Lynn Parramore: The perverted dreams of western modernity and capitalism may be exhausting themselves

Do you, inhabitant of the marvelous and menacing late-modern world, detect something missing – some kind of vitality, meaning, connectedness, love, beauty, or wonder? If so, you’ve likely searched for a story to explain it…. Critics of the disenchantment narrative have long noticed that if you look closely at western modernity, this ostensibly secular and rational regime, you find it pretty much teeming with magical thinking, supernatural forces, and promises of grace. Maybe the human yearning for enchantment never went away; it just got redirected. God is there, just pointing down other paths.

As scholars like Max Weber have noted, capitalism is a really a religion, complete with its own rites, deities, and rituals. Money is the Great Spirit, the latest gadgets are its sacred relics, and economists, business journalists, financiers, technocrats, and managers make up the clergy. The central doctrine holds that money will flow to perform miracles in our lives if we heed the dictates of the market gods. Under Mammon, we shall reach a state of blessedness in which all our desires are realized: a heaven on earth. We become gods ourselves.

All throughout the modern era, poets, dissenting scholars, writers, political radicals, and a motley assortment of ordinary apostates kept insisting that we are under the deadly spell of a false religion. Eugene McCarraher’s The Enchantments of Mammon: Capitalism as the Religion of Modernity is a magisterial account in this vein. The author sets out to explain how we came to find ourselves devoted to the jealous god Mammon, and how we might get free.

In distinction to some like-minded thinkers, McCarraher holds that capitalism is not a disenchantment, or even a re-inchantment, but rather a mis-enchantment, a “parody or perversion of our longing for a sacramental way of being in the world.” He sees the condition peaking at beginning of the 21st century, followed by calamitous years of economic crises, political and social unrest, and now, as Ruskin scholar Jeffrey Spear and I have described, a pandemic in which the neoliberal priests demand human sacrifice to the cult of Mammon…

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/capitalism/

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