Max Weber on Puitans and Art (gold is tougher than dirt)

[Mark Kohut]

And a tidbit learned elsewhere re Puritan America (maybe..that is, it is just 
suggestive)

"Peyton Place" became the fastest-selling book in America in 1956, i relearned, 
with
the person noting this---Ruth Franklin in Bookforum on bestsellers in 
America----
reminding that this book's sales success was universally thought to happen 
as a blow against Puritanism
in America, especially its hypocritical version............



----- Original Message ----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Mon, May 30, 2011 8:01:59 PM
Subject: Max Weber on Puitans and Art (gold is tougher than dirt)

As against this the Puritans upheld their decisive characteristic, the
principle of ascetic conduct. For otherwise the Puritan aversion to
sport, even for the Quakers, was by no means simply one of principle.
Sport was accepted if it served a rational purpose, that of recreation
necessary for physical efficiency. But as a means for the spontaneous
expression of undisciplined impulses, it was under suspicion; and in
so far as it became purely a means of enjoyment, or awakened pride,
raw instincts or the irrational gambling instinct, it was of course
strictly condemned. Impulsive enjoyment of life, which leads away both
from work in a calling and from religion, was as such the enemy of
rational asceticism, whether in the form of seigneurial sports, or the
enjoyment of the dance-hall or the public-house of the common man.

Its attitude was thus suspicious and often hostile to the aspects of
culture without any immediate religious value. It is not, however,
true that the ideals of Puritanism implied a solemn, narrow-minded
contempt of culture. Quite the contrary is the case at least for
science, with the exception of the hatred of Scholasticism. Moreover,
the great men of the Puritan movement were thoroughly steeped in the
culture of the Renaissance. The sermons of the Presbyterian divines
abound with classical allusions and even the Radicals, although they
objected to it, were not ashamed to display that kind of learning in
theological polemics. Perhaps no country was ever so full of graduates
as New England in the first generation of its existence. The satire of
their opponents, such as, for instance, Butler’s Hudibras, also
attacks primarily the pedantry and highly trained dialectics of the
Puritans. This is partially due to the religious valuation of
knowledge which followed from their attitude to the Catholic fides
implicita.

But the situation is quite different when one looks at non-scientific
literature and especially the fine arts. Here asceticism descended
like a frost on the life of “Merrie old England.” And not only worldly
merriment felt its effect. The Puritan’s ferocious hatred of
everything which smacked of superstition, of all survivals of magical
or sacramental salvation, applied to the Christmas festivities and the
May Pole and all spontaneous religious art. That there was room in
Holland for a great, often uncouthly realistic art proves only how far
from completely the authoritarian moral discipline of that country was
able to counteract the influence of the court and the regents (a class
of rentiers), and also the joy in life of the parvenu bourgeoisie,
after the short supremacy of the Calvinistic theocracy had been
transformed into a moderate national Church, and with it Calvinism had
perceptibly lost in its power of ascetic influence.

The theatre was obnoxious to the Puritans, and with the strict
exclusion of the erotic and of nudity from the realm of toleration, a
radical view of either literature or art could not exist. The
conceptions of idle talk, of superfluities, and of vain ostentation,
all designations of an irrational attitude without objective purpose,
thus not ascetic, and especially not serving the glory of God, but of
man, were always at hand to serve in deciding in favour of sober
utility as against any artistic tendencies. This was especially true
in the case of decoration of the person, for instance clothing. That
powerful tendency toward uniformity of life, which today so immensely
aids the capitalistic interest in the standardization of production,
had its ideal foundations in the repudiation of all idolatry of the
flesh.

Of course we must not forget that Puritanism included a world of
contradictions, and that the instinctive sense of eternal greatness in
art was certainly stronger among its leaders than in the atmosphere of
the Cavaliers. Moreover, a unique genius like Rembrandt, however
little his conduct may have been acceptable to God in the eyes of the
Puritans, was very strongly influenced in the character of his work by
his religious environment. But that does not alter the picture as a
whole. In so far as the development of the Puritan tradition could,
and in part did, lead to a powerful spiritualization of personality,
it was a decided benefit to literature. But for the most part that
benefit only accrued to later generations.

Although we cannot here enter upon a discussion of the influence of
Puritanism in all these directions, we should call attention to the
fact that the toleration of pleasure in cultural goods, which
contributed to purely aesthetic or athletic enjoyment, certainly
always ran up against one characteristic limitation: they must not
cost anything. Man is only a trustee of the goods which have come to
him through God’s grace. He must, like the servant in the parable,
give an account of every penny entrusted to him, and it is at least
hazardous to spend any of it for a purpose which does not serve the
glory of God but only one’s own enjoyment. What person, who keeps his
eyes open, has not met representatives of this viewpoint even in the
present? The idea of a man’s duty to his possessions, to which he
subordinates himself as an obedient steward, or even as an acquisitive
machine, bears with chilling weight on his life. The greater the
possessions the heavier, if the ascetic attitude toward life stands
the test, the feeling of responsibility for them, for holding them
undiminished for the glory of God and increasing them by restless
effort. The origin of this type of life also extends in certain roots,
like so many aspects of the spirit of capitalism, back into the Middle
Ages. But it was in the ethic of ascetic Protestantism that it first
found a consistent ethical foundation. Its significance for the
development of capitalism is obvious. This worldly Protestant
asceticism, as we may recapitulate up to this point, acted powerfully
against the spontaneous enjoyment of possessions; it restricted
consumption, especially of luxuries. On the other hand, it had the
psychological effect of freeing the acquisition of goods from the
inhibitions of traditionalistic ethics. It broke the bonds of the
impulse of acquisition in that it not only legalized it, but (in the
sense discussed) looked upon it as directly willed by God. The
campaign against the temptations of the flesh, and the dependence on
external things, was, as besides the Puritans the great Quaker
apologist Barclay expressly says, not a struggle against the rational
acquisition, but against the irrational use of wealth.

But this irrational use was exemplified in the outward forms of luxury
which their code condemned as idolatry of the flesh, however natural
they had appeared to the feudal mind. On the other hand, they approved
the rational and utilitarian uses of wealth which were willed by God
for the needs of the individual and the community. They did not wish
to impose mortification on the man of wealth, but the use of his means
for necessary and practical things. The idea of comfort
characteristically limits the extent of ethically permissible
expenditures. It is naturally no accident that the development of a
manner of living consistent with that idea may be observed earliest
and most clearly among the most consistent representatives of this
whole attitude toward life. Over against the glitter and ostentation
of feudal magnificence which, resting on an unsound economic basis,
prefers a sordid elegance to a sober simplicity, they set the clean
and solid comfort of the middle-class home as an ideal.

On the side of the production of private wealth, asceticism condemned
both dishonesty and impulsive avarice. What was condemned as
covetousness, Mammonism, etc., was the pursuit of riches for their own
sake. For wealth in itself was a temptation. But here asceticism was
the power “which ever seeks the good but ever creates evil”; what was
evil in its sense was possession and its temptations. For, in
conformity with the Old Testament and in analogy to the ethical
valuation of good works, asceticism looked upon the pursuit of wealth
as an end in itself as highly reprehensible; but the attainment of it
as a fruit of labour in a calling was a sign of God’s blessing. And
even more important: the religious valuation of restless, continuous,
systematic work in a worldly calling, as the highest means to
asceticism, and at the same time the surest and most evident proof of
rebirth and genuine faith, must have been the most powerful
conceivable lever for the expansion of that attitude toward life which
we have here called the spirit of capitalism.

When the limitation of consumption is combined with this release of
acquisitive activity, the inevitable practical result is obvious:
accumulation of capital through ascetic compulsion to save. The
restraints which were imposed upon the consumption of wealth naturally
served to increase it by making possible the productive investment of
capital. How strong this influence was is not, unfortunately,
susceptible to exact statistical demonstration. In New England the
connection is so evident that it did not escape the eye of so
discerning a historian as Doyle. But also in Holland, which was really
only dominated by strict Calvinism for seven years, the greater
simplicity of life in the more seriously religious circles, in
combination with great wealth, led to an excessive propensity to
accumulation.

That, furthermore, the tendency which has existed everywhere and at
all times, being quite strong in Germany today, for middle-class
fortunes to be absorbed into the nobility, was necessarily checked by
the Puritan antipathy to the feudal way of life, is evident. English
Mercantilist writers of the seventeenth century attributed the
superiority of Dutch capital to English to the circumstance that newly
acquired wealth there did not regularly seek investment in land. Also,
since it is not simply a question of the purchase of land, it did not
there seek to transfer itself to feudal habits of life, and thereby to
remove itself from the possibility of capitalistic investment. The
high esteem for agriculture as a peculiarly important branch of
activity, also especially consistent with piety, which the Puritans
shared, applied (for instance in Baxter) not to the landlord, but to
the yeoman and farmer, in the eighteenth century not to the squire,
but the rational cultivator. Through the whole of English society in
the time since the seventeenth century goes the conflict between the
squirearchy, the representatives of “merrie old England,” and the
Puritan circles of widely varying social influence. Both elements,
that of an unspoiled naive joy of life, and of a strictly regulated,
reserved self-control, and conventional ethical conduct are even today
combined to form the English national character. Similarly, the early
history of the North American Colonies is dominated by the sharp
contrast of the adventurers, who wanted to set up plantations with the
labour of indentured servants, and live as feudal lords, and the
specifically middle-class outlook of the Puritans.

As far as the influence of the Puritan outlook extended, under all
circumstances – and this is, of course, much more important than the
mere encouragement of capital accumulation – it favoured the
development of a rational bourgeois economic life; it was the most
important, and above all the only consistent influence in the
development of that life. It stood at the cradle of the modern
economic man.

see
http://www.williamgaddis.org/critinterpessays/zeidlerweberjress.shtml