The Guise of a Miracle

Some nuggets of brilliance from Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition:

“It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before.  This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings and in all origins....The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.  The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable.  And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world.  With respect to this somebody who is unique it can be truly said that nobody was there before....

“In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world, while their physical identities appear without any activity of their own in the unique shape of the body and sound of the voice.  This disclosure of ‘who’ in contradistinction to ‘what’ somebody is--his qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings, which he may display or hide--is implicit in everything somebody says and does.  It can be hidden only in complete silence and perfect passivity, but its disclosure can almost never be achieved as a wilful purpose, as though one possessed and could dispose of this ‘who’ in the same manner he has and can dispose of his qualities.  On the contrary, it is more than likely that the ‘who,’ which appears so clearly and unmistakeably to others, remains hidden from the person himself, like the daimon in Greek religion which accompanies each man throughout his life, always looking over his shoulder from behind and thus visible only to those he encounters.”

Consumerism and the Death of Human Society

In section 2 of The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt offers a fascinating analysis of the difference between labor, which produces the basic necessities of life, and work, which produces tools, durable goods, artifacts. Even in 1958, though, she saw that this distinction, so basic to the human condition, was being destroyed, as all work was being turned into labor--more and more of the products of work were being treated as necessities of life to be consumed like food, rather than tools to be used. This process began in the quest for economic abundance--since possible consumption is in principle infinite, then the only way to increase wealth infinitely is to turn everything into an object of consumption. But to do this is to destroy the fabric of truly human society and reduce us again to an animal state.
But I will let her say it all in her own words, which are breathtaking as always:

"Since mankind as a whole is still very far from having reached the limit of abundance, the mode in which society may overcome this natural limitation of its own fertility can be perceived only tentatively and on a national scale. There, the solution seems to be simple enough. It consists in treating all use objects as though they were consumer goods, so that a chair or a table is now consumed as rapidly as a dress and a dress used up almost as quickly as food. This mode of intercourse with the things of the world is perfectly adequate to the way they are produced. The industrial revolution has replaced all workmanship with labor, and the result has been that the things of the modern world have become labor products whose natural fate is to be consumed, instead of work products which are there to be used."

"The endlessness of the laboring process is guaranteed by the ever-recurring needs of consumption, or if, to put it in another way, the rate of use is so tremendously accelerated that the objective difference between use and consumption, between the relative durability of use objects and the swift coming and going of consumer goods, dwindles to insignificance. In our need for more and more rapid replacement of the worldly things around us, we can no longer afford to use them, to respect and preserve their inherent durability; we must consume, devour, as it were, our houses and furniture and cars as though they were the 'good things' of nature which spoil uselessly if they are to be drawn swiftly into the never-ending cycle of man's metabolism with nature, the biological process which goes on in its very midst as well as the natural cyclical processes which surround it, delivering and abandoning to them the always threatened stability of a human world.
The ideals of homo faber, the fabricator of the world, which are permanence, stability, and durability, have been sacrificed to abundance, the ideal of the animal laborans."

"One of the obvious danger signs that we may be on our way to bring into existence the ideal of the animal laborans is the extent to which our whole economy has become a waste economy, in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to come to a sudden catastrophic end. But if the ideal were already in existence and we were truly nothing but members of a consumers' society, we would no longer live in a world at all but simply be driven by a process in whose ever-recurring cycles things appear and disappear, manifest themselves and vanish, never to last long enough to surround the life process in their midst.
....Without taking things out of nature's hands and consuming them, and without defending himself against the natural processes of growth and decay, the animal laborans could never survive. But without being at home in the midst of things whose durability makes them fit for use and for erecting a world whose very permanence stands in direct contrast to life, this life would never be human."

The Property Paradox

It has become fashionable recently in Christian capitalist circles to define capitalism along the lines of “an economic system based on respect for private property.” If this is what capitalism is, then of course we should defend it, right?

The chief objection to this is that it’s completely arbitrary and unhistorical. To define capitalism this way is to define it strictly in opposition to socialism and communism. But the problem is that socialism and communism arose as reactions to capitalism, not vice versa. Capitalism pre-dated the major challenges to the notion of private property, so how could capitalism’s essence be “a respect for private property” given that it arose in a setting where private property was taken for granted? Obviously the essence of capitalism is not a respect for private property, even if that may be a part of it.

But it turns out, that’s not even a part of it. Capitalism is the rejection, the destruction, of private property, at least for most of the population. So Hannah Arendt fascinatingly points out in The Human Condition. See, Arendt points out that property and wealth are simply not the same thing, as we tend to take for granted that we are. We’re obsessed with private wealth in the modern world, but private property is increasingly non-existent. “It is easy to forget,” she says, “that wealth and property, far from being the same, are of an entirely different nature. The present emergence everywhere of actually or potentially very wealthy societies which at the same time are essentially propertyless, because the wealth of any signle individual consists of his share in the annual income of society as a whole, clearly shows how little these two thigns are connected.”

Property, you see, is not simply any worldly good of value, but is one’s personal share of the productive capacity of the world, it is, in its most basic for, land, and historically speaking, was fairly fixed and inalienable. One was born into and died on one’s property; one did not constantly exchange it for other pieces of property. Wealth is something quite different; wealth is transient, consumable, and in itself unproductive. To have property was the basis for freedom, to lack it was to be a slave, even if one had a fair bit of wealth, as many slaves did.

Capitalism, as a simple historical fact, Arendt observes, has never been particularly interested in the value of private property, but in fact originated in the widespread expropriation of it, and is much more interested in the amassing of private wealth: “The enormous and still proceeding accumulation of wealth in modern society, which was started by expropriation--the expropriation of the peasant classes which in turn was the almost accidental consequence of the expropriation of Church and monastic property after the Reformation--has never shown much consideration for private property but has sacrificed it whenever it came into conflict with the accumulation of wealth.” Moreover, the central value of private property--its permanence--which made it the basis of freedom and security, is undermined within modern capitalism, which has seen “the progressing transformation of immobile into mobile property until eventually the distinction between property and wealth, between the fungibiles and the consumptibiles of Roman law, loses all significance because every tangible, “fungible” thing has become an object of “consumption”; it lost its private use value which was determined by its location and acquired an exclusively social value determined through its ever-changing exchangeability whose fluctuation could itself be fixed only temporarily by relating it to the common denominator of money.”

This account resonates with Hilaire Belloc’s thesis in The Servile State, which is that capitalism arose via the expropriation of the widely-distributed private property from small landholders into the hands of large landowners. By the beginning of the industrial revolution, there was already a small minority property-owning class and a large majority property-less class. Naturally, then, the course that industrial capitalism took was one in which industry was not cooperative, but was owned by a small capitalist class, which oversaw and increasingly exploited a large working class. (Arendt points out that the whole existence of the “working class” is a modern invention, and was unknown in antiquity and the Middle Ages, where the free man was not a mere laborer, but a property-owner who lived off the produce of his own capital.)

All this of course sheds tremendous light on the meaning of the Old Testament economic laws, which are usually thoroughly misunderstood when we try to read into them modern capitalist/socialist dichotomies of property ownership. On the one hand, capitalist Christians, convinced that what capitalism stands for is “private property,” look at the Torah and assume that the whole point of the laws is to insist upon private ownership of property, but then they don’t know what to do with all the redistribution, which seems kinda socialist. Liberals see all the redistribution, and assume that there’s a more communal understanding of property, but then they don’t know what to do with the emphasis that each family receives and holds his patrimony.

In light of Arendt and Belloc’s analysis, though, it becomes crystal clear. The Torah t is deeply concerned with protecting private property, but not private wealth per se. It understands that private property is necessary for freedom, but precisely for that reason, it resists the private right to the continual acquisition of property (which is what capitalism means by private property rights). Private property is so important that it must be safeguarded by redistribution; if a family is deprived of their property, their fixed piece of land, given by God for them to use for their own and the community’s benefit, then that property must be restored to them via the regular resetting processes of the sabbath year and Jubilee. This puts a tight lid on the process of wealth accumulation that tends to devour the stability of property, and the process of expropriation of property by the strong from the weak. In other words, private property is a necessary, but not a sufficient, cause of economic freedom and justice; careful regulation of the use and acquisition of that property is also necessary, lest one person’s property become a means of destroying another’s.