http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-market-as-god/6397/?single_page=true
The Market as God
Living in the new dispensation
By HARVEY COX
A few years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was
going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although
my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always
willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice, vaguely fearful
that I would have to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary. Instead
I was surprised to discover that most of the concepts I ran across
were quite familiar.
Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of
déjà vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business
sections of Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking
resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint
Augustine's City of God. Behind descriptions of market reforms,
monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow, I gradually made out
the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human
history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right.
Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall, and
doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only
thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive
temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and,
ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small
dose of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East
Asian economies.
The East Asians' troubles, votaries argue, derive from their heretical
deviation from free-market orthodoxy—they were practitioners of "crony
capitalism," of "ethnocapitalism," of "statist capitalism," not of the
one true faith. The East Asian financial panics, the Russian debt
repudiations, the Brazilian economic turmoil, and the U.S. stock
market's $1.5 trillion "correction" momentarily shook belief in the
new dispensation. But faith is strengthened by adversity, and the
Market God is emerging renewed from its trial by financial
"contagion." Since the argument from design no longer proves its
existence, it is fast becoming a postmodern deity—believed in despite
the evidence. Alan Greenspan vindicated this tempered faith in
testimony before Congress last October. A leading hedge fund had just
lost billions of dollars, shaking market confidence and precipitating
calls for new federal regulation. Greenspan, usually Delphic in his
comments, was decisive. He believed that regulation would only impede
these markets, and that they should continue to be self-regulated.
True faith, Saint Paul tells us, is the evidence of things unseen.
Soon I began to marvel at just how comprehensive the business theology
is. There were even sacraments to convey salvific power to the lost, a
calendar of entrepreneurial saints, and what theologians call an
"eschatology"—a teaching about the "end of history." My curiosity was
piqued. I began cataloguing these strangely familiar doctrines, and I
saw that in fact there lies embedded in the business pages an entire
theology, which is comparable in scope if not in profundity to that of
Thomas Aquinas or Karl Barth. It needed only to be systematized for a
whole new Summa to take shape.
At the apex of any theological system, of course, is its doctrine of
God. In the new theology this celestial pinnacle is occupied by The
Market, which I capitalize to signify both the mystery that enshrouds
it and the reverence it inspires in business folk. Different faiths
have, of course, different views of the divine attributes. In
Christianity, God has sometimes been defined as omnipotent (possessing
all power), omniscient (having all knowledge), and omnipresent
(existing everywhere). Most Christian theologies, it is true, hedge a
bit. They teach that these qualities of the divinity are indeed there,
but are hidden from human eyes both by human sin and by the
transcendence of the divine itself. In "light inaccessible" they are,
as the old hymn puts it, "hid from our eyes." Likewise, although The
Market, we are assured, possesses these divine attributes, they are
not always completely evident to mortals but must be trusted and
affirmed by faith. "Further along," as another old gospel song says,
"we'll understand why."
As I tried to follow the arguments and explanations of the
economist-theologians who justify The Market's ways to men, I spotted
the same dialectics I have grown fond of in the many years I have
pondered the Thomists, the Calvinists, and the various schools of
modern religious thought. In particular, the econologians' rhetoric
resembles what is sometimes called "process theology," a relatively
contemporary trend influenced by the philosophy of Alfred North
Whitehead. In this school although God wills to possess the classic
attributes, He does not yet possess them in full, but is definitely
moving in that direction. This conjecture is of immense help to
theologians for obvious reasons. It answers the bothersome puzzle of
theodicy: why a lot of bad things happen that an omnipotent,
omnipresent, and omniscient God—especially a benevolent one—would not
countenance. Process theology also seems to offer considerable comfort
to the theologians of The Market. It helps to explain the dislocation,
pain, and disorientation that are the result of transitions from
economic heterodoxy to free markets.
Since the earliest stages of human history, of course, there have been
bazaars, rialtos, and trading posts—all markets. But The Market was
never God, because there were other centers of value and meaning,
other "gods." The Market operated within a plethora of other
institutions that restrained it. As Karl Polanyi has demonstrated in
his classic work The Great Transformation, only in the past two
centuries has The Market risen above these demigods and chthonic
spirits to become today's First Cause.
Initially The Market's rise to Olympic supremacy replicated the
gradual ascent of Zeus above all the other divinities of the ancient
Greek pantheon, an ascent that was never quite secure. Zeus, it will
be recalled, had to keep storming down from Olympus to quell this or
that threat to his sovereignty. Recently, however, The Market is
becoming more like the Yahweh of the Old Testament—not just one
superior deity contending with others but the Supreme Deity, the only
true God, whose reign must now be universally accepted and who allows
for no rivals.
Divine omnipotence means the capacity to define what is real. It is
the power to make something out of nothing and nothing out of
something. The willed-but-not-yet-achieved omnipotence of The Market
means that there is no conceivable limit to its inexorable ability to
convert creation into commodities. But again, this is hardly a new
idea, though it has a new twist. In Catholic theology, through what is
called "transubstantiation," ordinary bread and wine become vehicles
of the holy. In the mass of The Market a reverse process occurs.
Things that have been held sacred transmute into interchangeable items
for sale. Land is a good example. For millennia it has held various
meanings, many of them numinous. It has been Mother Earth, ancestral
resting place, holy mountain, enchanted forest, tribal homeland,
aesthetic inspiration, sacred turf, and much more. But when The
Market's Sanctus bell rings and the elements are elevated, all these
complex meanings of land melt into one: real estate. At the right
price no land is not for sale, and this includes everything from
burial grounds to the cove of the local fertility sprite. This radical
desacralization dramatically alters the human relationship to land;
the same happens with water, air, space, and soon (it is predicted)
the heavenly bodies.
At the high moment of the mass the priest says, "This is my body,"
meaning the body of Christ and, by extension, the bodies of all the
faithful people. Christianity and Judaism both teach that the human
body is made "in the image of God." Now, however, in a dazzling
display of reverse transubstantiation, the human body has become the
latest sacred vessel to be converted into a commodity. The process
began, fittingly enough, with blood. But now, or soon, all bodily
organs—kidneys, skin, bone marrow, sperm, the heart itself—will be
miraculously changed into purchasable items.
Still, the liturgy of The Market is not proceeding without some
opposition from the pews. A considerable battle is shaping up in the
United States, for example, over the attempt to merchandise human
genes. A few years ago, banding together for the first time in memory,
virtually all the religious institutions in the country, from the
liberal National Council of Churches to the Catholic bishops to the
Christian Coalition, opposed the gene mart, the newest theophany of
The Market. But these critics are followers of what are now "old
religions," which, like the goddess cults that were thriving when the
worship of the vigorous young Apollo began sweeping ancient Greece,
may not have the strength to slow the spread of the new devotion.
Occasionally backsliders try to bite the Invisible Hand that feeds
them. On October 26, 1996, the German government ran an ad offering
the entire village of Liebenberg, in what used to be East Germany, for
sale—with no previous notice to its some 350 residents. Liebenberg's
citizens, many of them elderly or unemployed, stared at the notice in
disbelief. They had certainly loathed communism, but when they opted
for the market economy that reunification promised, they hardly
expected this. Liebenberg includes a thirteenth-century church, a
Baroque castle, a lake, a hunting lodge, two restaurants, and 3,000
acres of meadow and forest. Once a favorite site for boar hunting by
the old German nobility, it was obviously entirely too valuable a
parcel of real estate to overlook. Besides, having been expropriated
by the East German Communist government, it was now legally eligible
for sale under the terms of German reunification. Overnight Liebenberg
became a living parable, providing an invaluable glimpse of the
Kingdom in which The Market's will is indeed done. But the outraged
burghers of the town did not feel particularly blessed. They
complained loudly, and the sale was finally postponed. Everyone in
town realized, however, that it was not really a victory. The Market,
like Yahweh, may lose a skirmish, but in a war of attrition it will
always win in the end.
Of course, religion in the past has not been reluctant to charge for
its services. Prayers, masses, blessings, healings, baptisms,
funerals, and amulets have been hawked, and still are. Nor has
religion always been sensitive to what the traffic would bear. When,
in the early sixteenth century, Johann Tetzel jacked up the price of
indulgences and even had one of the first singing commercials composed
to push sales ("When the coin into the platter pings, the soul out of
purgatory springs"), he failed to realize that he was overreaching.
The customers balked, and a young Augustinian monk brought the traffic
to a standstill with a placard tacked to a church door.
It would be a lot harder for a Luther to interrupt sales of The
Market's amulets today. As the people of Liebenberg discovered,
everything can now be bought. Lakes, meadows, church
buildings—everything carries a sticker price. But this practice itself
exacts a cost. As everything in what used to be called creation
becomes a commodity, human beings begin to look at one another, and at
themselves, in a funny way, and they see colored price tags. There was
a time when people spoke, at least occasionally, of "inherent
worth"—if not of things, then at least of persons. The Liebenberg
principle changes all that. One wonders what would become of a modern
Luther who tried to post his theses on the church door, only to find
that the whole edifice had been bought by an American billionaire who
reckoned it might look nicer on his estate.
It is comforting to note that the citizens of Liebenberg, at least,
were not put on the block. But that raises a good question. What is
the value of a human life in the theology of The Market? Here the new
deity pauses, but not for long. The computation may be complex, but it
is not impossible. We should not believe, for example, that if a child
is born severely handicapped, unable to be "productive," The Market
will decree its death. One must remember that the profits derived from
medications, leg braces, and CAT-scan equipment should also be figured
into the equation. Such a cost analysis might result in a close
call—but the inherent worth of the child's life, since it cannot be
quantified, would be hard to include in the calculation.
It is sometimes said that since everything is for sale under the rule
of The Market, nothing is sacred. But this is not quite true. About
three years ago a nasty controversy erupted in Great Britain when a
railway pension fund that owned the small jeweled casket in which the
remains of Saint Thomas à Becket are said to have rested decided to
auction it off through Sotheby's. The casket dates from the twelfth
century and is revered as both a sacred relic and a national treasure.
The British Museum made an effort to buy it but lacked the funds, so
the casket was sold to a Canadian. Only last-minute measures by the
British government prevented removal of the casket from the United
Kingdom. In principle, however, in the theology of The Market, there
is no reason why any relic, coffin, body, or national
monument—including the Statue of Liberty and Westminster Abbey—should
not be listed. Does anyone doubt that if the True Cross were ever
really discovered, it would eventually find its way to Sotheby's? The
Market is not omnipotent—yet. But the process is under way and it is
gaining momentum.
Omniscience is a little harder to gauge than omnipotence. Maybe The
Market has already achieved it but is unable—temporarily—to apply its
gnosis until its Kingdom and Power come in their fullness.
Nonetheless, current thinking already assigns to The Market a
comprehensive wisdom that in the past only the gods have known. The
Market, we are taught, is able to determine what human needs are, what
copper and capital should cost, how much barbers and CEOs should be
paid, and how much jet planes, running shoes, and hysterectomies
should sell for. But how do we know The Market's will?
In days of old, seers entered a trance state and then informed anxious
seekers what kind of mood the gods were in, and whether this was an
auspicious time to begin a journey, get married, or start a war. The
prophets of Israel repaired to the desert and then returned to
announce whether Yahweh was feeling benevolent or wrathful. Today The
Market's fickle will is clarified by daily reports from Wall Street
and other sensory organs of finance. Thus we can learn on a day-to-day
basis that The Market is "apprehensive," "relieved," "nervous," or
even at times "jubilant." On the basis of this revelation awed adepts
make critical decisions about whether to buy or sell. Like one of the
devouring gods of old, The Market—aptly embodied in a bull or a
bear—must be fed and kept happy under all circumstances. True, at
times its appetite may seem excessive—a $35 billion bailout here, a
$50 billion one there—but the alternative to assuaging its hunger is
too terrible to contemplate.
The diviners and seers of The Market's moods are the high priests of
its mysteries. To act against their admonitions is to risk
excommunication and possibly damnation. Today, for example, if any
government's policy vexes The Market, those responsible for the
irreverence will be made to suffer. That The Market is not at all
displeased by downsizing or a growing income gap, or can be gleeful
about the expansion of cigarette sales to Asian young people, should
not cause anyone to question its ultimate omniscience. Like Calvin's
inscrutable deity, The Market may work in mysterious ways, "hid from
our eyes," but ultimately it knows best.
Omniscience can sometimes seem a bit intrusive. The traditional God of
the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer is invoked as one "unto whom all
hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid."
Like Him, The Market already knows the deepest secrets and darkest
desires of our hearts—or at least would like to know them. But one
suspects that divine motivation differs in these two cases. Clearly
The Market wants this kind of x-ray omniscience because by probing our
inmost fears and desires and then dispensing across-the-board
solutions, it can further extend its reach. Like the gods of the past,
whose priests offered up the fervent prayers and petitions of the
people, The Market relies on its own intermediaries: motivational
researchers. Trained in the advanced art of psychology, which has long
since replaced theology as the true "science of the soul," the modern
heirs of the medieval confessors delve into the hidden fantasies,
insecurities, and hopes of the populace.
One sometimes wonders, in this era of Market religion, where the
skeptics and freethinkers have gone. What has happened to the
Voltaires who once exposed bogus miracles, and the H. L. Menckens who
blew shrill whistles on pious humbuggery? Such is the grip of current
orthodoxy that to question the omniscience of The Market is to
question the inscrutable wisdom of Providence. The metaphysical
principle is obvious: If you say it's the real thing, then it must be
the real thing. As the early Christian theologian Tertullian once
remarked, "Credo quia absurdum est" ("I believe because it is
absurd").
Finally, there is the divinity's will to be omnipresent. Virtually
every religion teaches this idea in one way or another, and the new
religion is no exception. The latest trend in economic theory is the
attempt to apply market calculations to areas that once appeared to be
exempt, such as dating, family life, marital relations, and
child-rearing. Henri Lepage, an enthusiastic advocate of
globalization, now speaks about a "total market." Saint Paul reminded
the Athenians that their own poets sang of a God "in whom we live and
move and have our being"; so now The Market is not only around us but
inside us, informing our senses and our feelings. There seems to be
nowhere left to flee from its untiring quest. Like the Hound of
Heaven, it pursues us home from the mall and into the nursery and the
bedroom.
It used to be thought—mistakenly, as it turns out—that at least the
innermost, or "spiritual," dimension of life was resistant to The
Market. It seemed unlikely that the interior castle would ever be
listed by Century 21. But as the markets for material goods become
increasingly glutted, such previously unmarketable states of grace as
serenity and tranquillity are now appearing in the catalogues. Your
personal vision quest can take place in unspoiled wildernesses that
are pictured as virtually unreachable—except, presumably, by the other
people who read the same catalogue. Furthermore, ecstasy and
spirituality are now offered in a convenient generic form. Thus The
Market makes available the religious benefits that once required
prayer and fasting, without the awkwardness of denominational
commitment or the tedious ascetic discipline that once limited their
accessibility. All can now handily be bought without an unrealistic
demand on one's time, in a weekend workshop at a Caribbean resort with
a sensitive psychological consultant replacing the crotchety retreat
master.
Discovering the theology of The Market made me begin to think in a
different way about the conflict among religions. Violence between
Catholics and Protestants in Ulster or Hindus and Muslims in India
often dominates the headlines. But I have come to wonder whether the
real clash of religions (or even of civilizations) may be going
unnoticed. I am beginning to think that for all the religions of the
world, however they may differ from one another, the religion of The
Market has become the most formidable rival, the more so because it is
rarely recognized as a religion. The traditional religions and the
religion of the global market, as we have seen, hold radically
different views of nature. In Christianity and Judaism, for example,
"the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world and all
that dwell therein." The Creator appoints human beings as stewards and
gardeners but, as it were, retains title to the earth. Other faiths
have similar ideas. In the Market religion, however, human beings,
more particularly those with money, own anything they buy and—within
certain limits—can dispose of anything as they choose. Other
contradictions can be seen in ideas about the human body, the nature
of human community, and the purpose of life. The older religions
encourage archaic attachments to particular places. But in The
Market's eyes all places are interchangeable. The Market prefers a
homogenized world culture with as few inconvenient particularities as
possible.
Disagreements among the traditional religions become picayune in
comparison with the fundamental differences they all have with the
religion of The Market. Will this lead to a new jihad or crusade? I
doubt it. It seems unlikely that traditional religions will rise to
the occasion and challenge the doctrines of the new dispensation. Most
of them seem content to become its acolytes or to be absorbed into its
pantheon, much as the old Nordic deities, after putting up a game
fight, eventually settled for a diminished but secure status as
Christian saints. I am usually a keen supporter of ecumenism. But the
contradictions between the world views of the traditional religions on
the one hand and the world view of the Market religion on the other
are so basic that no compromise seems possible, and I am secretly
hoping for a rebirth of polemics.
No religion, new or old, is subject to empirical proof, so what we
have is a contest between faiths. Much is at stake. The Market, for
example, strongly prefers individualism and mobility. Since it needs
to shift people to wherever production requires them, it becomes
wrathful when people cling to local traditions. These belong to the
older dispensations and—like the high places of the Baalim—should be
plowed under. But maybe not. Like previous religions, the new one has
ingenious ways of incorporating pre-existing ones. Hindu temples,
Buddhist festivals, and Catholic saints' shrines can look forward to
new incarnations. Along with native costumes and spicy food, they will
be allowed to provide local color and authenticity in what could
otherwise turn out to be an extremely bland Beulah Land.
There is, however, one contradiction between the religion of The
Market and the traditional religions that seems to be insurmountable.
All of the traditional religions teach that human beings are finite
creatures and that there are limits to any earthly enterprise. A
Japanese Zen master once said to his disciples as he was dying, "I
have learned only one thing in life: how much is enough." He would
find no niche in the chapel of The Market, for whom the First
Commandment is "There is never enough." Like the proverbial shark that
stops moving, The Market that stops expanding dies. That could happen.
If it does, then Nietzsche will have been right after all. He will
just have had the wrong God in mind.
