The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: Religious affiliation and social stratification

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Religious affiliation and social stratification

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Definition of stratification:

In sociology, social stratification is a concept involving the “classification of persons into groups based on shared socio-economic conditions … a relational set of inequalities with economic, social, political and ideological dimensions.”^[1] It is a system by which society ranks categories of people in a hierarchy ^[2] Social stratification is based on four basic principles: (1) Social stratification is a trait of society, not simply a reflection of individual differences; (2) Social stratification carries over from generation to generation; (3) Social stratification is universal but variable; (4) Social stratification involves not just inequality but beliefs as well.^[3]

In modern Western societies, stratification is broadly organized into three main layers: upper class, middle class, and lower class. Each of these classes can be further subdivided into smaller classes (e.g. occupational).^[4]

Several quotes:

the fact that business leaders and owners of capital, as well as the higher grades of skilled labour, and even more the higher technically and commercially trained personnel of modern enterprises, are overwhelmingly Protestant.

The more freedom it has had, the more clearly is the effect shown.

Participation in the above economic functions usually involves some previous ownership of capital, and generally an expensive education; often both.

There arises thus the historical question: why were the districts of highest economic development at the same time particularly favourable to a revolution in the Church?

But it is necessary to note, what has often been forgotten, that the Reformation meant not the elimination of the Church’s control over everyday life, but rather the substitution of a new form of control for the previous one.

But further, and especially important: it may be, as has been claimed, that the greater participation of Protestants in the positions
of ownership and management in modern economic life may to-day be understood, in part at least, simply as a result of the greater material wealth they have inherited.

On the other hand, Catholics prefer the sort of training which the humanistic Gymnasium affords. That is a circumstance to which the above explanation does not apply, but which, on the contrary, is one reason why so few Catholics are engaged in capitalistic enterprise.

The explanation of these cases is undoubtedly that the mental and spiritual peculiarities acquired from the environment, here the type of education favoured by the religious atmosphere of the home community and the parental home, have determined the choice of occupation, and through it the professional career.

National or religious minorities which are in a position of subordination to a group of rulers are likely, through their voluntary or involuntary exclusion from positions of political influence, to be driven with peculiar force into economic activity.

But the Catholics in Germany have shown no striking evidence of such a result of their position.

Thus the principal explanation of this difference must be sought in the permanent intrinsic character of their religious beliefs, and not only in their temporary external historico-political situations.

One recent writer has attempted to formulate the difference of their attitudes toward economic life in the following manner: “The Catholic is quieter, having less of the acquisitive impulse; he prefers a life of the greatest possible security, even with a smaller income, to a life of risk and excitement, even though it may bring the chance of gaining honour and riches. The proverb says jokingly, ‘either eat well or sleep well’. In the present case the Protestant prefers to eat well, the Catholic to sleep undisturbed.”

If, however, one wishes to make use of it at all, several other observations present themselves at once which, combined with the above remarks, suggest that the supposed conflict between other-worldliness, asceticism, and ecclesiastical piety on the one side, and participation in capitalistic acquisition on the other, might actually turn out to be an intimate relationship.

In particular, very many of the most zealous adherents of Pietism are of this origin. It might be explained as a sort of reaction against mammonism on the part of sensitive natures not adapted to commercial life…

Similarly, the remarkable circumstance that so many of the greatest capitalistic entrepreneurs—down to Cecil Rhodes—have come from clergymen’s families might be explained as a reaction against their ascetic upbringing.

However little, in the time of the expansion of the Reformation, it (or any other Protestant belief) was bound up with any particular social class, it is characteristic and in a certain sense typical that in French Huguenot Churches monks and business men (merchants, craftsmen) were particularly numerous among the proselytes, especially at the time of the persecution.

Gothein rightly calls the Calvinistic diaspora the seed-bed of capitalistic economy.

That of Calvinism, even in Germany, was among the strongest, it seems, and the reformed faith21 more than the others seems to have promoted
the development of the spirit of capitalism, in the Wupperthal as well as elsewhere.

In this purely introductory discussion it is unnecessary to pile up more examples. For these few already all show one thing: that the spirit of hard work, of progress, or whatever else it may be called, the awakening of which one is inclined to ascribe to Protestantism, must not be understood, as there is a tendency to do, as joy of living nor in any other sense as connected with the Enlightenment. The old Protestantism of Luther, Calvin, Knox, Voet, had precious little to do with what to-day is called progress.

Montesquieu says (Esprit des Lois, Book XX, chap. 7) of the English that they “had progressed the farthest of all peoples of the world in three
important things: in piety, in commerce, and in freedom”. Is it not possible that their commercial superiority and their adaptation to free political institutions are connected in some way with that record of piety which Montesquieu ascribes to them?

Wat ek hier leer is dat Weber probeer sê dat daar ‘n duidelike verskil in ambisie is tussen die Protestante en die Katolieke, met die gevolg dat die Protestante baie meer prominent op die Kapitalistiese mark verskyn. Hy noem bv dat die Dominees en die Besigheidsmanne gewoonlik die aandag van die vreemdes getrek het in ‘n besigheidsin. Wat hy ook opmerk is dat spesifiek in die Calvinisme is hierdie vooruitstrewende gedrag baie prominent, meer as in die Luteraanse Protestantisme, hoekom sal ons nog uitvind, maar hy merk dit ook op. As gevolg van die vooruitstrewende neigings van die Protestante het daar uit die aard van die saak ‘n klasse verskil begin ontstaan omdat nie almal hierdie gees van vooruitgang in hulle gehad het nie en so en die gaping tussen klasse begin. Besigheidsmanne en Dominees het saam gesels. Wat hy ook noem vir die moontlike ontstaan van hierdie neiging na Kapitalisme in die Protestantisme is tweeledig. Eerstens sê hy dit kan wees dat die Peitisme wat ontstaan het ‘n reaksie kan wees teen die Mamonisme (geldgod) en so ook heeltemal hulself weerhou het van die kommersiele lewe. ‘n Ander opvatting kan wees dat Kapitalisme geseevier het omdat van die grootste entrepreneurs se pa’s self dominees was en juis teen die lewe van weerhouding gerebeleer het en daarom juis die weelde wou ervaar en besit.

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Dit was dan Religious affiliation and social stratification

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17/06/2012

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: Author’s Introduction

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Author’s Introduction

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Unlimited greed for gain is not in the least identical with capitalism, and is still less its spirit. Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse.

We will define a capitalistic economic action as one which rests on the expectation of profit by the utilization of opportunities for exchange, that is on (formally) peaceful chances of profit.

Everything is done in terms of balances: at the beginning of the enterprise an initial balance, before every individual decision a calculation to ascertain its probable profitableness, and at the end a final balance to ascertain how much profit has been made.

For the purpose of this conception all that matters is that an actual adaptation of economic action to a comparison of money income with money expenses takes place, no matter how primitive the form.

But in modern times the Occident has developed, in addition to this, a very different form of capitalism which has appeared nowhere else: the rational capitalistic organization of (formally) free labour.

The frequent use of day labourers led in a very few cases—especially State monopolies, which are, however, very different from modern industrial organization—to manufacturing organizations, but never to a rational organization of apprenticeship in the handicrafts like that of our Middle Ages.

The modern rational organization of the capitalistic enterprise would not have been possible without two other important factors in its development: the separation of business from the household, which completely dominates modern economic life, and closely connected with it, rational book-keeping.

For without the rational capitalistic organization of labour, all this, so far as it was possible at all, would have nothing like the same significance, above all for the social structure and all the specific problems of the modern Occident connected with it.

The modern conflict of the large-scale industrial entrepreneur and free-wage labourers was entirely lacking. And thus there could be no such problems as those of socialism.

Hence in a universal history of culture the central problem for us is not, in the last analysis, even from a purely economic viewpoint, the development of capitalistic activity as such, differing in different cultures only in form: the adventurer type, or capitalism in trade, war, politics, or administration as sources of gain. It is rather the origin of this sober bourgeois capitalism with its rational organization of free labour.

When these types have been obstructed by spiritual obstacles, the development of rational economic conduct has also met serious inner resistance. The magical and religious forces, and the ethical ideas of duty based upon them, have in the past always been among the most important formative influences on conduct. In the studies collected here we shall be concerned with these forces.

the problem which is generally most difficult to grasp: the influence of certain religious ideas on the development of an economic spirit, or the ethos of an economic system.

In hierdie inleiding stel die outeur slegs wat hy poog om te bewys en hoe hy tewerk gegaan het om sy stellings te bewys. Hy is duidelik van mening dat die vorming van kapitalisme grotendeels beinvloed was deur die invloed van geloofsisteme, en daaroom wil hy sê dat kapitalisme vinniger posgevat het in die negatiewe sin in die weste vanwee ‘n mindere toewyding aan enige religieuse waarde. Die ooste aan die ander kant het egter steeds langer meer waarde aan die religie geheg en so, al was hulle voor met sekere tegnologiese uitvindsels, het hulle steeds nie onder die groot dwang van kapitalisme beland tot baie later nie. Dus, die groot dryfveer agter hierdie sosiale studie van die kapitalistiese kultuur, is vir die outeur die groot vraag na geloofsisteme, en watter rol dit het op die groter sisteme van die samelewing…

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Dit was dan die Author’s Introduction

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14/06/2012

Transmitting Culture: 7.

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Hoofstuk 7 – Ways of Doing

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Ways of Doing

The research programs implied by a mediological perspective can be divided into two branches. One side favours diachrony, asking by which networks of transmission and forms of organization a given cultural legacy was constituted. On the other side, with more importance given the synchronic cross-cut, the question is how the appearance of a new system or equipment modifies an institution, an established theory, or precodified practice.

In short, whether one surveys, so to speak, the meteor craters resulting from an unexpected object’s impact on a mental planet or reconstitutes the fluidities of magma behind forming eruptive rock, it is the shock of heterogeneous elements that will interest the observer.

Culture and technology move together and cannot do without one another: the two enemy sisters do not get along but must come to a working compromise.

Out of negative protestation there can arise a positive mutation (as every new object that is made intelligible transforms the frames of intelligence itself).

Three gestures in this direction fall unpremeditatedly into line: decentering, materializing, and dynamizing.

Decentering

There is clear evidence, however, for a causal complex in which the popularity of journalism followed from the steel railway. Industrialized mass transport enlarged printed matter’s sphere of circulation; it determined the industrialization of the press (the daily newspaper costing one sou) and brought massive influxes of money onto the intellectual.

This shift in emphasis, from the better – to the lesser-known, can be called the mediological indexation of a phenomenon. It puts what appears marginal at the very center.

Faced with a doctrine that is already constituted and presents itself as an autonomous whole, attention must be directed from literal meaning-content to the frameworks that administer belief in that content.

What institution gave rise to the indoctrination and put it across? How was its doctrine propogated, inculcated, and reproduced? Which models of conformity did it follow?

This complex in its turn served to set down, store, and circulate traces in a manner characteristic of a given, historically determined mediasphere: the logosphere, or age of orality and its first inscriptions in writing; the graphosphere, or age of print; and the videosphere of recorded images and sound, digitized and pixellated sign-pictures, and unimedia.

Some estimates are that half the species that have ever lived have become extinct since the first appearance of life on earth. A good number of ideological species encounter a similar fate, at the hands of their surroundings’ selective pressures (technological Darwinism is pitiless).

Every culture is an adaptive response to surroundings (Jacques Ruffie), and even if the “one species, one niche” principle does not apply mechanically in these more subtle matters, the technological niche of the videosphere proved fatal to a cultural tradition tending to put the (invisible) future before and above the (perceptible) present.

Before our very eyes there has occurred a slow disintegration of that grand European mosaic of the graphosphere. They had garaunteed the social viability of a bookbound culture within an ecosystem that was invisible because shared (with the internal ventilation of its pertinent oppositions).

How much thought does the myopic give to his glasses, except after misplacing them? (Can the fish discover water?)

Is it not by de-ideologizing ideologies that one can understand their appearance as well as disappearance?

The intended decentering crosses things and people, grasping relations of force incorporated into produced works that can in turn modify those relations further.

For the birth of the Artist, as someone practising a liberal profession and not just an artisanal or mechanical art, was as little spontaneous and universal an occurrence, and as intricately orchestrated, as was the birth of the Intellectual to public and symbolic prominence in the nineteenth century.

looking at the lookers, rather than the varnished veneer of canvases themselves.

In sum, at everything that is deployed to display and solemnize works of art. A careful study of this well-handled distraction, this periphery of cultural validation, puts us on the trail to a quite simple truth, which is not demystification but restoration of an aesthetic wholeness: art and the faith we put into it are one and the same.

Materializing

Civilization, insisted the historian Charles Seignobos, is roads, ports and quays. It has become so natural to speak of culture, while forgetting civilization, that our elaborate normative displays hide from view the basic levers of interaction and negotiation with things both inert and living.

Cultivated culture stands like a column covered with glorious signatures; technological culture is the poor relation, reduced to anonymous familiarities. With cultivated culture, the proper names last longer than the works; with technological culture, the inventors are effaced behind their inventions. Fire, the wheel, and steel were and remain signature-less, like the sewing machine.

Within the notion of artifex we persist in dissociating the (mechanical) artisan from the (liberal) artist. We tend to see only the painter in the figure of Leonardo, while he saw himself as an engineer.

As we pass from the book as text to the book as object, the history of the book could risk erasing that of literature.

Overvaluing the code and undervaluing the channel was yesterday’s semiocratic indulgence. Stopping before getting to the referent, the mediocrat might succumb to the opposite realist fallacy: overestimating the channel at the code’s expense.

Dynamizing

One needs to produce a complex schematic outline of flows that joins such media to the corresponding places and spheres of activity that diffuse them: the court, salons, marketplaces, cafes, public gardens, booksellers, and libraries. Oral transmission and written communication are relayed through these crossings, the first amplifying the second. So, the sphere of ideas has happily been broadened, but the entirety of the process is still conceived in terms of communication: the force of ideas lies in how widely they are spread.

Out of this came the capital formation, richer and thus less known than “the medium is the message”, that “method engenders doctrine”.

The observation can be extended to sites of sociability, the linchpins of that area of activity between the private sphere and the domain of the state that is today called “public sphere”.

The intermediary functions of images evolve at the crossroads of our belief systems and our mechanical outfittings.

Scouting out products, controlling technical operations, identifying consumer goods – all at a distance and often directed by the pressure of saving time (which dictate the semiotic efficiency of such things as logos, designer labels, brand names, and videos) – all of this falls within the regime of the visual when the production of an image of the world no longer corresponds to a lived experience of this world.

Hoe vinniger alles beweeg, hoe vinniger moet ‘n kultuur geskep word (‘n skynkultuur) deur beelde wat ‘n sekere item identifiseer en nie meer die item self nie, wat weer dinge aanjaag. ‘n Kultuur van al hoe vinniger beweeg en nie meer kan byhou nie en nou nuwe tegnologie skep om te probeer om by te hou maar in effek die gaping net groter maak.

A Disciplinary Proviso

The educated wager is that by tugging on the thread of the how, a good portion of the why can also by unravelled.

Permit me for an instant to suspend my judgement, bracket your message and ends, your perfections and truths, your salvational values, so that I my consider simply your comings and goings, your vectors and vehicles, the living stuff that conferred on you living from and without which you would never have arrived here among us.

Against the Stream

Knowledge was reduced to plays of language; history to a sequence of grand narratives; philosophy to a hermeneutics; and our most humble practices all became languages or grammars. Human action itself was labelled “communicational”.

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Dit was dan Hoofstuk 7 – Ways of Doing

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