(This
entry echoes one of the main themes of the Contradiction section, to the
effect that one must under no circumstances attempt to ‘moralize’ capitalism, for this practice makes it totally
incompatible with religious belief. In this entry I am approaching the same
subject, but as a more generalized, philosophical discussion, which clearly
stipulates its placement in Philosophy, rather than in Contradiction.)
Can
Capitalism and Christianity coexist in a symbiotic relationship, even though
morally incompatible?
Let
us take it for granted that sincere religious faith is good. Now, the Christian
Scripture says that “love of money is the root of
all evil.” (I Timothy 6:10), and that “Ye cannot serve God and mammon [or money, as in some
translations]” (Matthew 6:24). In short, religion appears to be
antipodal to capitalism.
The
incompatibility becomes unmistakable when the capitalist emphasis on money
receives a positive moral valuation, in other words, when it is declared to be
“good,” and thus its values are promoted to the status of a religion.
When two “goods” are antipodal and incompatible, at least one of them
must be a false good, and thus, an evil. One has to make a choice as to
which of the two goods is authentically good, and which is evil, and the stakes
involved here are thus starkly exposed.
(I
must clarify one critically important point. I see all great religions as good,
and yet, they have historically clashed with dire results. Does it mean that at
least some of them are “false goods,” or, in other words, evil?
The answer is no. When religious wars take place, they are inherently
political events, using good religions for improper purposes. All
religions are based on essentially the same shared morality, and in this
precise sense they are all one, and are together in opposition to capitalist
morality, which, as morality, is inimical to all religion, and thus antipodal
to it and incompatible with it. I hope I have made this distinction clear to
the reader.)
Now,
can something good ethically permit itself to coexist with something immoral,
or, say, amoral?
My
answer is that immorality is certainly out of this equation. Good cannot
peacefully coexist with evil in any imaginable circumstances. But
its coexistence with amoral phenomena is not only possible, but utterly
inevitable. The point that I am making is that it is not necessary for two
symbiotic substances to be ethically judged as “good” in order to survive
together. Any symbiosis of good and evil must be recalibrated Jenseits,
with at least one of the substances judged as amoral, that is, ethically
neutral…
This
is by no means an apologia of Capitalism and Christianity cozily surviving
together which is no longer consistent with my thinking on the future of
world economic systems, but merely a philosophical argument on the logical
feasibility of any coexistence of an ethically positive phenomenon, such as Christianity,
with something totally immoral, when ethically judged, such as Capitalism,
with the logical conclusion that such a coexistence is by all means possible,
and often unavoidable, as long as, I repeat, the latter phenomenon is exempt
from ethical valuations, therefore, considered amoral. It is further my
conclusion that in the process of such coexistence the amoral phenomenon will
be positively transformed, not into a now suddenly moral economic system,
but into yet another amoral economic system, which should be more
“ethically-friendly” to its religious counterpart, and thus Marx’s famous
historical sequence of socio-economic formations (and Hegel’s conception of
spiral historical progress) should both be getting a nice facelift, reconciling
the idea of historical morality with the reality of the historical Jenseits!
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