Authority Under Uncertainty:
How the History of Religion Formed Our Idea of Capitalism
Sly: So what is your book, Authority
Under Uncertainty, all
about?:
J.A.: Well this book explains
that religion gave us our idea of capitalism. It's a pretty exciting
concept.
Sly: How? And wasn't this just Max
Weber's idea way back in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism in 1906?:
J.A.: Well, it was 1903, I
think. But, whereas for Weber, capitalism was invented in early
modern Europe, for me capitalism was really a global invention that
has been brewing in human culture for thousands of years.
Furthermore, Weber thought that capitalism was all about rationalized
beaurocracy.
My take on it is that religion invented
capitalism by inventing—or at least, rediscovering—the concept of
uncertainty, in a way that happens in different times at different
places, across world history.
Sly: This is something that I think
readers might have trouble with. Since, doesn't religion tell us what
we are certain about, or ought to be? Whether it be God or eternal
life, etc.? A set of Dogmas? Or isn't this how people see religion?:
J.A.: Well, for some people yes.
And for some times and types of religious practice, yes, religion in
practice amounts to little more than that. But religion is not always
the same thing for everyone and is not the same thing in all times in
history. With that in mind, my argument about what religion is in
Authority Under Uncertainty rests on two distinctions.
First, that between Archaic and Modern
Religion. This is an idea that I take from religious
anthropologists.And, secondly, between modern religious scriptures
and religious orthodoxy—which are just all those institutions and
traditions which have preserved religious scriptures.
So there I make the difference between
ancient religions and modern religions—fairly widely accepted
although my definitions here put a bit more emphasis on the economic
factors involved than most religious anthropologists would care to
do.
And the second, this distinction
between modern scripture and the traditions that have grown up around
them,this is an idea that is basically my own, I would say, or I give
it a new emphasis. Religious anthropologists tend to lump scripture
together into tradition and consider scriptures just evidence as part
of a religious tradition. And I am saying, no, these are not the same
thing. Of course they are connected in certain ways and I am not
claiming scripture is divinely inspired while traditions and
institutions are manmade or vice versa. No, my argument for this
division is primarily an economic one. It's connected to that first
distinction between Archaic and Modern Religion.
Sly: Okay what is that first
distinction? It seems like that would be a good thing to have you
explain here. You say there was a different economic situation for
ancient religion than for modern religion:
J.A.: Well Archaic religions
were basically the state religions in the earliest civilizations. The
broad pattern in the course of human economic development across the
globe over the last 10,000 years—according to archaeologists—is
that humans begin to intensify their use of agriculture about 10,000
years ago in different places at different times. But this is the
beginning of the neolithic transition.
Within a few thousand years of
intensive agriculture, large stratified civilizations arise:
Akkadians are perhaps the first acknowledged complex civilization,
the Babylonians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Mycenaean, etc. all around
the Mediterranean. That's where it happens first. First in the
fertile crescent, and the Mediterranean, slightly later in India and
China, to a somewhat lesser extent in Africa, then most recently in
the New World Civilizations (Aztec, Maya, Inca, and Hawaii) the same
thing happens in the same order: domestication of crop species and
animals, followed by big civilizations. And in these big
civilizations you have all of the elements that we today recognize as
being religious.
However, here is the key thing.
Everything that we recognize as religious in the context of these
early civilizations is controlled by the state. Or rather religious
rituals, and state rule are basically inseparable. For all intensive
purposes—the priests rule. Or priests and rulers comprise a small
and tightly knit class.
What is more the state is also the
major economic controller, redistributing grain and other goods, the
major agricultural holdings and the organization are controlled by
the state—which is to say by the priests. Markets and trade remain
a basically marginal phenomena for a long time. And the leadership,
economic-managerial classes are basically the high priests. So as I
put it, religion, Archaic Religion, was basically the Public
Relations for economic management in these early states. The state
had a monopoly on life and ritual, and conversely, ritual and
religion was the tool that helped them maintain control. Priests, and
religion, the priestly PR was charged with convincing people that the
leadership were making choice that were in the society's interests.
Religion convinced people of what they ought to do. That meant both
working and worshiping gods in the way the leaders prescribed. And
above all, religion resorted to the idea of divine certainty to
ritualize the life of the lower working classes, to make obedience
appear as THE good above all, certain of producing divine
rewards—which were, of course, imaginary.
Sly: Okay, well how does that differ
from Modern Religion? Is it because now Church and State are separate?
J.A.: Well
what happens, yes. Church and State, so to speak, religion and the
state begin to break apart. especially in the Mediterranean. But the
reason for this is historical and economic. None of these religious
states lasts forever. Egypt lasts continuously for three thousand
years, depending on your definition of continuity. That is the
longest and that is an almost immeasurably long time, a third longer
than the distance from our time to Jesus's time. And Egypt continued
in a way that seems to have been much more unified than anything we
might imagine as a unified line of Christian civilization—though
Egypt is less well documented, historically, than what we know of the
last 10,000 years of Christian Europe.
However most of
the early fertile crescent civilizations did not last nearly as long
as Egypt. Hence, by the time you get to the final millennium BCE in
the Fertile Crescent and the Mediterranean, you have a big jumble of
leftover religious traditions and political histories that document
the obvious fact that, hey, the claim to divine certainty and a set
of carefully coded rituals is far from a guarantee that the gods are
going to extend any nation and the line of its priestly rulers into a
perpetual future. There is all of the sudden, plenty of evidence that
religiously dominated control economies can fail and there is a whole
new mistrust of priestly promises about divine certainty and social
prosperity.
So what this means
is that history kind of pries religion and the state apart. This
separation was not enacted by decree, as we might imagine, given that
our modern constitutions declare that religion must by law
be separated from one another. In fact, history and nature separated
religion and the state but at their origins, they were one and the
same.
Its in this context where you get the
birth of what we would recognize as some of the transitional moments
of society and religion that are documented in the Judaic Old
Testament and Greek philosophy. You also get some carefully codified
skepticism or rethinking of state power in the East with the
revolutionary life of Buddha and other Indic sages, and also in the
texts of Taoism and Confucianism. This all centers at around the
middle third of the final millenium BCE. It's what religious scholars
call the Axial Age. But I am just trying to give a very simple
political economic explanation for why all of these new phenomena
emerge at this time: fragmentation of state and religion.
Sly: Alright so why do you consider
scripture and tradition as being separate in this new stage?:
J.A.: Well,
its important to note that Archaic Religions do not appear to have
had much in the way of scriptures—at least not as we think of it.
My economic argument is that they did not need to. Priests of Archaic
Religion ran the state—and the economy for that matter—so
revelation, prophecy, most of the magic etc. all of this was made up
ad hoc as was necessary for
priestly leaders to get people to stay obedient. Faith was Public
Relations.
But
when priests no longer run the state, they now have the problem of
making their own institutions. And these new non-state priestly
institutions now have the problem of bargaining with states, property
holders, military and economic powers etc. in order to survive. Now
this shift is not so clear cut as I am making it but in a broad
strokes outline over the course of the thousands of years since the
earliest states up until the first millennium BC in the
Mediterranean, this is basically what happens. This is the condition
of the emergence of modern scriptures and orthodoxies as we know
them.
So
what this means, when you have religions competing with each other
and dealing with states that are competing with each other, in this
situation religions need to come up with a rationale for why they are
the authentic
religion. No leader or property holder wants to be caught believing
and practicing a religion that is wrong. Thus religions need a record
of their origin, some kind of formal proof of why they exist. This
was the meaning of scripture. And really, scripture distinguishes
modern religion from Archaic religion in a significant way.
The
key thing about scripture is that once it is fixed, it basically
cannot change. Or the ability to change it is limited, because the
more it changes, the less authentic it seems. Meanwhile, tradition is
subject to change and can be remade in more or less whatever way the
religious institutions needed in order to help the religion grow in
power and make the necessary alliances with states and property. Much
more flexible.
The
Catholic Church is, of course, the leading example of this. For
basically 1700 years, the church has pursued what economists looking
at religion have called a “Religious Monopoly” in Europe which
lasted, really up until the Protestant Reformation in the 15th
century. The church could shift and change their dogmas, the pope
could make new pronouncements, appoint saints, change the form of the
sacraments, etc. All of these changes would affirm the belief that
the church was certainly ordained by God, that the church could
pronounce God's will on earth and therefore that the church was
needed to divinely ordain kings. That was the major thing. In this we
see the church becoming more like the Archaic religions, after all,
at least in terms of tradition with one key difference: The church
can never get a state all to themselves, and for this reason they can
never get rid of the Gospels and go ahead and just rewrite them
however they wanted.
Once
the New Testament was set in the third century BC, right around the
time Constantine the Emperor of Rome (in Constantinople) converts to
Christianity, it couldn't really be changed. The scripture was the
proof, the record of authenticity, about Jesus upon whose words and
deeds the church was built. Even if the church can take up all these
different rituals that really seem really almost indistinguishable
from much of what passed for religion in Archaic times, they have to
keep scripture around.
Now
there is a lot of discussion about whether the Gospels that got into
the NT were really accurate or if someone made them up or if there
were better, earlier records out there. It's all very interesting. My
point in the first half of Authority Under Uncertainty is
that no matter what New Testament historians come up with in answer
to these questions, a revised Gospel is never going to stand on its
own, you have to look at it in relation to the other religious
scriptures and traditions that are basically popping up in this same
1,000 year window. If we want to understand the wider meaning of this
Axial shift, we have to adopt an approach that is as eclectic and
heterodox as possible.
And
there are a lot of religious anthropologists who say this when they
look and claim, hey, there was clearly a revolution in human
consciousness that begins around 800 BCE with the dawn of Greek
civilization and with a few other markers in Persia and China and
that extends perhaps all the way through to Muhammad in 600 CE, and
perhaps we are still living through it—that is my take, really. But
most anthropological explanations tend to rely on a fairly unstable
assertion for why we have to be eclectic about this process,
asserting claims about respecting all religions, or that all human
consciousness is linked in a kind of Jungian way.
My
explanation for the beginnings of modern religion, for the ideas
recorded in the scripture that religious institutions were forced to
preserve, is an economic one. People were realizing that the old
certainties just did not work, and when someone like Socrates or
Christ in the Mediterranean, Buddha in India, or Lao Tzu or Confucius
in China their ideas had an impact. And even though these power
structure emerge and form these institutions that are not all that
different from the Archaic religious rituals—they can't get rid of
those destabilizing ideas that were recorded in scripture.
A
lot of these destabilizing ideas—which I talk about as a
realization about the uncertainty of human knowledge—were written
down into stable scriptures within a few hundred years after these
revolutionary folks, maybe earlier in the case of Lao Tzu (if he
existed, maybe he even wrote them down himself). In any case, the new
religious institutions—the orthodoxies—that formed in the wake of
these folks had to pull together whatever records they could of their
founding figures—even if the institutions, customs, and beliefs
that these religious institutions would go on to rely upon and
enforce in order to compete with other religions and negotiate with
external economic actors would have little to do with the ideas in
the scriptures.
Sly:
So we've been talking a lot about religion in this interview, and
some stuff about general economic history and what religion and
economic history have to say to each other, but the book is also
supposed to be about capitalism, about our present day, is it not?
J.A.:
Well,
right, so the big question that I am asking in this book is when you
look at these religious texts, this moment in time with these major
figures from history who are recorded in scripture, what do you
learn? If you acknowledge that basically these scriptures have been
reinterpreted over and over again throughout history, often in rather
manipulative ways, but when we do not let this stop us from casting
these scriptures in the light of their economic reality, in terms of
the foregoing religious institutions of economic control that came
before, we can then ask: what is the overriding lessons that these
scriptures have given to some of our most formative thinkers about
how to organize our lives in spite of uncertainty? If no earthly
power can claim to be divinely ordained with the kind of certainty
that the early states claimed, then how do we act, what is the basis
of social order in this new uncertain reality?
If
all of those attempts by the earliest state makers to control society
through Archaic religion at the same time as they were attempting to
control nature through their early forms of agriculture and
domestication were failures, then how can we organize as individuals
and as groups with the best hopes of achieving the best possible
outcomes? If we cannot just sit there from above, or appoint some
very intelligent person to sit there from above and say this is best,
then what can we do?
Sly:
Ok, what do we do? Or what does scripture tell us to do? If that's
the question that you're asking?
J.A.:
Well
, the answer is a rather familiar one, but again I am trying to give
it a new basis. The answer is: let people have the maximal possible
freedom, and the best solutions will be most likely to evolve and
emerge. This is really the theory that was at the origins of what the
modern West has thought of as capitalism, classical liberalism.
The
examples that I point to in Authority
Under Uncertainty are
the writing of the Declaration of Independence along with Adam
Smith's Wealth of
Nations,
and there are other great economic and philosophical texts that date
from that moment: Locke and Hume are the most obvious. Economists
since then—I'm thinking mainly of Friedrich Hayek and other people
who have mainly influenced today's so-called libertarians—have
often taken up this idea of economic liberty. It's not a term that I
use too much, because I am not interested in waving that flag. It's a
bit dangerous to use such a rhetorically charged term. My point in
this book is to dig a little deeper to reveal the origins of the
hostility to economic control that was all tied up with these modern
revolutions and to say, hey it goes way back, and in fact the major
record of the origins of these ideas are in the religions.
And,
of course, Smith and the founding fathers—almost everyone at that
time who was reflecting on economics and politics—was also talking
about and reflecting upon religion and the history of religion.
However, none of these guys—brilliant and original guys—who
sparked the major debates about political order and economy, when to
intervene, when not to—a debate which includes Hobbes, Machiavelli,
Rousseau, Hume, Adam Smith, even Marx—none of them—not even the
more recent influential libertarians like Hayek, Von Mises, or their
opponent in Keynes who are less explicitly religious in their way of
speaking about society—none of these guys have ever had access to
the rich anthropological background that we have today.
A
lot of the earlier thinkers of political order and the proper
relation of politics to economics had the idea of man's existence in
a state of nature before society even existed. But its funny, even
recent political thinkers have not done a good job at this—Frances
Fukuyama's recent book is an example of an attempt to kind of think
back to what ancient history, maybe even pre-history has to teach us.
He has some nice passages on debunking the nature-culture dichotomy
that people like Locke, Hume, and Rousseau ascribed to almost
wholeheartedly. Yet, I think Fukuyama in this big massive global
study published last year still misses the point about these
different origins. He is really tied to this idea—a presupposition
about how all these cultures outside the West are essentially
different civilizations, and why did capitalism only arise in the
West, etc. I don't believe. He gets it from Max Weber. And I start
Authority Under
Uncertainty
by asking whether Weber really missed the big picture of religion and
capitalism. I hope I succeed in showing just how he did.
But
anyway, this is how Authority
Under Uncertainty
starts, with a little discussion of Weber and of Smith, or how
religion has played a role in our idea of capitalism—that we know
of but that has not really been taken into account by people who want
to argue against state control. Libertarians have missed just how
deeply in human culture the origins or state control really go,
because they don't like to deal with the thorny issues of religion,
because these people like to align themselves with religious
orthodoxies, not question them. This is the basis of the Republican
party after all.
Sly:
And what you've come up with then is a libertarian's take on
religion?
J.A.:
Sort
of, that way of condensing the project has kind of occurred to me.
But I don't like it, I'm suspicious of using the term libertarian
because of what it connotes for people and because there are so many
version of it. Mainly my problem with so-called libertarians is the
rationale for liberty. Okay these people say that a minimal state,
less intervention from above, and a free economy is best. I agree
with that, but why? For me, you need a richer and more global
explanation for this kind of discussion about economic liberty than
what any libertarian thinker has offered and that includes Hayek, who
for me is still the most interesting representative of these ideas.
But Hayek has a lot of bizzarre contradictions and even outright
errors which is something that I get into in the last chapter of my
book, after I have gone into anthropology and then into scripture to
describe how the linked problems of religious and economic control go
deeper and are more instructive to us today than we have really ever
imagined.
Of
course, it all depends on how we define our terms, but libertarians
often fall back onto this hackneyed idea that it is best to be free
and I want to be free, I have a right to be free, so keep the
government's grubby paws off my private property and so on, and so
forth. What often gets lost in this kind of emotionalized argument
against the state and against taxes, is that the original arguments
for economic freedom was that controlled societies have always
failed. It's not because you want liberty that we all should respect
your property, it is because a society that is flexible and evolving
just like the natural world, where there is competition, where the
best solutions and most valuable arrangements persist. That more
nuanced argument is the real argument for liberty. But the shortcut
to people's knee-jerk, “keep your hands off my stuff” obscures
the more subtle rationale that is nothing less than the origin of
this country's political system.
From
the perspective of politics, the authentic libertarian argument—whose
religious and anthropological history I have tried to lay out in
Authority Under
Uncertainty—is
not that freedom is good for me, my private property is good for me,
I deserve it, I earned it, therefore I must keep the government off
of my freedom and property. No, in fact, the argument that this
country was built upon is that a system that is going to allow
individuals to compete and let organizations evolve without anybody
trying to plan things too much, or to shift things over to their own
interests, or to get a whole lot of people locked up into a kind of
archaic worldview where we imagine that we know what the gods are
telling us to do for sure and for all time—the American idea is
that an open and evolving economic system is best: nothing more and
nothing less than that. This simply follows out the ideas that
emerged at the time of the Axial shift with decline of the Archaic
religions and the earliest civilizations.
Now,
the bizarre thing is that because libertarians often get caught up on
in an emotional appeal to private property and “keep your taxes of
my stuff” they often align with weird strains of religious
traditionalism—the Tea Party is perhaps the defining instance of
that. It's what Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, FOX News, anti-immigrant,
anti-welfare thinking is all about.
One
way of thinking about what I did in this book was to look into this
kind of “unholy alliance” if you will, and say well, yeah there
are a lot of brilliant ideas in the history of religion, particularly
in scriptures—that we miss if we just think okay these
traditionalist orthodoxies own religion. There is a lot that is
interesting in this idea of capitalism, a lot of vital thoughts, and
stuff we can't do without, and stuff if we just react to the
contemporary mouthpieces for big religion and big corporations,
so-called libertarians, we are going to be in trouble. Instead, I am
saying, hey these supposed advocates have made some big
mistakes—common mistakes, if you look at history, but worse than
ever—about where our ideas of religion and capitalism came from. If
you do look at it, you see things a lot differently in terms of how
to organize political systems, about the meaning of the words and
deeds that gave rise to religion as we know it and about the links
between these different founding figures and events. All of this
gives you different clues for what you are really looking for from a
healthy free market economy. What you have here in our contemporary
cultural and economic crises is—above all—an opportunity to
rethink what kind of effects proactive, creative, passionate
individuals and organizations—particularly young people who aren't
already entrenched and inextricably invested in political, legal, and
corporate structures as they are, particularly people who we wouldn't
tag as an “authority”—can have on our political and economic
future moving forward?
Sly:
So what does the future look like?:
J.A.:
Well, that to me, is a
matter of uncertainty, but I do hope to publish another book talking
in more detail about the implications of the story I tell in
Authority Under Uncertainty.
One
thing, I feel relatively sure about is that most of the institutions
that we have in place in terms of education, media, government, and
financial structures are more or less contaminated by the old model,
by traces of the archaic religious and economic way of organizing
things. We have not succeeded in breaking free from all of this.
Nobody—at least nobody who has interested their lives in building
these institutions and stands to lose a lot from the recognition that
they are flawed—wants to admit that. So, you know this is an
opportunity to challenge a lot of those and history is on our side in
that. History proves the continual failure of authoritative
leadership and continually affirms that success, innovation, new and
important ideas, life-changing, world-saving ideas always come from
unexpected places, from individuals who have not been ordained by the
powers that be. Now, how do you build that kind of revolutionary
innovation into your social order? It seems a paradoxical question. I
think that our idea of capitalism is in some ways an attempt to come
to grips with that problem.
Just
to end on a religious note, this is one of the things that has really
interested me about Zen. It's funny—most American know the word,
Zen—and its kind of all over marketing. The funny thing is, most
people have no idea about the amazing nature of Zen scripture, which
is to say, the Koans. Maybe people have heard of Koans, but they
don't know what they are. Basically, the Koans are records where a
Zen monk, basically the closest thing to an authority that Zen
Buddhism in China of the later first millennium CE had, a leader of a
monastery, a community, a teacher, where one of these authorities
opened his authority up to questioning. Its a case, an instance of a
challenge where the idea of a non-authority is given the opportunity
to publicly challenge authority, and it goes on record.
So
on a religious level, it means, keeping the scripture permanently
open to new innovations. More importantly, it means, keeping the
political-economic order of the Zen monasteries open to challenge and
revision, innovation. No one is beyond reproach. I think our
contemporary financial and political leaders could take a lesson from
that obviously. We have a lot to learn from Zen and especially from
the Western religions when considered in light of Zen and Taoism—but
not just in a spiritual way, but in a very very practical way
