#The Protestant Work Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism

[morlock-holmes]

So I started reading Max Weber and it turns out that "protestant work ethic" isn't just a fancy name for the idea that hard work is good sometimes.

[greeneyre]

American "Justice" System: [Forcing people into hard labor conditions for fucking weed possession] I keep reinventing slavery bro! It keeps happening! Max Weber: I warned you about turning working all the time into some sort of moral issue bro!!!! I TOLD YOU DOG!

this ca prop 6 stuff is so bananas because i read this opinion article opposing it and their mic drop end of article moment is just "should people CONVICTED of CRIMES be able to REFUSE work? we don't think so! vote no :)" (and also this is not analogous to slavery in any way and actually if you say it is you are obfuscating other REAL issues in prisons that we only bring up when someone actually tries to fix something)

[transmutationisms]

can you talk a bit more about weber (im refering to a post you made earlier today i think)? i know a bit about the protestant ethic theory but not really the historical context in which it was written nor how it's used today. thanks!

so, weber's argument is essentially that protestant (specifically calvinist and puritan) theology played a major causal role in the development of capitalism in northern europe following the reformation. his position was that protestant ethics, in contrast to catholicism, placed a high moral value on secular, everyday labour, but also discouraged the spending of one's wages on luxury goods, tithing to the church, or giving overmuch to charity. thus, protestants invested their money in business and commercial ventures instead, turning the generation of capital into a moral endeavour and venerating hard work and economic productivity as ways to ensure one's soul was saved (as the buying of indulgences was not an option for protestants).

this is a bad argument. at core it is idealist, subordinating an economic development to religious ideology. weber never explains how the actual, material economic changes he wants to talk about were effected by a set of ideas; he doesn't consider the possibility that the ideas themselves reflected in some way the material and economic context in which they were developed; he doesn't differentiate between protestantism as a causal factor in the development of capitalism, versus the possibility that capitalism and protestant conversion both resulted from some other factor or set of factors. <- these types of problems are endemic to 'history of ideas' aka 'intellectual history' because merely writing a history of the (learned, published) ideas circulating at a given time doesn't tell you jack about how and whether those ideas were actually implemented, how common people reacted to them or resisted them, what sorts of material circumstances the ideas themselves were formulated amidst, and so forth.

in the case of weber, it's very easy to poke holes in this supposed relationship between protestantism and capitalism. even in western europe alone, we could look at a country like france, which was quite catholic, never became predominantly or even significantly protestant, and yet also industrialised not long after, eg, the netherlands and england. we could also look at what historian michael kwass calls "court capitalism" in 18th-century france, which was a largely non-industrial form of capitalism that depended on the catholic king's central authority in order to ensure a return on investment. france at this time had a burgeoning luxury culture and a centralised, absolutist government that was closely entwined with the powerful catholic church—yet it also had economic development that is recognised as early capitalist, along with growing social and economic tensions between the nascent bourgeois and petit-bourgeois classes and the aristocracy. this is not even close to being the earliest example of capitalist or proto-capitalist economic development (some predates the reformation!), and again, this is within western europe alone—we could and should also point out that capitalism is not solely a european phenomenon and can and does coexist with other, radically different, religious ideology (i have problems with jack goody's work but this is something i think it can help elucidate).

weber argued that the 'spirit of capitalism' was no longer dependent on the protestant theology that had initially spawned it—but again, here we see issues with idealist methodologies in history. at what point, and how, does this 'spirit' become autonomous? what is it that has taken hold, if weber is not talking about the 'protestant ethic' itself and is also not interested in analysing the material changes that comprise capitalism except as effects of some underlying ideology? well, it's what he sees as a general shift toward 'rationalisation' and 'disenchantment' of the world, leading to an understanding of late 19th- and early 20th-century capitalism as a kind of spiritually unmoored servitude to mechanism and industry. this in turn relates back to weber's overall understanding of the legacy of the 'scientific revolution', which is another can of (bad) worms. there is a lot to say about these elements of weber's thought, but for starters the idea that europe was the progenitor of all 'scientific advancement', that it then simply disseminated such knowledge to the rest of the world (the apotheosis of the centre-periphery model, lmao), and that europe has become 'disenchanted', ie irreligious, as a result of such scientific advancement... is just patently bad analysis. it's eurocentric, chauvinistic, and simply demonstrably untrue in like twelve different ways.

anyway, when i see conservatives and reactionaries cite weber, i'm not surprised. his arguments are conservative (his entire intellectual paradigm in this text was part of his critique of marx and the premises of materialist / contextualist history). but when i see ostensible leftists doing it, often as some kind of dunk on protestantism (or christianity more generally, which is not even a good reading of weber's own understanding of catholicism), it's more irritating to me. i am not interested in 'leftisms' that are not materialist. weber's analysis is a bad explanation of how and why capitalism took hold; it doesn't even work for the limited northern european case studies he starts with because, again, idealist history fundamentally fails to explain how ideology itself creates material change. like, "some guy writes something down -> ??? -> everyone just agrees with him -> ??? -> stuff happens somehow" is not a good explanation of any phenomenon, lmao. if we are stuck on the idea that capitalism, a set of economic phenomena and real relations of production, is the result of ideology, then we will also be stuck trying to 'combat' capitalism on the ideological level. it's unserious and counterproductive. weber's analysis has retained an outsize position in the sociological historiography because it's an attractively simplistic, top-down, idealist explanation of both capitalism and protestantism that makes centuries worth of material changes to production forms into a kind of ideological coup ushering in an age of 'rationalism'. this is just not a text that tells us, leftists, anything politically useful. at best it is an explication of the internal psychological logics of (some) forms of protestantism in (some) places and contexts.

[ink-stained-clouds]

Read in October ↴

favorites: ★

Books

The Fragile Threads of Power by V.E. Schwab (5/5) ★

The Spare Room by Andrea Bartz (just okay)

Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton (4/5)

The Atlas Paradox by Olivie Blake (sigh)

Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore (reread. Forever a fave) ★

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Marx Weber (just glad to be done with it tbh)

Scholarly articles

Hay, Carter and Ryan Medlrum. 2010. “Bullying Victimization and Adolescent Self-Harm: Testing Hypotheses from General Strain Theory.”

Martineau, Harriet. 1838. “On Marriage.”

Erikson, Kai. 1986. “On Work and Alienation.” ★

Van der Linden, Sander. 2022. “Misinformation: susceptibility, spread, and interventions to immunize the public.”

Nan Xioali, Yuan Wang, and Kathryn Thier. 2022. “Why do people believe health misinformation and who is at risk? A systematic review of individual differences in susceptibility to health misinformation.” ★

Wright, Caroline, Philippa Williams, Olga Elizarova, Jennifer Dahne, Jiang Bian, Yunpeng Zhao, and Andy S. L. Tan. 2021. “Effects of brief exposure to misinformation about e-cigarette harms on Twitter: a randomised controlled experiment.”

[philosopherking1887]

@iscariotsss asked in the replies about the relationship between Calvinism and the Protestant work ethic. I haven't actually read Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, though I seem to have absorbed a lot of its contents by osmosis, and I probably didn't say anything in my post that Weber hadn't already said with a lot more supporting evidence...

Anyway, the Wikipedia article on Weber's book says that he considered Calvinism and Pietism (a behaviorally stricter offshoot of Lutheranism) to be the most pronounced incarnations of a general tendency that began with the Protestant Reformation, including Luther's anti-clerical, in theory democratic/egalitarian idea that any occupation in life, however humble, can be a vocation or calling, not just the priesthood. Then that fed into the idea that any kind of work, not just overtly religious work, could be service to God, because God was the one who called people to be a shoemaker or a dairy farmer or whatever. Then add to that the predestination weirdness of Calvinism, where you can't do anything in particular to secure your salvation (such as participating in the Church sacraments, or even coming to sincere faith), which led people to look for some indirect indication that they were predestined for salvation and decided that worldly success was a good one (which is frankly kind of ridiculous considering what's actually in the Gospels), plus (as @squeeful said in the replies) the turbocharged misanthropy of Calvinist theology, and you have the perfect breeding ground for capitalist culture.

Interestingly, the Wikipedia article also says this in the "Reception" section:

The essay can also be interpreted as one of Weber's criticisms of Karl Marx and his theories. While Marx's historical materialism held that all human institutions – including religion – were based on economic foundations, many have seen The Protestant Ethic as turning this theory on its head by implying that a religious movement fostered capitalism, not the other way around.

Other scholars have taken a more nuanced view of Weber's argument. Weber states in the closing of this essay, "it is, of course, not my aim to substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and history. Each is equally possible, but each if it does not serve as the preparation, but as the conclusion of an investigation, accomplishes equally little in the interest of historical truth." Weber's argument can be understood as an attempt to deepen the understanding of the cultural origins of capitalism, which does not exclude the historical materialist origins described by Marx: modern capitalism emerged from an elective affinity of 'material' and 'ideal' factors.

It seems to me that the story about Protestant culture as a necessary but not sufficient condition for the development of modern capitalism is a rebuke to clumsy or simple-minded versions of historical materialism which claim that spiritual or religious ideas have no causal efficacy in history and economics. Orthodox Marxists might not be able to accept a causal explanation for the rise of capitalism that makes reference to anything other than material demands and the "internal contradictions" of the collapsing feudal order, but any sensible account of history has to acknowledge that people are susceptible to intellectual, spiritual, and moral motivations as well as material ones (and if they weren't, how would ideology actually work to hold a system of production in place?).

Re: Capitalism vs Calvinism (you make a solid point, btw), do you have any thoughts on why the two are conflated as much as they are?

For context, here is the post that this is about.

There are sort of two ways to answer that question:

Why is it natural or tempting to conflate capitalism and Calvinism? That is, what are people getting right when they do this?

Why do people make the mistake of conflating capitalism and Calvinism -- what leads them to get it wrong?

The answer to the first question is pretty obviously that the culture of capitalism in northwestern Europe was strongly conditioned by the culture of Calvinism. They grew up at the same time, intertwined with each other. The Commercial Revolution, people other than Jews (and much more numerous) who were allowed to charge interest on loans (which Catholics couldn't), etc. It also has to do with the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and how people's success and industriousness in the world were taken to be signs of God's favor -- not that you could earn it, because God's grace is given by His free will alone, but it was supposed to be an indication that God liked you and was allowing you to be virtuous (which you couldn't claim credit for on your own).

The ideology we think of as capitalist, about how people are naturally lazy and selfish and need to be manipulated with the right incentives into serving the public good, is originally Calvinist: it views human nature as irretrievably fallen without God's special grace (as I learned in a very interesting talk on Hobbes recently). You can't teach people to be truly good, to recognize the good and desire it for its own sake (as Catholic theologians thought you could, even though fallen human nature made that difficult); all you can do is set things up so that it's in their interests to do the things you (the community leader/ ruling authority) want them to do. @squeeful's tags on the instigating post nicely sum up this pessimistic view about human nature: #it's a viewpoint that people are inherently flawed #not in like a human way #but in a 'if given free time they will Sin'

So, given that people will Sin if you give them any leeway at all, you have to make sure you're taking up all their time with Something Productive. If they're working all the time, they won't have time to sin; if they're always thinking about work, they won't have mental space to think about sinning (which is just as bad as sinning, according to the Calvinist worldview); if they're "wholesomely" exhausted from work, they won't have the energy or inclination to sin. But of course people are naturally lazy and hate working, so how do you make them do this? Make it in their interests! Reward them with wealth and praise if they work all the time! Punish them with starvation and shame if they don't! The culture and worldview of capitalism follow from the culture and worldview of Calvinism.

OK, so, what about the second question? Why do people attribute this crap to capitalism alone rather than tracing it back to its deeper origin in Calvinism? Well, probably because capitalism is blatantly all around us, while Calvinist theology isn't -- at least, not obviously. We don't have stern bearded guys preaching at us about how God finds us loathsome and repulsive and it's only by His infinite grace and mercy that any of us are saved from the eternal torments of Hell that our degraded, sinful nature so richly deserves. Calvinism has been pretty thoroughly secularized in our daily experience, to the extent that we might think we're not religious at all, even when our mindset is profoundly shaped by religious ways of thinking.

But what I wanted to get across is that the dependency is asymmetric, not just in the sense that Calvinism came first and modern capitalism as we know it developed later, but in the sense that Calvinism could have given rise to systems and practices other than capitalism (and sometimes does), while capitalism as we know it (probably) couldn't have developed without the underpinnings of the Calvinist worldview. That's why you can see the Calvinist way of thinking even in anti-capitalist Social Justice movements, especially in the US, whose dominant culture has been profoundly shaped by Calvinism (from the English Puritans, the Dutch, and some proportion of early German immigrants). That is, you still get the view that people, or certain kinds of people, are inherently sinful (racist, sexist, homophobic, bourgeois, etc.); that the only way to not be contributing to evil forms of oppression is to be actively working against them at all times, including purifying your mind of all oppressive, bourgeois ways of thinking; and that even your moments of rest, idleness, and pleasure have to be justified in terms of the aims of work: your 'self-care' is so that you're refreshed to keep working more effectively for liberation, or else you're taking your joy in defiance of the systems that want you to be miserable, so it counts as its own form of resistance. And these subcultures, like OG Calvinism and its capitalist offspring, also rely heavily on the mechanism of shame to get people to be constantly policing their thoughts, words, and actions, ever-vigilant lest someone catch them Sinning. After all, people are sinful, so you can't rely on their natural inclination toward the good; you need to leverage their impure desire for acceptance and the good opinion of others.

(Figuring out how this cultural strain relates to the neo-Rousseauian "humans are Good, only the corruption of capitalism makes them evil" ideology in the online Left would be a further project... I suspect there's a tension between the official line and the way people actually think and behave subconsciously; and I also suspect there may be a bifurcation between the groups of people who are regarded as Fallen, on the Calvinist model, and those who are taken to represent the prelapsarian naturally good state of being.)

[squirrels-are-sleeping]

Counter/Weight 27: An Animal out of Context, Liveblog

(It has come to this, I've got to do reaction posts, otherwise I shall explode)

We're in the past! Austin and Jack are building a religion/history/myth/origin story!

JACK: … And on this planet, things are very, very bad … because something is telling these people exactly how much timber they need to cut, and every day that number is going up, and already we have a name for this thing– JACK: … –and it is called Rigour and we built it. … It’s really, really bad, and we want more than anything else … we wanna chop down trees. We wanna keep producing, but more than anything else, we want to throw off the yoke that Rigour has us under.

So the villain is actually the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism?? Or more precisely, something like if Taylorism (my beloathed) and the Protestant Ethic were taken to an extreme and had a very ugly robotic child

AUSTIN: … The relic is a mapping system. … See, normally, your maps are controlled by Rigour. You see where you can go, and normally … your personal lumberjack rigger only can have a zone of operation inside of zones that Rigour determines. … It automatically, like an automated car, drives you to a place. … Now you can move wherever you want. … [T]his is the Liberty in the Liberty and Discovery system. I am the Divine of Liberty and Discovery.

OK, so there's probably a lot to say about metaphors of divinity as they apply to Divines. It's not super clear to me to what extent the Diasporan culture at the time of the Chime imbues Divines with actual godhood, or whether religions even exist as the kind of cultural practices that we would recognise, separate from veneration of big-ass machines.

However, it's clear that, when the events of this Tower game occur, the only Divine that's existed up until now is Rigour, and he is not even called that. It would seem like the only thing framing Liberty and Discovery as divinities is the framework of the game itself.

And yet, one of the first actions that Liberty and Discovery perform is, in effect, world-making. The Pilgrim's world up until now was defined by Rigour, but now he has a map - and in a literal sense, the map doesn't simply describe a different place, it creates a new world for him. In this way, Liberty and Discovery do what divinities do.

AUSTIN: Okay. The Divine names the pilgrimage. This is the Pilgrimage of the Opposite of Alone.

Fuck, that's beautiful and weird, and a little sinister. What's the opposite of "alone"? It's not "together", because for the Pilgrim there's no sense of togetherness.

And in one room, you see a– a single… screen on with a sort of logo on it, an L and a D. The D is holding the L close. They are intimate for a logo.

First of all, what a descriptor to choose for a logo.

Second of all, are Liberty and Discovery separate selves? Or are they a composite self, Liberty-and-Discovery? Is AuDy going to be a triad when they wake up?

AUSTIN: The name, by the way, that it gives you, starts to feel good in your mouth. It’s Chital. C-H-I-T-A-L.

This is interesting. At first I interpreted this piece as him re-discovering what he was called before he was named for his Juggernaut. But no, actually. He doesn't claim a name, the name is still coming from the Divine. He is named, and accepts it.

JACK: [T]o pay off my saw blade… I have a detachable saw blade. So … my ability to chop down trees goes up significantly more. I chop down four times as many trees. … AUSTIN: And this is how you honor my– my relics. Okay.  JACK: I don't know anything about you. AUSTIN: You know a couple things. JACK: Well, you’ve given me a saw blade. AUSTIN: Mm.

Ooof, the world of disappointment and judgement in this exchange. If my deity said "mm" to me in that voice, I might lie down and have a cry

AUSTIN: I think that the way space months work– one of the ways they work here, at least– is that most people don’t know what all of the different seasons are on all of the different major planets. But everyone knows one or two special things about one or two planets, right? And so, you know, everyone knows about the beautiful winter month on the planet of Garden where, for nine months out of the 10-month year, it is this beautiful spring. And then there’s this one month of just fierce winter storms for a week, and then it’s just a beautiful winter playground for the remaining three weeks. Everybody knows the name of that month. No one knows what the third spring month is like, but everyone knows what that one is.

See, here's the reason I fucking love this show. You have to think deeply about human cultures to notice that a calendar is not just for marking the progress of a year, but is a collection of specific meanings entangled with particular cultural circumstances, and what the natural world is doing is only somewhat related to what a month is collectively understood to mean.

AUSTIN: [Rigour] comes across like austerity does now for some people. For those who already have a great deal of power, they hear it, and they go, “Oh, yes, those people do need to be more rigorous, don’t they?”

Let's take a short break to all say "fuck austerity"

AUSTIN: If you’re curious about what the inspiration for Rigour is, it is– JACK: Is it Henry Ford? AUSTIN: –Taylorism and Fordism. It is those practices. Scientific management.

CALLED IT

~Mako's interlude~

AUSTIN: Maybe this is the way you do that, technically you’re in your Larry form, moving around Mako’s memories, you know? I think Larry form just has his hair parted the other way. … KEITH: … Whatever color Mako’s hair and shirt are they match, but for Larry, they match in a slightly different way.

Hold your horses! Is Larry just here now? Hanging out in Mako's brain with Ibex/Righteousness's avatar/whatever that was? AuDy is two Divines (who are maybe one Divine), and Mako is hosting a friendly virus on top of his Evil MIT software?

I'm also extremely here for the Orth/Mako dynamic we discover in this segment, where Orth sets him Tasks and Duties, and Mako acts like a petulant child about it, and both of them are right, and neither of them is right. I daren't go on AO3 because spoilers, but god, I hope somebody has explored this.

Back in the Tower, Chital has installed Righteousness on the L&D mech. Is it now 3 robots in one? Or 1 complex robot?

~Cass's interlude~

AUSTIN: What’s Cass interested in right now? ART: Uhh… I mean, I think, on one sense, Cass is interested in nostalgia right now

…and

AUSTIN: So what’s the meal that Cass had that comes to mind while cooking. ART: I… I think there was a banquet at the beginning of the war … I imagine that [Cass's parents] look… just glorious, right? All five of them, probably. These are their best clothes. … The monarch is wearing a fantastic crown … and all of the family are wearing finery, and they sit and they talk”

The texture of Cass's nostalgia is so interesting. They're grieving for their parent, but the parent was a monarch who'd waged a war of conquest. They'd recently spent a fair amount of time watching a memory in which Sokrates works to prevent mass death from a weapon that their parent had deployed. When they wake, the parent is dead, and Sokrates has taken apart the monarchy and is reigning over its pieces.

Cass flies the mech bequeathed to them, and uses their hereditary cookware to make sad space pasta with fake squid ink, and reminisces about the last time they spent time with their parents and siblings, and it's a huge fucking state banquet.

I'm worried for Cass; they need a hug.

Back in the Tower, Rigour is here :-D The rest of the episode baffled the fuck out of me in terms of mechanics of The Tower. I went back and listened to it twice. Jack drew a Joker, and things became Bad? And then they drew another Joker?

JACK: Yeah. But I don’t think you can judge me based on the presence of the Adversary. AUSTIN: Is that what you think, or is that what Chital thinks? JACK: Oh, no, that’s what I think. I don’t think that you can judge me. I don’t– AUSTIN: Did you live up to your own laws? Did you find loopholes in your own laws? Did you break your own laws? AUSTIN: Did you honor my relics? Did you covet them? Did you disavow them? Distance yourself from them?

Ok but why is Austin so menacing, though

AUSTIN: Did you. Oh, Jack. Oh, Jack. Oh, Jack.

You know things are bad when Austin starts regretfully saying your name like a disappointed school teacher.

Anyway, RIP Chital, you disappointed your judgy mech suit one too many times.

[howieabel]

“Today's capitalist economic order is a monstrous cosmos, into which the individual is born and which in practice is for him, at least as an individual, simply a given, an immutable shell in which he is obliged to live. It forces on the individual, to the extent that he is caught up in the relationships of the "market," the norms of its economic activity. The manufacturer who consistently defies these norms will just as surely be forced out of business as the worker who cannot or will not conform will be thrown out of work.” ― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

[sororalice]

On The Blessedness Of Rest

A homily for the Autumn/Spring Equinox on September 22, 2024. Dedicated to a rest ally.

Dearly Beloved,

A very blessed Autumn Equinox to those in the Northern Hemisphere and a very blessed Spring Equinox to those in the Southern Hemisphere! Recently, I have been reminded by one of my household spirits of one of the most overlooked experiences in our spiritual lives, and so in my gratefulness I have written this homily dedicated to that spirit.

In our rise-and-grind “western” culture spawned by the twin hellscapes of authoritarianism and late stage capitalism, we are taught to work hard year round, to maximize productivity, and that any rest or relaxation is an indulgence, a weakness, and (often) a sin. As mages, it is all too easy to apply this same mentality to our magickal and spiritual lives. We get caught up in our initiatory work, our daily practices, our relationships with our deities, ancestors, and ally spirits, the spiral of solar and lunar rituals in our liturgical year, and, for many of us, our teaching, pastoral, and artistic vocations. All of that often leads to tired and cranky mages.

We could use a nap.

And so, on this day where my home here in Northern California begins to tip over into the dark time of the year, the period of sleep and rejuvenation for half of our beloved planet, I am moved to speak on the virtue of sleep and the joys of regeneration. I am moved to speak on periods of just letting ourselves take a breath.

I am moved to speak on the blessedness of rest.

To be sure, work is necessary in the spiritual life. I believe strongly that we are here to learn and experience and grow into the Divine, and all of that takes sustained effort. This is a basic and brute fact of our existence as mages and mystics. But I want to invite—and perhaps to gently challenge—you to take a fresh look at the notion of the “Great Work” and to question where that notion has taken us.

First, the term “Great Work” or “Magnum Opus”, while it comes to us in the modern “western” occult world as an artifact of that particular batch of occult traditions extant in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, originated as a term in alchemy. It has absolutely nothing to do with the notion of work as a virtue or work for its own sake, the so-called “Protestant Work Ethic” made famous by sociologist Max Weber. The alchemical usage of the term “work” is more akin to an “action” or “undertaking”, and expresses in alchemy the process of transforming a “base” or “imperfect” substance, such as lead, into an “ideal” or “perfect” substance, such as gold. This process was understood as being both literal and mystical; the medieval alchemists were just as often trying to produce perfect people as they were perfect substances. In alchemy, the development of spirit and matter are wed together into one undertaking.

Our honored ancestors in the craft, such as groups like the Hermetic Order Of The Golden Dawn, the A.’.A.’., and the Aurum Solis, inherited the traditions of alchemy and then used the term “Great Work” to describe their systems of initiation, of spiritual alchemy. This usage has found its way into modern “western” magick. As lead is “perfected” by being transformed over the stages of alchemy into gold, so too many modern mages conceive of themselves as being “perfected” over the stages of various systems of initiation and mysticism.

I am not ashamed to admit that I am one of these…I am a true believer in the Great Work. Much of my life since I was 12 years old and my mother bought me my first book on magick has been dedicated to the Great Work. I have officially drunk the Great Work Kool-Aid and subscribed to the Great Work newsletter.

And let me tell you, esteemed friends and colleagues, I am tired.

Every mage I know is tired. My colleagues online are tired. My primary teacher back in Santa Cruz (some of my older friends might know who I am talking about) was in his late 40s and early 50s when he was training me, and he was tired. Before he died, my dad was tired (as those of you who knew him can attest). We’re all tired. The Great Work has taken its toll.

We need rest.

As pagans, we subscribe to a naturalized theology. I repeat this endlessly, in homilies and essays, in social media posts and conversations with my peers. I believe devoutly that the surest and clearest knowledge we can have about the Divine is through Their manifestation in, with, and as nature. We meet our deities and allies first in nature, in the elements, in the Sun and the Moon, and in the planets and the stars. Nature is divine and the Divine is, in a very real way, nature. So what does nature, the world that the Divine has created and become for us, through us, and with us, have to teach us?

Nature teaches us that there is a time to grow and a time to consolidate that growth. Light and dark. Day and night. Summer and Winter. A time to reach out our branches to the sky and a time to send our energy back down into our roots. A time for waking and a time for sleeping. And yes, a time for the Great Work and a time for a Great Rest.

The equinoxes are moments of a balance point between light and dark, warm and cold, growth and death. Today the world tips over to the other side, and in the Northern Hemisphere, we move into the time of pulling back within, to the time the darkness begins to eclipse the light. So let us honor that time by taking a breath. Let us turn down the light and settle snug into bed with our favorite people and spirits. Let us lay back and let ourselves doze for awhile.

Let us rest.

Pleasant dreams.

In love,

Soror Alice

Art: Octave Tassaert, “Sleeping Seated Woman”, (19th century)

[luckydicekirby]

mailing Bobbie a copy of the protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism

[eldritch-bf]

Work and work alone banishes religious doubt and gives certainty of one’s status among the saved.

— The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism //Max Weber

[altrbody]

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment”. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

[aporia-nsfw]

It's a commodity fetishism fetish. Suburbs paving over forests. Tourism replacing genuine culture with plastic tacky junk. Plastic surgery medfet. Hail corporate kink. It's a lot like Cruelty Squad and Burgerpunk. Personally, I'm mcloving it.

I would criticize attributing the totalizing effect of capitalism on culture solely to capitalism. Capitalism selected for this culture to rise to the top but did not create it. A lot of this stuff has roots in Calvinism, settler-colonialism, Romanticism and eugenics. Particularly, land/property fetishism is a very colonialist kink which shows up in such diverse areas as Clint Eastwood cowboy white masculinity and in eco-feminist witchcraft. It's all a congenitally predetermined elect and damned, a promised land for the nation of the elect and the need for the elect to testify to their blessings through work. You're supposed to buy the Wonder Bread but not to enjoy it. Sexually gratifying oneself over conspicuous consumption is therefore a sacrilege against Calvinism. You are no longer using wealth to testify your blessing by the lord but using wealth to cum. It's a subversion of the Protestant work ethic. Puritans hate Jewish people because they're happy merchants not because they're merchants. Judaism just did not have the same encratic spirit as Puritanism.

Everyone talks about the wonderbread guy but nobody talks about how the wonderbread isn't necessarily the fetish object - it's supposed to symbolize like overcommodification or something. Like wonderbread is such a synthetic suburban concoction it implies wherever it is, that area has become gentrified and mown over by capitalism and this like caricature of commodification. That's why all the other pics the dude commissions are women (typically white and blonde) chopping down forests and stuff. The fetish isn't the bread. The fetish is this extreme caricature of earth and culture being consumed by the unstoppable force of like. Sterile Kroger marketability and commerce. That's why the women are always BUYING the bread and not like, fucking it. Its not about the loaves people. It's about Karen Bad End TF.

[howieabel]

“Low wages fail even from a purely business point of view wherever it is a question of producing goods which require any sort of skilled labour, or the use of expensive machinery which is easily damaged, or in general wherever any great amount of sharp attention or of initiative is required. Here low wages do not pay, and their effect is the opposite of what was intended. For not only is a developed sense of responsibility absolutely indispensable, but in general also an attitude which, at least during working hours, is freed from continual calculations of how the customary wage may be earned with a maximum of comfort and a minimum of exertion. Labour must, on the contrary, be performed as if it were an absolute end in itself, a calling. But such an attitude is by no means a product of nature. It cannot be evoked by low wages or high ones alone, but can only be the product of a long and arduous process of education.” ― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

[darkmaga-returns]

For all its obvious organizational authoritarianism and corruption, the Catholicism that reigned largely unchallenged in Western Europe in the ten or so centuries previous to the unveiling of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses in Wittenberg in 1517 was, and to a great extent still is, profoundly democratic in the way it looks at the intrinsic worth of human beings before God, holding that insofar as an individual decides to accept God’s grace, practice good works, and cleanse himself of sin through repentance, he or she can enjoy eternal salvation. 

However, as Max Weber argued in his justifiably renowned The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism  (1905), Protestantism, and more specifically its Calvinist variant, changed much of this through its propagation of the doctrine of predestination; that is, the idea that “only a small proportion of men are chosen for eternal grace” and that we humans, with our limited purview of creation are unable to discern exactly who among those in our midst has been called by to form part of this small cadre of God’s pre-chosen Elect. https://read.amazon.com/kp/card?asin=B0C4G4785Y&preview=inline&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_5XSJKQ95AWZV5P4JF795

While Weber was primarily concerned with how the anxiety created by not knowing the ultimate disposition of their souls before God often drove people to try and prove their elect status before others through industriousness and the accumulation of wealth, the doctrine of predestination had many other important effects on the populations (such as our own) where Calvinism took root and played a key role in generating foundational cultural norms. 

Perhaps none of these is more important or consequential than the generalized acceptance of the idea that a select number among us, putative members of that predestined elite, not only have the right, but the obligation to correct and/or tame the moral comportment of their fellow citizens. 

Like most people raised in the US, I assumed as a young man that this was a universal cultural dynamic. 

[villainessbian]

That comes with the assumption that it's 100% one or the other, and since there's work then it's 100% work and 0% "talent" or "gift" or whatever - but you can practice drawing all your life and never reach the level another did in 5 years, you can compose and never be Mozart, you can paint and never reach Dali's level, etc - and I'm not talking about imitation.

But there's this prevalent belief in a lot of arts (but especially drawing and painting and similar visual arts) that everything you do is earned and that you can't take pride in anything innate as opposed to earned.

Don't you dare compliment me on anything else than my hard work.

It's okay to acknowledge that a masterpiece born of talent without hard work doesn't exist, but it's discrediting the hard work to imply that hard work without talent wouldn't have gotten them this far?

Some people will never be able, no matter how long they train, how dedicated they are, how passionate they are, to get to a point others view as a stepping stone before getting "good enough." That's a difference in talent/potential/gift/call it what you want. For the majority of people, it'll never be relevant, sure. It just means you get the hang of it slightly faster or need to work a bit longer to get there, big whoop, no one notices.

Without a lot of hard work, I wrote better at age 15 than some others did after 15 years of practice. I also know that I can spend 15 years painting and not have the technical skills of some 15 year olds. It's clearly not the hard work that will have been a difference.

Saying that the technical skills of someone are beyond you isn't discrediting work. It's saying the skills are impressive. It's hyperbolic to begin with, but even if it weren't, it's not saying "you never worked for it." This takes an incredible level of squeezing to become that. It's at "worst" saying, "your work took you places mine can never suffice for." But even that is mistaking a comment that places your skill above the ordinary for a comment that says anything about how meritorious you are. It's not enough to say "you're doing something extraordinary," the correct praise must be "you're doing something extraordinary while being ordinary, thanks to all the effort you spent" and that is a deeply protestant-work-ethic and spirit-of-capitalism approach to artistic production.

It is also true that unless you're talking to someone who genuinely is incredible, or have checked it out for yourself that you really can't make progress, saying "I will never be able to do that" literally is not conducive to anything. Outside of the two, frankly, edge cases, you can't know if you'll ever be able to do that without training, putting in the hours, etc. That goes double or triple for the skills that take years.

So earlier in art class today, someone drew a characters hands in their pockets and mentioned that hands are really like the ultimate end boss of art, and most of us wholeheartedly agreed. So then, our teacher went ahead and free handed like a handful of hands on the board, earning a woah from a couple of students. So the one from earlier mentioned how it barely took the teacher ten seconds to do what I can’t do in three hours. And you know what he responded?

“It didn’t take me ten seconds, it took me forty years.”

And you know, that stuck with me somehow. Because yeah. Drawing a hand didn’t take him fourth years. But learning and practicing to draw a hand in ten seconds did. And I think there’s something to learn there but it’s so warm and my brain is fried so I can’t formulate the actual morale of the lesson.