“If, for Marx and Weber, capitalism was the dynamo of secular modernity, for Ruskin, it embodied a metamorphosis of the sacred, a perverse enchantment of the world. Ruskin clearly feared that ‘secularization’ was really a capitalist form of idolatry—a rechristening of heavenly ecstasy in a cold baptismal font of money, a re-enchantment conducted under the gilded, unholy auspices of capital. In The Political Economy of Art (1857) Ruskin described the day of a typical businessperson as a regimen of spiritual discipline. ‘The worship of Mammon,’ he began, proceeds ‘with a tender reverence and an exact propriety’ reminiscent of Johnson’s Volpone. The merchant ‘rises to his Mammon matins with the self-denial of an anchorite’ and asks forgiveness for the distractions that may keep him from his ‘Mammon vespers.’ Later, in Munera Pulveris (1871), Ruskin maintained that, far from a ‘secular’ denial of the supernatural, capitalism had its own ensemble of gods, sacraments, and spiritual devotions. ‘We have, indeed, a nominal religion, to which we pay tithes of property and sevenths of time,’ he concluded. ‘But we have also a practical and earnest religion, to which we devote nine-tenths of our property, and six-sevenths of our time.’ The deity of this true Victorian faith was ‘the Goddess of Getting-on’—in male form, Mammon, ‘the great evil Spirit of false and fond desire, or ‘Covetousness, which is Idolatry.’”

The above passage comes from Eugene McCarraher’s wonderful book, The enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity. The book is over 650 pages long and it’s just beautifully written and so enjoyable to read. I’m really loving that McCarraher is drawing upon the 19th century Romantic tradition (e.g. English polymath, John Ruskin, is cited in the passage above), whose adherents seemed to have correctly diagnosed the dangerous enchantments of capitalist accumulation and, conversely, emphasized imagination, craft, the commons, mutual-aid, and a sensitivity to natural wonder.

Painting above: The Worship of Mamon by Evelyn DeMorgan

Tags:capitalismEugene McCarraherIdolatryJohn RuskinMammonPoetryreligionRomanticismsecularismtheologyWealth