How Juvenal! – The Fourth Estate

The poet known as Juvenal – his full name was Decimus Junius Juvenalis - was born in the Volscian town of Aquinum (1) in central Italy around the middle of the first century Anno Domini. He studied rhetoric and law under Quintillian and served in the Roman military before obtaining a low level position in the Roman bureaucracy. A few decades later, still in the same position, and having grown very bitter about it, he picked up his stylus and turned to satire. Satire in those days was a more specific genre of writing than it is today. Then as now it was social commentary full of biting attacks on public personalities, but then in ancient Rome it had to be set in verse and composed in hexameter. Juvenal’s first attempts at satire landed him in hot water. He insulted the court of Caesar, and especially Domitian’s favourite, the actor Paris – presumably in the lines found in his seventh Satire although the book in which this has come down to us was not published until much later - and Domitian, not being known for his appreciation of this sort of thing, furiously sent him away to exile in Egypt. The exile was not long – it ended when Domitian was assassinated and Nerva became Caesar – but, having lost his estate and his position, he returned impoverished to Rome, where he became more bitter than ever as is plain to be seen in his extent writings – five books, containing sixteen Satires, published in the first four decades of the second century.

In the days when Juvenal was more commonly read than today the third and the tenth were the Satires which were general favourites. The third, which can be found in Book I of the Satires, depicts Rome as a city that has grown too big and hopelessly corrupt by acting as a sewer into which all the dregs of the known world drained, leaving no room for an honest but poor Roman. This Satire was imitated countless times in the period between the Renaissance and the death of classical education. One of the better known imitations was London, the first major work published by Samuel Johnson shortly after he moved to that city from his native Lichfield. It was a not-so-subtle attack on the Whig government of Robert Walpole and earned Dr. Johnson his first critical acclaim, from none other than Alexander Pope.

If Juvenal’s Satires themselves are less known today than they used to be, phrases from them are still universally recognizable. It is a rare bird (“rara avis”, Satire VI, line 165) who has never heard the expression “bread and circuses” (“panem et circenses”, Satire X, line 81) used to describe the means by which politicians bribe the masses into complacency. As familiar as these are is the famous question posed in the sixth Satire, which is by far the longest of them all, comprising in itself the entirety of Book II.

This Satire is addressed to someone named Postumus who is on the verge of marriage. Juvenal attempts to dissuade him by arguing that the last time female chastity could be found on earth was in the mythical, primordial, Golden Age before the Olympians overthrew the Titans and that Roman woman in particular had become so depraved that a man would have to be insane to marry one of them when he could opt for suicide or sodomy instead. That summarizes the first thirty-seven verses alone. From this point on Juvenal’s esteem for women enters into a downward slide as the poem continues for another six hundred and six lines, not including the thirty-four lines which in the manuscript discovered by E. O. Winsted in the Oxford library are inserted between lines 365 and 366. (2) Reading him today, one would almost think he had the #Me Too Movement in mind. Truly, he was a man ahead of his time.

The famous question actually occurs twice in the Satire, the first time in lines 346-347, the second time in lines 31-32 of the “Oxford fragment.” In both contexts, Juvenal begins by saying that he hears from his old friends all the time the advice to lock up your wife and keep her indoors. It is in response to this that he asks:

sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (3)

This can be translated “but who will guard the guardians themselves” or “but who will watch the watchmen themselves” or even “but who will police the police themselves.”

The last of these translations would sound extremely odd in the context of what Juvenal is discussing but it fits well with the broader application that has often been assigned to the question. This pertains to the state in its role of administering and enforcing the law. This role has often been compared to that of a watchman. The word Plato used for the governing class of his hypothetical ideal city could be rendered custodes in Latin, just as both words are conventionally rendered “guardians” in English. Minarchists, that is to say, those who argue that the state should be as small and limited as is consistent with law and order, (4) frequently use the metaphor of the night-watchman to illustrate what they see the role of the state to be. Transferred from its original reference and applied to the state in this capacity, Juvenal’s question becomes the question of who keeps tabs on the civil authorities and holds them accountable for how they use and abuse their power.

Ideological democrats would answer “the people”, but this is extremely naïve. It has been recognized since ancient times that it is the leaders who are able to sway the masses into supporting them who are the most likely to severely abuse civil authority. A much better answer is the old Tory answer of “God.” The Whigs, and all the liberals who have come after them, regarded the “divine right of kings” as a license for the abuse of power. If the king gets his authority from God, they reasoned, he can do whatever he wants. This is totally fallacious, of course, because if regal authority comes from God, this means that the king is accountable to a Power that is both absolute and incorruptible, for how he uses that authority. A king who believes in God, and recognizes God as the source of his authority, is far less likely to abuse that power, than some demagogue who climbs to power through the support of the people and who in his heart recognizes no power greater than himself.

For the sake of making a point however, I am going to take the Tory answer, which is how I myself would answer the question, off of the table. If we answer “God” and by “God” mean God as He is conceived of in Christianity – the Omnipotent, Eternal, Unchanging Being Who is Perfect in His Justice, Righteousness, Mercy and Love – then we have a final answer to the question. If, however, we restrict the answers to those involving some sort of human agency, then we find that the question keeps repeating itself. Remember that the question is “who guards the guardians” or “who watches the watchers.” Any time you answer that question by naming some individual person, group of individuals, or human institution, these become the new “guardians” or “watchers” and the question must be repeated with regards to them. As long as you keep answering the question in this way, the question keeps repeating itself.

There is an institution that has long regarded itself as being the answer to the question at least insofar as it is asked in regards to the civil authority. I refer to the news media. In the eighteenth century, the news media - which at the time was synonymous with the press because there was no other medium - was dubbed "the fourth estate" (5), an allusion to the three estates of the realm – the clergy, nobility, and common people – and their representatives in Parliament. The expression suggested that the press was a more powerful estate than all of the others combined because it held them all accountable by reporting everything they did. Obviously, only a privately owned, independent press could fulfil this role with regards to the state. A publicly owned press would have the same power to shape and mold public opinion, but it would do so in the service of state interests rather than in the interest of holding the state accountable. Think Pravda and the rest of the controlled press in the former Soviet Union.

The mere existence of a public news medium, like the BBC or the CBC, is not enough to negate the news media's role as the watchers of the state, when it is a single voice among many, competing in a marketplace of information that is still a reasonably free forum. That can hardly be said to describe the unhealthy situation in Canada today. The Crown broadcaster has long been staffed primarily by adherents of the Liberal Party, and for this reason the CBC only subjects the government of the day to intense, adversarial, scrutiny, when the Conservatives are in power. The government agency responsible for regulating the electronic communications media, the CRTC, is also staffed mostly by Liberal-sympathetic civil servants. To make matters much worse, in the period since the Liberals returned to power in 2015, they have bailed out to the tune of billions, much of the private sector of the news media. Ironically, the Liberals justified the bailout of the media by pointing to how essential the media is in a free and democratic country, even though the bailout compromised the very independence that allows the media to function in this role.

The result can be seen everywhere today. For months Parliament has not been able to properly hold the Prime Minister and his Cabinet accountable. It adjourned at the beginning of the ill-advised pandemic lockdown, and when it resumed in April, it was at a much reduced capacity as the Liberals wanted and obtained with the help of the socialists and environmentalists. The Liberals have now succeeded, with the same backers, in sending Parliament into recess until the fall. When the previous Conservative government had Parliament prorogued for a much shorter period than this, the outcry from the media was deafening. They regarded this to be a mortal threat to democracy. Now there is mostly silence. Meanwhile, throughout this entire period, the Prime Minister has been giving brief updates almost every morning, in small press conferences admission to which has been tightly controlled to exclude unsympathetic and hostile questioners. There has been little objection to this with the exception of that which came from the small, private, online news companies that have been so excluded. Until earlier this week when a CBC reporter actually dared to put him on the spot with regards to the racial situation in the United States he had faced only Mickey Mouse questions tailored to fit his own agenda. The Canadian media has largely abdicated its role as watcher of the state.

A much worse problem exists, however, when the fourth estate fails to realize that quis custodiet can be asked of itself as well. Its power, let us never forget, comes from the same source as that of the archetypical populist demagogue, namely the ability to sway the masses and shape public opinion. This is a power that is no less dangerous in the hands of a press that does not regard itself as being accountable to anyone other than itself than it is in the hands of a would-be tyrant. Indeed, it is even more so.

Consider what has been happening south of the border for the last week. Race riots, with the looting, arson, destruction and mayhem that these entail, have sprung up in cities across the United States. The media bears the lion’s share of the culpability for this. For decades they have been deliberately distorting the facts about issues pertaining to race in the United States. Through over-reporting and hyper-editorializing every incident in which an unarmed black man is shot by a white policeman, and under-reporting all other police shootings that don't fit this pattern they have created the contra-factual impression in the general public that cops, especially white cops, use unarmed blacks for target practice. In reality, and the data clearly shows this, more whites are killed by the police than blacks every year. This fact is all the more significant in that the data also consistently shows that blacks commit a much larger percentage of the violent crime in the United States than their percentage of the American population, and that their percentage among the victims of police shootings is smaller than their percentage among violent crime perpetrators. The data also shows that police, white and black, are far more likely to shoot members of their own race than the other. The media does not widely report the studies and statistics that document this data, they instead make the specific incidents that fit the pattern they are looking for into their highlighted and headlined story for days, weeks, months on end. They trot out all of the victim’s family and friends, to eulogize and emote, in what is a cynical exploitation of these people’s pain, loss, and suffering in order to bully into silence anybody who tries to counter their narrative spin by pointing to the data. “How can you be so cold as to be talking about facts and statistics when these people are suffering?” is what their non-argument boils down to. Then they get pop singers, movie and television actors, and every other celebrity they can find to weigh in on the matter with their own uninformed and irrelevant opinion. This latter point should be sufficient to clue people in to the fact that they are seeing actors putting on a show instead of honest, truth-seeking, journalism. It is possible, of course, that they think of what they are doing as some sort of a "noble lie" justified by the need to raise “awareness” of white “racism” or some such rot. To someone who does not share their activist outlook, however, it appears more like they are trying to incite a race war, and their behaviour over the last couple of weeks would bear out that interpretation. Apart from giving the death of George Floyd the same treatment described above, they have encouraged and promoted what they persist in describing as peaceful protests, despite the looting and burning. Evidence abounds that these riots are not spontaneous uprisings in response to Floyd’s death but highly organized affairs, well supplied with transportation, bricks, etc., indicating that they were planned well in advance. The mainstream progressive media has for years been whitewashing the Blackshirt actions of the growing Antifa movement which is undoubtedly providing the organization here, suggesting a high degree of media complicity in producing this anarchy.

It is imperative, therefore, today, that we turn our serious attention to the question of who watches the watchers, with regards to the self-appointed watchers of the state themselves, the fourth estate.

(1) Now called Aquino.

(2) The same manuscript inserts a much shorter fragment after line 373.

(3) In the Oxford fragment this does not end with a question mark but a comma because it is followed by the relative clause “qui nunc lasciuae furta puellae hac mercede silent?” which basically says that the guardians take payment to keep silent about the girl’s mischief. The larger context in the fragment is interesting in itself. It begins with an attack on effeminate males which, if had been written today, would have landed the poet in exile again for some phobia or another, even if he had not already been driven out by the feminists over what he said in the larger body of the poem. Juvenal complains that theses have way too much influence over the minds of women and from this launches into a warning to husbands who rely upon eunuch servants to guard their wives’ fidelity. The gist of the warning is that there are plenty of Lotharios willing to masquerade as pansies in order to trick husbands into becoming parties to their own cuckolding and so the husbands need to make sure that the eunuchs are eunuchs indeed. This leads in to where the earlier discussion is repeated.

(4) This view is often ascribed to libertarians, who do indeed hold it, but libertarianism is more properly a specific set of arguments for minarchism rather than minarchism itself.

(5) Thomas Carlyle attributed it to speech given by Edmund Burke in 1787.

GTN Tory Classics 4: The Economic Age

One of the things I dislike the most about contemporary politics is the exaggerated importance it attaches to economics. This is true both of those who favour economic freedom and private property on the one hand and those who believe in a state-planned economy and/or collective ownership of property on the other.

This does not mean I attach no importance to these matters. I believe in private property and in laws protecting private property. I believe that economic decisions are best made by those who will be most affected by the outcome of those decisions. For most economic decisions this amounts to the free market position - that people are themselves the best judges of what to buy and what to sell, how much to spend or ask for in a market exchange. Some economic decisions, however, must be made by the leaders of communities or the governments of countries. These are decisions whose outcome affects the entire community or country.

Examples of the first kind of economic decision include decisions as to what kind of career to train for, whether to stay in a job or look for a new one, whether to open a new business or seek employment, whether to save, invest,or spend one's income, and, if one has this option, what other than essentials to buy with one's income.

Examples of the second kind of economic decision include decisions as to whether a country needs domestic production of a particular commodity or whether it is better to rely upon foreign imports and decisions as to how much and what kind of infrastructure to build and maintain out of the public purse.

These decisions cannot be made in isolation from each other, of course. The decision a government takes, to protect its domestic iron industry, because a consistent supply of foreign iron is threatened by war, will affect the choices of those buying and selling iron and deciding whether to go into an iron-related line of work. Likewise, economic decisions at the level of a community or country, cannot properly be made without taking people's personal economic choices into consideration.

In 2009 I wrote a series of economic essays, most of which
were arguments for economic liberty and against socialism. It ended with "The Free Trade Cult", which argues that history demonstrates that free trade doesn't work the way economic liberals say it does. I intend to post several of the essays from this series including "The Free Trade Cult". The first essay in the series, the one which follows, was "The Economic Age". This essay came first, because it contained the most important thing I wished to say about economics - that we, whether we be capitalists or socialists, place too much importance on economics.

The Economic Age


By Gerry T. Neal
June 2, 2009

“The age of chivalry is gone. -- That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.”

Those famous words were spoken by Edmund Burke in 1793, in response to the murder of Marie Antoinette by the revolutionaries in France. 2 years previously the 18th Century Whig statesman had written Reflections on the Revolution in France in which he rejected the abstract, rationalist, planning that led to the horrors of the French Revolution which had only just begun, and embraced the Tory view of traditional, organic society in which authority, rights, and liberty were firmly established by prescription. He had seen, even then, where the Revolution was headed.

Clearly, Burke did not think very highly of economists. What did he mean by the word “economist”? The context of Burke’s remarks would suggest that “economist” like “sophister” and “calculator” was being used to describe a class of people who rejected the noble sentiments of the age of chivalry – the gallantry and honor that, as Burke had just remarked, should have caused “ten thousand swords” to leap to Marie Antoinette’s defense. These people replaced these sentiments, with numbers, cold reason, and pragmatic materialistic calculations of their own self-interest.

Burke’s lament, was over seeing the day when such people would become dominant, when society would be rationally planned from the top down, and when people would be primarily guided by cold, rational, materialistic, pragmatic motivations in their everyday decisions rather than by noble sentiments and loyalties. He believed, that much of what made life worth living, which he summed up in the phrase “the unbought grace of life”, would fall by the wayside and perhaps be lost in such a society.

Burke was correct in his beliefs and his predictions. We see the evidence all around us. Far too many people identify “the good life” with obtaining material possessions and dismiss concepts like honor, loyalty, virtue, and character. The concept that true happiness is not related to how much you have compared to other people but to being satisfied with what you have and where you are, while familiar to the ancients and the great Christian ethicists, is alien to such people. This is true regardless of whether the rational materialist favors “capitalism” or socialism.

That does not mean that economic questions are unimportant or that “capitalism” and socialism should be regarded as equally good or equally bad.

Economics, a term derived from the Greek word for the management of a household, is today used to describe the discipline which studies the mechanics of the production, trade, and consumption of material goods and services. Thought on these subjects has been recorded for millennia, of course, but as a distinct formal discipline economics was only in its infancy stage in the 18th Century. While the nature of the discipline is such as to make it especially attractive to people with the rationalist, materialistic mindset Burke decried, it is by no means necessary for one to be a rationalist, materialist to form an educated opinion on these subjects.

Edmund Burke’s own views on economics are known to us. He was a friend of Adam Smith who published his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. Smith, who died in 1790, once remarked that Burke was the only man he had ever known who “thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do, without any previous communications having passed between us”. Burke, for his part, had heaped praise on Smith’s book. This suggests that Smith’s comment was no exaggeration.

Smith’s book marked the beginning of what is now called classical economics. It is both a history of the evolution of production and commerce and an argument for the free market. The specialization resulting from the division of labor results in greater production of any given product. The same principle applies on a larger scale to the specialization resulting from commerce. As everybody produces more and more of the product they specialize in to sell to others who in turn are producing other products, the general wealth of the nation increases, everybody is better off, and the best thing the government can do to facilitate the process is to keep out of the way.

Later, the term “capitalism” would be applied to Smith’s system. This was not Smith’s term. It was in fact coined by Karl Marx to refer to the period in his dialectic understanding of history, in which feudalism was supplanted by industrialism and commerce, and which Marx believed would be supplanted by revolutionary socialism leading to his communist utopia in its turn. The identification of Marx’s “capitalism” with Smith’s free market probably came about because Smith’s glorification of commerce could be seen as championing the activities and interests of the emerging bourgeoisie class. Marx, who saw everything in terms of class conflict, identified the bourgeoisie as the heroes of the capitalist revolution against feudalism and the villains in the coming revolution of the proletariat.

It is interesting that Marx regarded capitalism, not as a conservative or reactionary force in society, but a revolutionary one. As Marx was a champion of the revolutionary cause this observation on his part has to be regarded as praise of capitalism, which may seem odd, but actually makes sense when one considers his view of history as progressing towards a certain end.

Was Marx right? If he was right about capitalism being a revolutionary force what does that say about Smith’s arguments for the free market, which were endorsed, as we have seen by the leading 18th Century opponent of revolution?

The answer to the first question is yes. If we define capitalism as the historical transformation of rural societies with a predominantly agricultural economy into urban societies with a predominantly industrial economy, then capitalism was undoubtedly revolutionary. Capitalism weakened all sorts of ties that are fundamental to a functioning society. The ties between people and the land they live on were weakened as people moved en masse from the farms into the cities looking for work. The ties between people and previous generations were weakened as crafts and trades were removed from the home and concentrated in factories and stores. Institutions like the family were undoubtedly weakened and Thomas Carlyle was not unjustified in remarking that human interaction was being cheapened by being reduced to the “cash nexus”.

A few observations are necessary at this point. The first is that capitalism as described above was not the free market Adam Smith was advocating. The rise of modern, manufacturing-based economies, concentrated in large scale factories in urban centers, was accomplished with the active assistance of governments. This is a matter of the historical record.

The second is that those who condemn capitalism for its atomizing effects on society will not find an acceptable alternative in socialism or communism. Socialism’s objection is not to an urban economy centered on industrial manufacturing. Its objection is to that economy being in the hands of private owners instead of “the people”. The negative results of capitalism described above were regarded as positive and progressive by Marx. If capitalism was revolutionary, socialism is a thousand times more revolutionary.

A third observation is that manufacturing and increased production are not themselves the problem. It is not wrong for a society to desire a higher material standard of living for its people and this can only be achieved by increasing production. What is wrong is when people and society place make material prosperity their ultimate goal and make all other considerations subservient to that goal.

Adam Smith argued for a free market on the grounds that it was the best system for maximizing human industry and production and therefore increasing the nation’s material wealth and standard of living. He was right but his was not the best argument for the free market. The best argument for the free market is that freedom is itself a good. Moreover, freedom, the right and ability of people to make their own decisions for themselves (including economic decisions), is a superior good to any material goods that can be manufactured, bought, and sold. It is for this reason that a free economy should be defended against the advocates of a planned economy. The latter believe that they can somewhere find a group of experts competent enough to make everybody’s economic decisions for them.

That is the same arrogant mindset of rationalistic planning that Edmund Burke saw devastating France in the 1790s.

Capitalism and Culture

It is part of our nature as human beings that we both need and desire to live together in communities. Indeed, it is part of our very nature that the most basic human community, the fundamental unit of human society, the family, is one that we are born into upon entering the world, rather than one we voluntarily join. It is also part of our human nature that each of us is a unique person possessed of his own desires, intelligence, and will.

There is tension between these two aspects of our nature, a tension that is intensified by another aspect of human nature that is perhaps best described by the theological term “sin”. This tension creates the necessity for rules and for government with the authority to enforce those rules. Laws can be just or unjust to varying degrees. The more necessary a law is for the good of the whole community the more just it is. The more a law serves the interests of a part of the community rather than the good of the whole, the more unjust that law is. This is true regardless of whether the part of the community served be the few or the many, the rich or the poor, the high or the low. In the most just laws, the good of the whole community is in harmony with the good of each of the parts. Such laws are by nature few and Evelyn Waugh once wisely wrote that while man cannot live without rules they should be “kept to the bare minimum of safety”.

To do so requires that there be something other than just law holding a community together and easing the tension between our human need for community and our human individuality. That something is what we call culture. While a community’s formal rules are part of its culture it also includes much more, including informal rules, and a shared understanding of the community and the world which encourages the kind of attitude and behavior towards others which facilitates community life but which cannot reasonably be enforced by legislation. T. S. Eliot in his Notes Toward a Definition of Culture pointed out that culture and religion overlap to a large degree. Roger Scruton, in a work inspired by Eliot explained further that religion, by setting aside certain things as sacred, renders them inappropriate for the buy-and-sell world of the marketplace, thus ensuring that the most important elements of community life are not conducted on a commercial basis. (1)

This raises the question, which we will be looking at in this essay, of the effect of capitalism upon culture.

Before doing so we will need to consider the definition of the term “capitalism”. Capitalism is not an easy word to define, especially since those people who are in favour of capitalism and those people who are against capitalism do not appear to be referring to the same thing when they say “capitalism”. A further difficulty arises from the fact that the word capitalism does not have the same relationship with the word capitalist as the word socialism has with the word socialist. A socialist is someone who believes in the idea of socialism. A capitalist, however, is someone who uses capital which he owns in order to make a profit. This would suggest that capitalism is an economic activity – the use of capital (productive property) to produce goods to sell in order to obtain a profit. We usually think of capitalism as being the opposite of socialism, however, and socialism is not an economic activity but an economic system, which would suggest that capitalism is such a system as well.

Perhaps that is needlessly complicating the matter. It is possible for capitalism and socialism to be opposed to each other without belonging to the same general category. Socialism, at least as it was understood in the 19th Century, is the belief that private ownership of productive property generates social and economic inequality which produces the oppression of one class by another which in turn creates most of the evils people suffer in society, and that therefore such property should be collectively owned by the society. If capitalism is the economic activity of using privately owned productive property to produce goods to be sold for a profit then it is an activity which socialism clearly judges to be wrong. This is especially true if the capitalist hires other people to labour for him. This is judged to be oppression by the socialist because he regards the capitalist as having an unfair advantage over the laborer in the fact that he owns capital and the laborer does not. Conversely, the capitalist believes that the socialist is unfairly condemning him for things which are not morally wrong – owning property, using that property to produce goods which people want, selling those goods to others who wish to buy them in order to make a profit for himself, and providing jobs for others who need them in order to earn a living. (2)

Those who write in favour of capitalism, however, usually think of it as an economic system rather than an economic activity. The features of the system are the private ownership of property and the free market. The free market is not an actual market in the sense of a place where people go to buy and sell but a concept, an idea about how the process of buying and selling works. People exchange that which they have (sometimes only their labour) for that which they do not have but want or need more than that which they are giving up for it. The price (what amount of x that is exchanged for what amount of y) is determined by the impersonal forces of supply and demand. The more a good is in demand (the more people want it) the higher the price is, the larger the supply of the good (the more available it is) the lower the price. The adjective “free” modifies the concept to suggest the idea that the market works best and has the fairest outcome when people are free to make their own voluntary exchanges without interference from a regulating body. (3)

Historians might object to the free market economist’s definition of capitalism however. If, by a free market we mean a market that is completely unregulated then no such thing has ever existed. If we mean a market that is unregulated but not completely so then the question becomes how unregulated must it be in order to be considered a “free market”? Any answer to that question would be more or less arbitrary and so we are left with a definition of capitalism as an economic system that is either a) an abstract ideal that has never existed in real life or b) a definition that would apply to a number of economies before the Industrial Revolution and the historically recognized dawn of capitalism. A further historical problem with the free market economist’s definition of capitalism is that the transition to an industrial capitalist society was accomplished with a significant degree of positive government intervention and not by the adoption of the laissez faire proposals of economic liberals. (4)

What this tells us is that the liberal economist’s defense of the free market and private enterprise cannot be taken as a literal description of capitalism as a historical economic system. It must be regarded as being either an ex post facto justification of historical capitalism arrived after it had already developed or was in the process of developing (5) or a prescription for what capitalism would look like in its ideal form. This raises the question of what is the defining characteristic of historical capitalism.

Here we run into a very interesting problem. There is an obvious answer to the question of what distinguishes historical capitalism from all previous economies. That answer is the application of modern science in invention to the matter of the efficiency of production. This is what brought about the Industrial Revolution and the transformation of pre-Industrial economies which were predominantly rural and agrarian to industrial economies which were predominantly urban and based upon large-scale manufacturing. The problem lies in the fact that this answer cannot also be used to distinguish capitalism from socialism. Indeed, if this is taken to be the chief distinguishing characteristic of capitalism, which from a historical point of view it seems to be, then socialism would appear to be a form of capitalism. That assessment is not one which is likely to please either free market economists or socialists.

It is industrialism, the result of technology produced by the application of modern science to production, that distinguishes capitalism from previous economies, but this does not distinguish capitalism from socialism which is widely regarded as capitalism’s only significant competitor in the modern economy. Capitalism and socialism can only be distinguished by economic theory. In the economic theory of capitalism productive property is privately owned and the market is considered the most efficient and most fair means of distributing goods. In the economic theory of socialism productive property is collectively owned and the state distributes goods based upon need as assessed by the state.

The relationship between historical capitalism and the liberal economist’s theory of the free market can now be explained however. One result of the application of modern science to production was that it now became possible to produce manufactured goods on a much larger scale than before. In a modern, industrialized factory, goods could be produced in larger numbers in shorter periods of time than ever before. As a consequence, the market became more important than ever before. The whole point of a market is to sell that which you have produced in excess of your own needs to others who wish to purchase it in order to obtain other things that you do not make yourself but which you wish for or need. In an economy where people make most of the things they need for their own use themselves the market performs this vital function but people are not absolutely dependent upon it. When large factories began producing on a massive scale, however, all of a sudden the entire economy of a modern, industrialized, country became dependent upon the market. This is where the liberal economists entered the picture and offered a theoretical defense of the market which had already taken on new importance due to technological development.

Our definition of capitalism then, is that it is a modern economy brought into existence by the application of modern science to the development of productivity-enhancing technology and efficient assembly-line processes, in which productive property is privately owned and the market, as the means of distributing mass-produced goods is of central importance to the economy.

Now that we have a working definition of capitalism we can return to the main question of the impact of capitalism upon the culture of societies which have adopted it. Culture, remember, which grows out of a society’s religion, serves as a social adhesive, holding a community together, inspiring the kind of attitudes and behavior necessary for community living which laws alone cannot produce, and helping relieve the tension between human individuality and the human need for community. Has capitalism strengthened culture and helped it to perform this function or has it weakened it?

A case can be made that capitalism, in its early stages, strengthened culture. Although the economic case for the free market was made primarily by liberals who were at their best broad church latitudinarians and at their worst outright religious skeptics, (6) early capitalism was closely identified with the Protestant faith, particularly Calvinism, and especially the English version of Calvinism that is known as Puritanism. (7) Capitalism, at this stage in its development was supported by a Protestant ethic which stressed the importance of hard work, thrift and saving, and sacrifice. These are important things for a culture to stress because they help ward off the free rider problem which causes people to lose faith in the collective project of community and society. (8)

These ties between capitalism and the Protestant ethic no longer exist. If anything, capitalism in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries has come to support the exact opposite of these values. Contemporary capitalism encourages people to spend their money in order to support the market. This discourages thrift and saving. Yet hard work, thrift and saving are practices that cultures have encouraged and which parents have tried to teach their children for millennia. The Proverbs of Solomon in the Hebrew Scriptures and the fables of 7th Century BC Greek storyteller Aesop both preached their importance (9) The Protestant work ethic of early capitalism was in line with thousands of years worth of accumulated human wisdom. The contemporary capitalist ethic of “shop till you drop” is not. After the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center ten years ago, then US President George W. Bush in an address to the American nation said “I ask your continued participation and confidence in the American economy”. (10) While Mr. Bush went on to identify the values of the older capitalism as the source of American prosperity his words were widely interpreted by the news media and their viewing/reading audience as meaning “go shopping”. (11)

Why was this interpretation of “continued participation and confidence in the American economy” as “go shopping” so widely accepted? It was because an equation between “support the economy” and “go shopping” had already been made in the popular culture. It is a very easy equation to make because “go shopping” is the ubiquitous message of the popular media and a lesson people now learn from their earliest childhood. The electronic media have become the primary vessels of the transmission of culture for the majority of people and while television programs are still occasionally produced which convey old fashioned values in their message, the louder message is that of the advertisements which pay for the programs, and whose message is “buy our product”.

In all of this we see that a change has taken place within capitalism itself that coincides with a change in the culture of societies which are economically capitalist. As part of that change, values which culture has traditionally promoted and which were important to the early stages of capitalism have been abandoned as the culture has begun to promote behavior which traditionally culture sought to discourage. Why did this transformation take place and was it inevitable that capitalism would develop in this direction?

The change that has occurred in capitalism is basically this – consumption has become more important than production and the market has ceased to be a means to the end of human material prosperity and has become the end to which human productivity has become the means.

The seeds of this transformation were present in capitalism from the beginning. From “the market is the most efficient and fair way to distribute goods” it is a simple step to “the market is the source of prosperity” and yet another short step to “we must keep shopping in order to keep the market going because our economy will crumble if we don’t”. Yet these steps could never have been taken apart from the weakening and collapse of the cultural roadblocks which stood in their way.

Those roadblocks were essentially religious.

At Mt. Sinai, the commandments which the LORD handed down to Moses, began with:

I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me. And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments. (Ex. 20:2-6)

We have a term for the sin of breaking these commandments. That term is “idolatry”. Theologically, idolatry can be defined as putting something which is not God in the place of God. It is idolatry, even if that which is put in God’s place, is itself a good. In philosophical ethics, roughly the same thing occurs when a means is treated as an end, or a penultimate good is treated as an ultimate good. This is exactly what occurs when the market is regarded as the source of human prosperity. It has taken the place of God as the ultimate source of good for mankind. When man turns a lesser good into an idol, that idol becomes his master and he becomes its slave.

The Christian faith, which inherited the Hebrew Scriptures and the prohibition against idolatry, stood in the way of the market being put in the place of God as the ultimate source of human good, so as long as capitalists were Calvinists, this could not take place. When the Christian faith of the Calvinist eroded, this roadblock was gone. The market was elevated to the level of the highest good and became an idol. When this happened the relationship between man and the market was inverted. The market, as a means to the end which is the material well-being of mankind, is a good thing. As such it is man’s servant not his master. When the market is treated as the source of human happiness it become’s man’s master and man becomes its slave. When this happens you find people making decisions and doing things that they would not otherwise make or do because it is “good for the market”.

Idolatry is an error in the setting of priorities. That which is secondary is treated as if it were of first importance. This leads to other similar errors. Man’s material needs are treated as being of greater importance than his moral and spiritual needs. Consumption is treated as being more important than production. The same Christian faith which warned against idolatry, including making an idol out of the market, warned against these errors as well. “What doeth it profit a man”, the Lord Jesus Christ once asked, “if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” To consume without producing, Christianity and common sense have long warned, is the path to poverty.

Capitalism, in other words, was on the road to contemporary consumerism the moment Christian faith began to wane in capitalist countries. Did capitalism itself contribute to that waning?

In a way this is like the question about whether the chicken came before the egg or vice versa. Capitalism is both the product of and a contributing factor in the ongoing process of change that has transformed the Western world from Christendom into a number of secular states and societies. Modernization is one way of describing this process. Those who regard it as being an unmixed blessing often refer to it as “progress”. This term suggests that the changes in the modernization process are improvements and that they are leading mankind away from the evils of the past towards a glorious future. While the modernization process, including the early stages of the development of modern science, began with Christian scholars in the late middle ages (12) it was deists, religious skeptics, and people who were hostile to the Christian faith who began to think of modernization in terms of progress.

It is ironic then that the concept of progress can be regarded as a form of “Christian” heresy. A heresy is what you end up with when you take one element of the orthodox doctrine of a religion and make it all-important by removing it from the context of orthodox doctrine as a whole to the point where other doctrines are denied. As Canadian conservative philosopher George Grant explained in the series of CBC lectures later edited into the book Philosophy in the Mass Age Christianity inherited from Judaism a belief that there is meaning in the order of events which occur because such events are ordered by God towards His ultimate ends. Our Western understanding of history is based upon this belief and when it is removed from the theistic context of Christianity it becomes the idea of “progress” in which man takes God’s place as the mind directing historical events. (13)

This understanding of progress is fundamental to the critique of progress, technology and capitalism that recurs throughout Grant’s writings. In the opening essay of his final book Technology and Justice he breaks down the English word “technology” into its roots and argues that this word better captures the essence of that which it denotes than its counterparts in other European languages, because technology is a synthesis of art and science, of making/doing and knowledge. The purpose of this synthesis is human domination over ourselves, nature, and the world. This, of course, is the domination which he saw as lying at the heart of the concept of progress. (14)

It is this same technology, as we earlier saw, which brought into existence the industrial economy of capitalism. If Grant is correct then, the capitalism which was in its earliest stages driven by the Protestant ethic, was part of a process that would eventually undermine that very influence of Protestant Christianity upon the culture of capitalist nations, which in turn led to the transformation of capitalism into the consumerist corporate empire it is today. Grant himself went even further than that in identifying the seeds of late capitalism in the capitalism of the earlier era:

Early capitalism was full of moral restraints. The Protestant ethic inhibited any passion that did not encourage acquisition. The greed of each would lead to the greater good of all. But in the age of high technology, the new capitalism can allow all passions to flourish along with greed. (15)

The idea here is that of a two-stage liberation of the passions, which pre-modern ethics had shackled. (16) In the first stage greed was unleashed, while other passions – the context suggests the sexual passions are what Grant has chiefly in mind - remained inhibited. In the second stage the remaining passions are emancipated.

While there are some problems with this (17), overall the description of the modern age of progress as a gradual unshackling of the passions from the restraints pre-modern Western civilization placed upon them seems quite accurate. Contemporary capitalism and the culture that corresponds with it has been telling people to indulge themselves and their passions for decades. The advertisement industry, that part of consumerist capitalism whose job is to convince people to buy products, is constantly preaching this message to people, and since advertisement pays the bills for the producers of popular culture in the age of the mass media, that culture has come to preach that message as well. A culture that tells people to indulge their passions and throw off traditional restraints, however, is a culture which does not serve the function for which culture exists very well.

Culture, remember, exists to unite a community or a society, alleviating the tension between the social nature of man and his individuality, in a way which the law, also required for this purpose, cannot. Culture does this, Roger Scruton tells us, by “dedicating them [the present members of a society] to the past and future of the community”. (18) In other words, it provides the present members of the community with the long view that enables and encourages them to sacrifice part of their present, short term good, for the long term good of the community as a whole.

Culture then is supposed to present us with a view of our community, as a whole larger then ourselves. (19) Culture cannot do this when it is too heavily influenced by modern liberalism. Modern liberalism is the belief that the individual comes first and that society is a voluntary contract between individuals made with the end of securing the good of individuals. The free market economist’s defence of capitalism is the economic expression of modern liberalism (20).

Modern liberalism, in its political and economic manifestations, wishes to see all human interaction conducted on a contractual basis. It was against this that 19th Century social critic Thomas Carlyle wrote “We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings”. (21) Nor, it should be added, is it the most important. The most important relationships between human beings are not those which are appropriate for the market place but those which exist within the family. The relationship between a husband and his wife, and between parents and their children, are of far greater importance than the relationship between a seller and a buyer. These relationships would not be improved by being made to resemble a business relationship. Indeed, a huge part of the present crisis of marriage is that the state has done all in its power to reduce marriage to the level of a business partnership.

What the state has removed from marriage is what liberalism would have removed from all human relations – the sense of the sacred. The words we use to express the concept of the sacred are words which originally conveyed the meaning of “set apart”. Something that is sacred, that is holy, is something that is “set aside” or “reserved”. To grasp the concept of the sacred we need to ask two questions: “set apart for what?” and “set apart from what?” The answer to the first is fairly obvious. Within a religious tradition that which is sacred is set apart for that which is considered divine in that religious tradition, the gods, or in Christianity, God. The second question requires a bit more thought but what the answer ultimately boils down to is “the common”, “the ordinary”, “the everyday”, “the mundane”. Something which is sacred is something which is removed from the realm of the ordinary and elevated by being consecrated for the use of the divine.

When something is raised to the level of the sacred it is removed from the market, for something which is dedicated to God is priceless in the most literal sense of the term. To attach a price to it, to make it into an object of commerce, is to commit an act of desecration. Remember that Jesus when He found the money changers in the courtyard of the Temple, overturned their tables and drove them out saying “It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves” (Matt. 21:13). Whereas modern liberalism demands a separation between church and state, which makes religion into something it is not supposed to be, i.e., a private, personal matter and prevents it from being that which it is supposed to be, i.e., the coming together to worship which lies at the heart of the culture which binds a community, past, present and future, together, it was something more like a separation between commerce and religion which Jesus demanded.

Does this mean that the market is a bad thing?

No, it is a good thing when it is kept in its proper place and put to its proper use. When it is put in religion’s place in the heart of a community, however, it cheapens everything by reducing it to a commodity. Roger Scruton wrote:

But something new seems to be at work in the contemporary world—a process that is eating away the very heart of social life, not merely by putting salesmanship in place of moral virtue, but by putting everything—virtue included—on sale. (22)

This spells death for the life of a community. In a market transaction, both participants exchange something they value less for something they value more. This amounts, paradoxically, to a gain for both parties. This is the “subjective theory of value” which is one of the central insights of Carl Menger (23) and the Austrian School of Economics. This, combined with Ludwig von Mises’ argument about the non-existence of a means whereby a central planning body could calculate the economic needs of everybody within a society, is the reason why the market is the best possible way of handling economic matters.

It works, however, because each person in a market transaction is looking out, first and last, for his own self-interest. This works well in economic transactions but it would be very problematic if every interaction in society were conducted on this basis. If every social interaction consisted of two individuals looking out for their self-interest first and trying to come to an agreement then the only way in which we would ever see others is as means to our own ends. This amounts to the complete objectification (24) of every person, by every person, and is the very antithesis of a healthy community.

Religion, traditionally, consecrates the most important events and relationships in our lives. Weddings are traditionally conducted by clergymen, who pronounce God’s blessing on the union of man and woman, establishing the marriage as a covenant rather than a contract. In most of the traditional branches of the Christian faith a newborn child is baptized shortly after birth upon which occasion the child officially receives his Christian name and when a man is expected to die God’s blessing is pronounced over him in the last rites. The beginning and end of life is thereby consecrated and after a man dies the ceremony in which his loved ones say good bye, the funeral, is an inherently religious rite as well.

All of this serves an important social function. By consecrating the most important events and relationships in our lives as sacred, religion reminds us that life is about more than just the obtaining of material things. This reminds us that life itself is sacred. As technological development and mass production have magnified the role of the market place in Western societies, they have brought us tremendous material blessings, but those blessings have not come without a cost. By taking over the role of the Christian religion at the centre of Western cultures, the market has robbed us to a great degree of our sense of the sacred. It has also robbed us to a large degree of a sense of vocation (25) and of public spirit (26) among our leaders. These are all things which it is difficult to regain once lost.

The time is now long past when we should have asked ourselves whether the price of “progress” was worth it.




(1)Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998, 2000) This book is a defense of high culture, in the tradition of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot, which argues that the function of modern Western high culture is to fill the gap left by the collapse of Christian belief in Western societies. The argument is a sociological/anthropological explanation of the purpose of religion. While Scruton argues that such a view of religion can only be taken from the outside by those who have distanced themselves from the faith I see no reason why someone like myself who believes that the evidence overwhelmingly points to Jesus of Nazareth having risen from the dead as a historical fact, thus demonstrating the truth of His claim to be the Son of God, cannot also accept a reasonable explanation of the social function of religion.

(2) Socialism’s moral assessment of capitalism and capitalists and capitalism’s moral assessment of socialism are not the subject of this essay and so I will deal with them briefly here. Each side, in its judgement of the other, exaggerates the importance of a particular economic group (productive property owners for capitalism, wage-labourers for socialism) for the good of the other group and of the society as a whole, and downplays the extent to which the well-being of its own group depends upon the good of the whole community. The exaggeration is far greater on the part of the socialist than the capitalist. No efficient system of producing goods on a scale large enough to raise the standard of living of most members of a community significantly above subsistence level ever has been produced by manual labour alone, nor would it be possible to do so. The possibility exists, at least in theory, for a capitalist to do away with his labour force by completely automatizing his property. The capitalist is far more important for the well-being of the wage labourer than the other way around (this is the one essential truth that can be pulled from the mountains of error which exist in the writings of Ayn Rand). Conversely, the capitalist is far more likely to downplay the extent to which community, an orderly society, and just laws contribute to the creation of private wealth. Ultimately, however, the capitalist’s moral assessment of socialism is more accurate than the socialist’s moral assessment of capitalism.

(3) From an economic point of view I have no objection to the free market argument. Socialism, which presents itself as the alternative to capitalism, is based upon the idea that a governing body can plan the economy of an entire society in such a way as to produce a better outcome for all of the society’s members than if each member makes his own economic decisions for himself and has control over whatever property he may privately own. I have never understood how anybody could be stupid enough to believe this.

(4) See Robert Nisbet’s The Quest For Community (London: Oxford University Press, 1953, 1962), pp 104-105.

(5) Marxists, for example, explain the relationship this way.

(6) See, however, Murray N. Rothbard Economic Thought Before Adam Smith: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought Vol. 1 (Aldershot and Brookfield: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1995) for the alternative view that free market arguments were anticipated by, among others, neo-Aristotelian Roman Catholic scholastics in the late middle ages.

(7) See, for example Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner, 1958). It should be noted that Weber’s explanation of the relationship between the Protestant work and the doctrine of predestination seems accurate enough as a description of Puritan theology, but some insist that that theology, through the influence of Theodore Beza, William Perkins and others, has diverged from John Calvin’s own teachings on just this point. See R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1654 (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1979), and M. Charles Bell Calvin and Scottish Theology: The Doctrine of Assurance (Edinburgh: The Handsel Press, 1985). Nevertheless, the connection between Calvinism and early capitalism seems undeniable. Capitalism developed first where Calvinist influence was the strongest (the Netherlands on continental Europe, the English-speaking world, and especially the strongly Puritan influenced United States of America).

(8) Marxists, of course, and other socialists would argue that the capitalist class – i.e., the class of people that derives its income from its ownership of property is a free rider class that profits from the efforts of others, i.e., those it employs to work on or in its property. This argument is based upon a misconception of the relationship between property owners and labourers. It has more weight, however, when it comes not from those who believe in some nonsensical vision of a propertyless egalitarian society, but those who preach the importance of small property owners who work their own property (deceased British economist E. F. Schumacher for example, Kirkpatrick Sale or Wendell Berry of Kentucky).

(9) Think of Proverbs 6:6-9 and Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper.

(10) http://articles.cnn.com/2001-09-20/us/gen.bush.transcript_1_joint-session-national-anthem-citizens/6?_s=PM:US

(11) http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/thepresidentandcabinet/a/did-bush-say-go-shopping-after-911.htm

(12) Richard M. Weaver, in Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) identified the nominalism of William of Ockham in the 13th Century as the beginning of the decay of Christian civilization. Nominalism was a rejection of the reality of universals, which in one form or another had been the focus of Western philosophy since Plato and Aristotle. This is relevant because the Athenian school, by refocusing philosophy on universals (justice, truth, etc.) laid the foundations for Western civilization, whereas nominalism led to a reversion to the questions which were important to pre-Socratic philosophers (questions about the nature and composition of the world). Note however, that the Athenian philosophers did not reject such matters entirely. Aristotle in particular devoted much study to the natural sciences which is why the Scholastic revival of Aristotelianism was also an important factor in the development of modern science. Science is built upon a foundation of presuppositions which assume a theistic worldview like that of Christianity – science is the observation of the world, the development of theories which explain and predict on the basis of those observations, and the testing of theories through experimentation, all of which presupposes that there is order which can be found in the world through observation, which presupposes, although many scientists deny it, that Someone put that order there.

(13) George P. Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). The original edition was published by Copp Clark Publishing in 1959. It consists of eight essays which were revised from a series of lectures on philosophy Grant had given on CBC radio in 1958. The fourth essay, “History as Progress” is the relevant essay, in which Grant writes “Nevertheless, in its moral connotation there is nothing more important to its understanding than to recognize how the Christian idea of history as the divinely ordained process of salvation, culminating in the Kingdom of God, passes over into the idea of history as progress, culminating in the Kingdom of Man: how Christianity’s orienting of time to a future made by the will of God becomes the futuristic spirit of progress in which events are shaped by the will of man.” (p. 44).

(14) George P. Grant, Technology and Justice (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1986). The first essay is entitled “Thinking about Technology”.

(15) George P. Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989), p. 59. The original edition of this book was published in 1965. The occasion for Grant’s famous jeremiad was the defeat of the Diefenbaker Conservatives in 1963, when the Liberals and NDP brought down the government following an orchestrated media campaign against Diefenbaker after he refused to allow American nuclear warheads on Canadian soil. Grant regarded this as the last step in the transformation of Canada into a satellite of the American empire. As a part of Western civilization, Grant argued, North American societies have no roots older than the age of progress, but whereas the United States was built upon the concept of progress, Canada was a conservative project made possible by the fact that English Canada retained its ties to Great Britain which still had pre-modern roots.

(16) Grant, like Weaver, was a Christian Platonist. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates argued that the human soul was divided into three parts, reason, will, and the appetites, and that in the properly ordered soul, the soul of the philosopher, reason governed the appetites through the will, and that this same tripartite division would be reflected in the class structure of the just polis. The rule of the philosopher kings representing reason, would be enforced by the guardian warriors representing the will, over the mechanical workers representing the appetites or passions. The same idea that ethical behavior requires the use of the will to suppress our desires when they would pull us away from what reason tells us is the right thing to do, recurs in a slightly different form in the Ethics of Aristotle. Grant’s comments about the removal of moral inhibitions on the passions reflects a Christian version of this.

(17) Grant seems to make no distinction, for example, between the desire to acquire material wealth and “greed”. However, if we consider the passions which were inhibited in the earlier Protestant ethic but which have subsequently been unshackled, such a distinction is necessary. Grant’s next sentence after the one quoted makes reference to Playboy, for example, indicating that sexual desire was what he had in mind when he wrote “any passion that did not encourage acquisition”. The Protestant ethic however, did not completely equate sexual desire with the vice of “lust”. Such an equation would have been expressed in a rule against any and all sexual expression, including that which occurs within wedlock. Only extreme sects like the Shakers ever dreamed up such a rule, however. The mainstream Christian ethic, both Catholic and Protestant, was that sexual desire was only to be physically expressed within the confines of marriage. The passion of sexual desire was not intrinsically bad, but when ungoverned, led to behavior which was either harmful in itself or could have harmful consequences (premarital intercourse was irresponsible because it could lead to children being born outside of the security of wedlock, adultery was intrinsically harmful because it was a betrayal of one’s spouse and could also lead to cuckoldry, etc.) Hence, in the Christian ethic, the vice of lust is not sexual desire per se, but sexual desire which is emancipated from these ethical restraints. Similarly, greed must not be identified with the generic human desire to acquire material wealth. Like sexual desire, the desire for material acquisition is necessary to human survival, and must therefore be identified as a good. It is when it is not balanced with other goods and made subject to the highest good that it becomes a vice. The vice of greed is not easy to define. Some have defined it as “the desire to acquire more than what one needs”. This begs the question of “what do we mean by need?” If by “need” we mean the bare minimum required to maintain our existence, then this definition of greed would translate into the moral requirement that all human beings live at the level of mere subsistence. Only an insane person would think this way. Another definition of greed is “the desire to acquire more than one’s fair share of material goods”. This is better than the first definition but we again run into the problem that “one’s fair share” is a hard concept to pin down, except in cooperative ventures. The best definition of greed is that it the vice of taking one’s desire for material gain so far that one is willing to compromise the good of other people for it.

(18) Scruton, op.cit., p. 9, italics in original.

(19) This serves the good of the community but it also serves our good as individual persons by providing us with a context within which to understand ourselves. That this answers to a need in our human nature seems evident from the search for self-identity which seems to be everywhere present since culture has ceased to provide it.

(20) This can be confusing to people in the English-speaking world, especially North America. This is because we tend to equate conservatism with capitalism and liberalism with socialism and to regard conservatism and liberalism (and capitalism and socialism) as opposites.

(21) The quotation comes from “The Gospel of Mammonism”, which is the second chapter of Book Three of Past and Present (1843). Elsewhere in the same work (“Working Aristocracy” which is chapter 9 of Book III) Carlyle expressed the same sentiment by writing “Cash-payment is not the sole nexus of man with man”. This brought the expression “cash nexus” as a reference to market interactions into the English language.

(22) Scruton, op. cit., p. 55.

(23) Carl Menger, Principles of Economics (New York: New York University Press, 1976) a translation of Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre first published in 1871.

(24) By objectification I mean the reduction of a person to the level of an object. Jewish philosopher Martin Buber in his I and Thou (New York: Scribner Classics, 2000, a translation of Ich und Du first published in 1923) pointed out the fundamental difference between the “I-Thou” way of relating to other people and God and the “I-It” way in which we use objects.

(25) Vocation, a word derived from the Latin verb meaning “to call”, refers to the sense that one’s work is an answer to a higher calling. While a sense of vocation can still be found among clergymen, artists and to a lesser degree statesmen (if anyone deserving of this label is still around) it has by and large been lost for most people. Careerism has replaced vocation for those whose work comes with a ladder of success for the ambitious to climb, whereas other jobs have become “occupations” – things done to pass the time and pay the bills. Without a sense of vocation, work is perceived as a necessary evil to be avoided if at all possible, rather than as something which is a good to be engaged in for its own sake as much as for the material remuneration one receives for it. See Weaver, op. cit., pp. 70-79.

(26) Peregrine Worsthorne, Democracy Needs Aristocracy (London: HarperPerennial, 2005), originally published in hardback as In Defence of Aristocracy in 2004. In this book Worsthorne argues for the values the British aristocracy represented (even if they did not always embody them very well) and for the general concept of a leadership class which takes to public service out of a sense of duty. While Worsthorne does find examples of aristocratic leadership in the most capitalist of countries the United States (chapter four) he argues that the capitalism of the new consensus between “New Labour” and “New Conservatism” has threatened the values he is championing. In chapter five, for example, he writes “For triumphant capitalism, unlike triumphant socialism after the war, had no need to make use of the gentlemanly public-service ethics. Quite the contrary. It has a vested interest in the destruction of that ethic, and the marginalization of the gentlemanly class that still adhered to it. Cutting off heads, in the French revolutionary fashion, was not necessary. A less brutal but no less effective method was to stuff their mouths with gold” (p. 199) Worsthorne goes on to decry the way the “spirit of free enterprise” has taken over the old Tory educational institutions so that “a great public school like Eton became just as proud of an old alumni who had built up a media empire from scratch as of one who had become a prime minister or an archbishop.” (pp. 200-201). Earlier, in the chapter in which he gave a brief history of the British aristocracy, Worsthorne explained this as the result of the Labour Party’s acceptance of the post-Thatcher consensus. “New Labour’s removal of the threat to property had thus altered the balance of power in British politics, allowing the bourgeois bulk of the Conservative Party, which only accepted the aristocratic tradition as a marriage of convenience, to show what, out of prudence, they had previously kept hidden: their anti-gentlemanly social chip on the shoulder”. (p. 105) Worsthorne writes “As a force for change, capitalism in Britain was always likely to be a more socially dissolvent force than socialism”. (p. 106). George Grant had made similar remarks in Lament for a Nation and Technology and Empire (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1969) in the last of which he wrote “These days when we are told in North America that capitalism is conservative, we should remember that capitalism was the great dissolvent of the traditional virtues”. (p. 67) There is a slight difference in the way these two conservative thinkers came to their similar positions however. Grant believed that the Marxists were wrong in seeing socialism as being more progressive than capitalism and argued that socialism was a positively conservative force. Worsthorne, on the other hand, wrote that “Indeed socialism, by frightening and therefore slowing down the capitalist horses, acted more as a brake than an accelerator”. In other words, it was not that socialism was intrinsically conservative in any way, but that it was a threat that prevented capitalism from going too far down the road of progress.