Redeem the Time

More critiques of Stark’s book and the “Christianity and Capitalism” thesis over at the Acton Institute blog here.

The last two posts remind me of a marvelous passage in C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. The wizard Merlin is reawakened after a centuries old sleep, and goes to a house in modern day England. He comments on what is to him a very puzzling fact: he has been able to have a bath fit for a king, but there is no servant to help him. (Anyone kind enough to type in the sentence or two from the book and email it to me wins my good wishes for the day.)

This passage fits with the quotation from the article I posted below by Rodney Stark concerning capitalism and free labor. Slavery or servitude was the only way to accomplish such a bath in the past, but now almost everyone has hot running water on demand. Of course, as the passage below also says, people must work harder themselves for what they have (without the benefit of slaves.) This is not incongruent with virtue—in fact, as Father Schall was recently quoted saying on the Acton Institute blog:

A certain amount of property or wealth is necessary to practice virtue, as Aristotle said. He also said that the greatest crimes do not arise from a lack of means or sustenance. Riches are often the worst environment in which to practice virtue.

The middle class provides political stability in part because it helps foster a more fundamental moral stability. When people are either desperately trying to preserve the lives and health of themselves and their families, or, on the other extreme, living purely off the sweat of other’s brows, it is difficult for virtue and happiness to be obtained by anyone in this life.

A lot of those inclined towards the intellectual life might mistakenly and crudely think that the classical tradition on these matters (as laid out, say, in Joseph Pieper’s eminently wise Leisure as the Basis of Culture) means that a society in which one has to work hard—or one in which, as in all capitalist societies, an emphasis is put on “earning a living”—is necessarily ignoble. Two brief clarifications: first, Pieper doesn’t mean to condone laziness, or the vice of sloth. The life of the mind requires incredible discipline and focus. Second, and more to the point, people have more leisure time and money than they know what to do with these days. Sure there are many false idols and errors swirling around in our culture, but the ultimate fault lies, as it so often does, not in the culture or the structure of the regime, but in ourselves.