TALENT FOR... COMMUNISM?

In my two entries placed in different sections, according to each one’s leitmotif, one (not yet posted), under the title Weber’s Protestant Ethic And The Spirit Of Capitalism, in the Contradiction section, and the other (posted on September 21^st, 2012), Talent For Religion, in the Religion section (both these sections precede Russia in my book), I have already sounded themes very similar to the theme of this entry. In this Russian section I am getting back to them again, but in a new setting.

 

In his best-known book The Protestant Ethic And The Spirit Of Capitalism (1904-1905) Max Weber comes to the rather unexpected conclusion, in my view, that it is not the Jewish spirit of entrepreneurial ingenuity, but the thoroughly Gentile ‘Protestant’ character, which defines and epitomizes capitalism, constituting the best guarantee of capitalist success, at least in so far as Germany is concerned. Weber notes the significant statistical correlation in Germany between successful business ventures and the Protestant background of the entrepreneurs in-point. He then attributes this connection to certain accidental consequences of the notions of predestination and calling in traditional Puritan theology as developed by Calvin and his followers, which contributes to the emergence of the “workaholic” type, religiously committed to his worldly calling, coupled with an ascetic abstinence from the enjoyment of the profits of his labor, which, in practical terms, leads to a swift accumulation of capital… (For the record, and as a fascinating piece of by no means trivial information, the close connection between religious [implicitly Protestant] zeal and the workaholic propensity of the individual was proposed by the already mentioned on several occasions great American homeopath Dr. James Tyler Kent six years before Weber’s book came out.)

Now, opening the present entry proper, and in keeping with the subject matter of the previous one, here is Nietzsche again, with this shocking suggestion from his Jenseits (48):

“It appears that Catholicism is much more intimately related to the Latin races than all of Christianity in general is to us northerners, and unbelief means something different in Catholic and Protestant countries. Among them, a kind of rebellion against the spirit of the race, among us, a return to the spirit of the race. We, descendants of barbarians, have little talent for religion.”

This quasi-racial approach to the religious differences dividing the nations of Europe makes no pretense to a comprehensive sweep of the subject of their connection. As usual with Nietzsche, this is rather a teaser, but what a fruitful teaser! It opens up a whole new field of virgin soil, and with a multitude of outside links. There is no point in starting a scholarly disputation here on whether he is on or off target in this case, as he is always quick to contradict himself with yet another intellectual challenge born out (sic!) of his fearlessly random fancy. What is important is to pick up his challenge, and to play with it, carrying it even further in our double dare.

Applying this splendid idea-generator and proliferator to the subject of Russia, we may start our riposte by asking whether Russian Orthodox Christianity, unmentioned by Nietzsche in the above passage, relates to Catholicism more than to Protestantism, in this case, and the answer is: yes, of course. The Russians have an amazing talent for religion, an even greater one, perhaps, than their Latin counterparts. And, conversely, the spirit of Protestantism is conspicuously alien to the spirit of Russia.

Several Russian thinkers of the early twentieth century (well summarized in Merezhkovsky’s Last Russian Saint/Serafim Sarovsky and in his religious-philosophical push for Russia’s adoption of a New Christianity) must have been profoundly struck by Nietzsche’s implicit call to return to the spirit of the race, but their common mistake had been to misunderstand the nature of the Russian spirit that has proven itself alien both to the spirit of Protestantism and to the idea of a New Christianity. (For more on this, see my posted entry Merezhkovsky And His New Christianity (October 16^th, 2011) in the Religion section.) As a matter of fact, the spirit of the Russian race focuses on the blessed nature of suffering (see my entry The Blessedness Of Suffering, posted on August 24^th, 2011), and thus provokes the interesting question of whether such ready acceptance of suffering contradicts the spirit of human nature or, on the contrary, provides an antidote to its sting once we realize that suffering is an essential part of the human condition anyway.

 

(This is very similar to Camus’ argument on the acceptance of absurdity in his treatment of the myth of Sisyphus. In my not yet posted entry My Take On Sisyphus, I observe that the absurdity of Sisyphus’ “life in hell” was no laughing matter, involving not just the sheer senselessness of his job, but also a great suffering, if we should believe Homer. Thus, Camus, without ever stating it this way, invites the reader/Sisyphus to seek some kind of happiness in a life of suffering, in close parallel with the peculiar Russian/Christian way of looking at it.)

Now, having repeatedly said that the spirit of Protestantism with its relative disregard for religion is alien to the Russian spirit, let us superimpose this line of thinking, like a piece of see-through paper for tracing, on Max Weber’s idea of the positive spirit of Capitalism, as tied to the Protestant ethics. Thus superimposing religion on the politico-economic forms of social organization, we arrive at the idea of Protestant Cultures, such as the British and American cultures, with a greater propensity for capitalism than Catholic Cultures. Bringing Russia into this discussion on the side of the church-controlled Catholic cultures, we are getting in a light-hearted manner of course, to a litmus test of who is better fit to be a capitalist and who is better fit to be… what… a socialist?!

But wait, aren’t we running into a contradiction already? Nietzsche clearly identifies the Germanic race as Protestant, and, therefore, by Max Weber’s definition, a Capitalist-spirited race. Yet, it was Germany that embraced socialism at the time of the Third Reich…

Nothing contradictory here, though, once we remind ourselves that the national-socialist idea had come out of the Catholic quarters of Germany, and not from her Protestant North.

Well, once we have established that “serious” Christians gravitate toward the socialist principles of social organization, how come that in modern Europe socialism has been embraced by all northern, traditionally Protestant nations? The answer is that perhaps traditional religious identification is no longer important and pertinent in modern Europe, and that the socialist idea has taken over the European nations as part of their earlier childhood upbringing, over the objections of the much later spirit of religious Reformation.

Returning now to the summarizing question of my Weber entry, let me pose it here again:

If we should assume that the spirit of capitalism is somehow tied to Protestantism, does that mean that the spirit of socialism is tied to Catholicism? On an even more reflective note, it may perhaps even go without a challenge that the spirit of communism is certainly alive in the body of Russian Orthodox Christianity.

The question is now reformulated quite seriously as a positive statement. Consistently with the insights of Nietzsche’s talent for religion, and Weber’s identification of nation-religions with their politico-economic preferences, and also consistently with Russian history and her predominant trends in religious philosophy, we may thoughtfully conclude that Russia, as a nation, possesses an unquestionable talent for communism, not to be confused with the bungled experiment in social engineering, characterizing the Soviet era, but as the principal idea underlying her philosophical approach to self-realization.