim to making a sub-species of this same tendentious argument.
Without a doubt, we have gotten too materialistic. It’s pretty horrible to witness: Cheap garbage we don’t really need, but we keep buying. Consumption seemingly for the sake of consumption. An economy that depends on the sudden paroxysms of prodigious spending that occur at Halloween and Christmas.
We wonder—what about the things that really matter? Have we just become atomized spending machines? What happened to community?
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