RELIGION AND CAPITALISM

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21982, 17 June 1933, Page 16

RELIGION AND CAPITALISM

ADDRESS BY DR FISHER Dr A. G. B. Fisher was the speaker at the Philosophical Club at the University last night. The vice-president (the Rev. Dr E. N. Herrington) was in the chair, and there was a large attendance. The speaker said that it was a mistake to suppose that the essence of capitalism was to be found in unlimited greed for gain. The acquisitive impulses had been powerful in every form of economic organisation, but the distinctive feature of modern capitalism was the moulding of the acquisitive impulse into a national system, based on the deliberate and systematic adaptations of means to the end of wealth accumulation. This national ordering of the acquisitive impulse was made possible by the organisation of legally free wage-earners for the purpose of pecuniary profit by the owner of capital or his agents. Its development in the modern world demanded a body of active, innovating experimenters and a body of workmen who would submit to control, but who would at the same time display initiative and adaptability, and it would have been impossible without a definite breach with the codes of social and economic morality of the mediaeval world. What made this breach possible? What moved men to brave the disapproval with which those who ignored long-established traditions were always received? It had been suggested that the answer was to be found in the religious revolution of the sixteenth century. Capitalism was the social counterpart of Calvinist theology, the influence of which extended widely among Puritan groups who were never Calvinists. The change of moral standards associated with Calvinism converted a natural frailty into an ornament of the spirit, and canonised, as economic virtuous habits which in earlier ages had been denounced as vices.

The Calvinist doctrine of predestination plunged the individual into profound spiritual isolation, but instead of encouraging withdrawal from the world, Calvinism compelled the individual to view all his ordinary, activities with a new seriousness. The elected Christian was in the world only to increase the glory of God, by fulfilling His commandments, but the fulfilment of God’s commandments included the organisation of social and economic life. Labour in the service of impersonal social usefulness promoted the glory of God, and hence was willed by Him. Further, for the ordinary man the assurance of election wag most effectively given by the intense activity involved in the conscious national organisation of every part of one’s life in carrying out the duties involved by his calling. The doctrine of the calling meant the improvement of all one’s talents in what to-day would be described as the most economic and efficient way. Richard Baxter wrote in 1673: “If God show you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way (without wrong to your soul or to any other), if-you refuse this, and choose less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your calling, and you refuse to be God’s steward.” The calling was a strenuous and exacting enterprise to be chosen by the individual, and pursued with a sense of religious responsibility. As another Puritan writer put it, next to saving his soul, the tradesman’s 1 call and business is to serve God in his calling, and to drive it as far as it will go.” Money-making and piety became natural allies, for the virtues which were incumbent upon the elect were also those most likely to ensure commercial prosperity. The natural man was quite pleased when opportunities for increasing his income arose, but he was seldom prepared to order his whole life in a systematic way to bring about, this end._ Economic progress demanded such a national ordering of life, so that if economic progress were to be accelerated some method of controlling and reversing the tendencies of the natural man was necessary. Calvinist theology, it had been suggested, had been effective for this purpose. How was the difficulty to be removed now that the force of this original impetus has been exhausted? Religious influences still operated to some extent in business, but for the most- part they pointed to-day in quite a different direction from that which was necessary if the deeply-rooted conflict between the desire of the natural man for individual security and his equally eager demand for further economic progress was to be resolved. Neither the philanthropy of which the Cadburys and Rownbrees were < types, nor the woolly sentimentality, without stable intellectual foundations displayed by movements like Rotary, was' very helpful in this connection. The inner drive which had formerly made the accumulation: of wealth appear to, be so obviously in harmony with the Divine will had now disappeared almost everywhere, any many men continued to, accumulate wealth without any conviction that their activities were really sinenificant. For the most part, and on the whole quite reasonably, we still demanded tlje fruits of economic progress, but the general outlook on fife which influenced a sufficient number of people in the past to exercise the care and restraint which the adaptations" demanded by economic progress made necessary had radically altered, and for the most part for good reasons. The stability of our social structure depended upon the discovery of a new basis for controlling the natural desire for stability in the interests of further economic progress.