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How The Market Became Divine
Apotheosis: n. 1. The elevation or exaltation of a person to the rank of a god.
—Random House Dictionary of the English Language
I said, “You are ‘gods’; you are all sons of the Most High.” But you will die like mere mortals; you will fall like every other ruler.
—Psalm 82:6–7
The relationship between religion and The Market is a long and convoluted saga. When did it start? One day a Cro-Magnon man traded a chiseled-stone spearhead with a hunter for a slice of newly slain saber-toothed tiger. He was so pleased with the exchange that the next morning he laid out some other tools he had made on a large rock and watched for passersby to stop and deal. The first market was born, and that was about forty-three thousand years ago.
This, of course, is a myth, and like any other myth it takes place on some other plane of time and space. It has no basis in fact; its purpose is to explain or justify some feature of our own times. But there are good myths and bad ones: some deepen our tenuous understanding of human life, and some obscure or distort it. In my view, the myth of the Fall of Adam and Eve still tells us something significant about who we are today. The Nazi myth of a superior Aryan race was a vicious and destructive one. What about the Cro-Magnon man and his spearhead? It is a myth that may seem harmless enough in some respects, but the way it is often used today places it in the bad-myth category. It is deployed misleadingly to construct an impressive but spurious lineage, and even to assert a virtually timeless and therefore “natural” quality of the market.
Its lack of any basis in real history is not what makes it a bad myth. Many good myths share that quality. Still, since those who use it often assert it is historical, it is important to remember that anthropological and historical research has shown that the earliest people did not have markets. Rather, theirs were “gift cultures,” at least within social groups. One was expected, of course, eventually to reciprocate for gifts accepted. But the reciprocation was not expected to happen right away; otherwise it would amount to tit-for-tat bargaining. What little barter did happen took place only with outsiders. Thus trust, reciprocity, and the importance of community are more primal and more “natural,” if that word is relevant in this case. They were present before markets or even bartering appeared.
Also, when two people met each other in even the most primitive of exchanges, they were already embedded in social and symbolic worlds which overlapped in both conflict and mutuality. There had probably been previous encounters and there would be more to come. As intertribal connections increased, the role of traders, once peripheral, grew as well. But even when simple forms of currency appeared (in the form of shells or beads, for example) both the buyer and seller knew they were part of larger interlaced worlds that relied on some common assumptions. The spearhead-for-a-slice or any of its variants is ahistorical. It may be a useful fiction, for some people, because it serves as what theologians call a “myth of origin” for the religion of the Market God. It suggests that market values are primal, even ingrained in the human psyche. We are, as the T-shirt has it, “Born to Shop.” But the truth is that market economies are not timeless. They appeared in human history under certain ascertainable conditions. The fact that they have existed for a long time does not make them eternal and it does not guarantee they will always be with us.1
So much for our Cro-Magnon spearhead marketer and his stone-top display. It is also important to recall that, even before gifting gave way to marketing, some form of religion was also on the scene. Markets may eventually have performed an important human service. But they did so surrounded and constrained by a host of other institutions—families, tribes, religion, customs, rituals, and governing institutions.
Markets contributed one voice to the choir, but have never sung an unaccompanied a cappella solo or drowned out all the altos and tenors. The Market never reveled before in the celestial centrality it has enjoyed in recent western history and especially in the past two centuries. How did the change come about?
It took a while. Ages in human history have always been defined by key metaphors or webs of metaphors, often unnoticed grids through which people see themselves, others, and the world. An age’s metaphor is not just invented. It grows out of the conflicts and convergences of ordinary human efforts and the perception of the wider horizon of life within which daily life unfolds. Philosopher Charles Taylor and other scholars have recently begun to call this metaphor the “social imaginary.” Lewis Mumford once pointed out that historians might have placed undue emphasis on man as toolmaker because tools, being crafted out of stone, flint, or iron, were the surviving artifacts of otherwise lost civilizations. But, Mumford reminds us, in addition to making axes and hammers, our earliest ancestors also spun out stories to try to make sense of their often threatening world.2
Man the toolmaker was also man the tale-teller. Archeologists can recover the tools, but the stories woven from sounds and gestures—the elements from which religion is made—have been lost. Hardly an echo survives, although sometimes we can catch a glimpse of what they might have been about in the carefully executed paintings that scroll across the walls of the cave dwellers. Enticing and elusive, these sketches tell us little but hint at much. They suggest that the imaginative worlds, and perhaps the dream worlds, of our forebears were rich and complex.
One such cave was discovered as recently as 1994 by speleologist Jean-Marie Chauvet in France. Its vivid drawings are dated to a time thirty thousand years ago, making them ten thousand years older than the most ancient cave art found elsewhere. When the German director Werner Herzog made his superb film about the Chauvet Cave, he significantly titled it Cave of Forgotten Dreams. But his film raises a profound question: Why did people who clung to life so close to the edge of hunger and cold devote precious hours to portraying animal and human forms by the light of flickering torches? They lived in an environment that was unpredictable and threatening. They had to stave off wild animals, insects, and storms. They hunted and gathered, then later planted and picked, but their lives were always precarious.
Imagine how a sudden flash of lightning or ear-splitting peal of thunder, both totally inexplicable, pierced their quotidian routines. What did the Chauvet Cave mean to those people? No one knows the entirety. But surely it performed at least two closely related functions. First, it provided a safe place where they could gather and be reminded of the irreducibly corporate and communal character of their lives. No sane person would venture out alone to hunt or gather. They knew they needed each other. And second, it offered a location where they could placate the terrifying forces that constantly threatened them. In a deep recess of one of the branches of the Chauvet Cave stands a large, flat boulder with what appear to be stone containers on each side. What is this? Again, no one can be sure. But the consensus among scholars is that it is a primitive altar. Looking upon it amidst the vivid colors of the wild bison and human torsos makes the mind race. What lost rituals and incantations might have been intoned here? What plants or animals would have been offered to keep the menacing powers at bay? Could this have been the location of the earliest forerunner of the Eucharist and Passover Seder?
The cave is reluctant to reveal its secrets. But clearly, our ancestors were not just crafting handaxes and hide-scrapers; they were also imagining, dreaming, drawing, and perhaps praying. As Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan writes, the Chauvet Cave is “a sacred space where the human and the mystical effortlessly intertwine.”3 Perhaps the people who created the paintings and altar needed periodic rituals to remind themselves that the welfare of the group—the family, the tribe—was vital to the survival of the individual. And in the face of a frightening world they were doing everything in their limited powers to project some meaning onto it, to prevent it from doing its worst, to stake out a space in which to survive. They had to cope with both the selfish passions of human beings and the capricious moods of the gods. The world-metaphor informing their lives was a dark forest where danger lurked both within and without. Whatever exchanges took place did so surrounded by the symbolic and ritual parameters of a larger human enterprise that placed the value of collective survival far above that of personal gain. The market and the altar both have long histories. But the altar, and some form of spirituality, seems to predate the advent of markets. Still, the epic of their interaction, sometimes friendly, sometimes adversarial, is the stuff of an ongoing drama.
From Tribe to Empire
Step by step, tribal groups clustered into villages and villages became cities. Strong cities conquered weaker ones and empires arose. As we know from the epochal research of archaeologists like Henri Frankfort, it is nearly impossible to find distinct market spaces in ancient imperial cities. Whatever markets existed were located within the temple areas in the cities’ physical centers.4
Recall the famous account of Jesus knotting a whip of cords and chasing the money changers from one ancient temple, the one in Jerusalem. The story of his overturning their tables and calling them thieves has been subject to a long history of gross misinterpretation. Countless sermons have piously asserted that he was decrying such commercial activity within the walls of a holy place. But this is a patently mistaken reading. Like temples before and after it, the Jewish temple had a place within its walls, in the outer court, for people selling various items, including most importantly the animals and birds to be used as sacrifices. Having come from distant parts of Palestine and the empire, these pilgrims would have carried widely differing coinages. Because they needed to pay for the animals in the local currency, the “money changers” provided an essential service. So why did Jesus, at least temporarily, close them down?
It was not because he objected to ritual sacrifices. Indeed, in another passage he tells his followers that if, while they are on the way to the temple to make a sacrifice, they remember that they bear some grudge against a neighbor, they should first make peace with that neighbor, and then proceed to the temple and make the sacrifice. Jesus lashed out at the money changers not because he objected to the business they were doing or to the practice of ritual sacrifice, but because the prices they were exacting were too high. They had become a “den of thieves.” They were cheating poor, defenseless pilgrims, and he probably knew that the temple priesthood was getting a nice cut of their takings. Jesus, in other words, was enforcing a venerable but often violated religious practice: protecting the weak and vulnerable against the predations of calculating profit seekers. He was enacting one episode in the long struggle we will follow in this book between the God of the Bible who has a bias for the poor, and the God of The Market.
As the ancient world gradually becomes what we call the Medieval period, the religions of Chauvet’s cave and of the classical empires were absorbed, at least in the West, by Christendom. By this point, wild animals were less of a worry. Hunger still threatened, but food could be smoked and stored. Most people lived in villages within sprawling systems of manors and fiefs in which each owed fealty to the next level up on the social hierarchy.
At the top stood the “head,” the lord of the estate, the king, the bishop, or the pope. Below him were nobles and clergy. They were the hands and hearts doing the fighting and the knees doing the praying. Scattered throughout were merchants, tinkers, and peddlers distributing the goods and services the people could not produce on their own. At the bottom were the feet, the peasants who trudged out to their daily toil from sunrise to sunset. In theory all segments fit together into one organic whole.
In Medieval society, shaped by a near universal faith, the controlling metaphor, drawn from the Bible, was that of the human body. But it was not just a physical body. The parts all fit together because they shared a common spiritual purpose. Saint Paul was the main authority for this idea:
God arranged the organs in the body, each one of them, as he chose … the parts of the body which seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those parts of the body which we think less honorable we invest with the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior part, that there may be no discord in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. (1 Corinthians 12:18, 22–25)
As powerful as the image of the body was for medieval people, it was still precarious. Just as among the Cro-Magnons, menace still loomed. The threat became not the thunder clap or the lightning flash. It was human passions that could boil up and corrode the fragile fabric that bound the parts of the body together. Anger, lust, avarice, or gluttony could poison the body and rot the ligaments that keep head and heart and feet laced to each other in a single purpose. In place of the caves, churches and cathedrals reached toward the sky, replete with images of exemplary figures embodying virtues like courage, compassion, and generosity. The walls were also decked with gargoyles and monsters, symbols of such vices as greed, gluttony, and envy that threatened the health of the community. Saints and gargoyles, images of heaven and of hell, all found their niches both inside and outside. The road from the Chauvet Cave to Chartres was a long one, but it can be traced.
As today’s tourist can observe, the cathedral at Chartres, like most cathedrals, faces an open square. Markets thrived literally within the shadow of its facade. But as trade and travel and pilgrimage increased, enterprising merchants moved some market functions further from the cathedral, just as their predecessors had in the ancient world. At first such movement was only temporary. Like today’s roving falafel carts, vendors went to where the people were. They set up booths and stalls, especially at popular pilgrimage sites, hawking food and drink and whatever else passersby might be tempted to buy. As a saint’s day or festival drew to a close, these emporia were easily taken down and moved again. Some tourists today seem offended when they discover rampant commercial activity at pilgrimage destinations such as Lourdes and Fatima, but the fact is that knickknacks, drinks, and religious kitsch have been sold since opening day.
Gradually, more permanent market encampments appeared at points of convergence of rivers and rutted highways. This was another ancient practice. The Sumerian ideogram for market is a Y, suggesting a junction. But wherever they appeared, markets were still expected to do their business within the traditional moral and spiritual restraints that had obtained when they plied their trade within the walls of the temple. These restrictions were enforced by cities and boroughs, and by guilds and confraternities whose members had internalized the theological concept of the “just price” and the recognition that buyers had to be protected against swindlers with thumbs on their scales and false bottoms in their baskets. The idea of caveat emptor (“let the buyer beware”) was undoubtedly known, but the buyer was aided in his wariness and by a long tradition of moral precepts that shielded him from the worst predations of the unscrupulous. The idea that the market was automatically self-regulating would have seemed bizarre. Traders, buyers, and sellers all transacted their business within a nexus of assumed mutual trust, manners, and obligation that were plaited into the underpinnings of their world. As anthropologist David Graeber points out, our habit of saying “thank you” or even “I’m much obliged” after a purchase (presumably unnecessary in an economic world where perfect pricing means neither side is doing any favor for the other) is a reminder of this larger context, which is a set of shared “assumptions of what humans are and what they owe one another.” He also notes that the simple, common act of asking directions from a stranger, and expecting him to share his knowledge with no expectation of being paid, testifies to a baseline recognition of interdependence and commitment to social peace underlying whatever pecuniary bargaining we do.5
As cities grew, buying and selling also mushroomed exponentially. Markets raced ahead of the power of traditional restraints or explicit rules designed to prevent them from bilking the weak or the gullible. Kings in their palaces and emperors on their thrones often tried to wield the kind of control over the markets that temples once had. But it was usually too much for them. These crowned heads had to borrow money for their sumptuous palaces and their wars, so they needed the merchants and, when they later appeared on the scene, those who plied the business of finance. The investors and bankers were willing to loan the money, but in exchange, they wanted the kings to clear away the obstacles that hindered them from making that money in the first place. The rudiments of a deal were obvious. If your majesty will get the priests and the guilds and any others who are barriers to profit off our backs, we will be more than happy to make the cash you need available—with a hefty interest charge, of course. Things were changing. The twelfth-century monk Alain de Lille may have been exaggerating a bit when he wrote, “not Caesar now, but money, is all,” but he was undoubtedly prescient. Throne and altar were giving way to bourse and counting house as the reigning establishments.
We are a long way now from the Chauvet Cave, or Chartres, where the market was constrained by the temple, and people were suspicious of greed. As the middle ages began to wane, a whole new ethos appeared and spread. As Lewis Mumford puts it:
With the extension of the wholesale market … by means of both money and credit, seeking large speculative profits, there grew up a new attitude toward life: a combination of ascetic regularity and speculative enterprise, of systematic avarice and presumptuous pride. If the prevailing theme of the Middle Ages was protection and security, the new economy was founded on the principle of calculated risks.6
Now, as trade among distant cities and even with other peoples developed, a strange new phenomenon appeared. Secured loans, currency exchanges, shipping insurance, and joint stock endeavors emerged. Paper replaced bags of gold. What historians have called “the abstract market” heaved into view. With the appearance of letters of credit and other forms of “paper,” fewer stalls or booths were needed. If money could be made from money and even by buying debt, the possibility of containing this overgrown cash box to protect those drawn to it by ruthlessness and fraud diminished. No longer did buyer and seller, or borrower and lender, meet each other and transact their business within the same implicit or explicit code of moral norms. The foundation was laid for the coming era when billions of dollars would be able to be deposited or withdrawn from anywhere in the world with the click of a finger. Securitized mortgages and leveraged buyouts had their seeds sown. The “new attitude” Mumford describes combined with dazzling technology to defeat the best intentions of moralists and regulators. Let the buyer indeed beware.
Today it is no longer helpful to think of markets as just particular zones or as constituting one societal institution among many. We live in a new Marketist era. The Market now pervades our social imaginary. The change in attitude has affected everything. Physical markets escaped towns with their limiting customs and regulations, then escaped physical space altogether. New habits of calculating invaded the arts and family life. Nor was religion unaffected by the change. Practices involving counting up how many days one must endure purgatory for this or that sin, and how many of those days could be cancelled by dispensations or indulgences of a certain price, were perfectly logical extensions of this fiscal thinking. In Milan, a giant market—the first mall in history—was constructed just across the piazza from the cathedral. It replicated its ecclesial opposite number in every detail: the central nave became a sheltered passageway along which the faithful could stroll; side altars, customarily devoted to different saints, became permanent spaces for certain shops. These two buildings still face each other today on different sides of the stone pavement where tourists photograph both and pigeons flutter. But any sense of equality was not to last long. By the end of the eighteenth century, it appeared that the protracted conflict between the God of the Bible and the deified Market was over, and The Market had won. Today urban architecture tells the tale. In most western cities the steel and glass towers of insurance companies and financial conglomerates soar over the steeples of even the largest churches.
Still, the long contest was not quite over, and now and then hints of efforts to reinject religious and moral values into The Market, or in some cases even to find a different way of distributing the good things of life, have appeared. Movements have arisen intent on dethroning the sovereign Market and restoring it to the honorable but not almighty place it once held. Popes have issued strongly worded encyclicals, such as Pope Leo XIII’s “Rerum Novarum” in 1891, which insisted on the right of labor to bargain collectively.7 In the first decades of the twentieth century, a Baptist minister, Walter Rauschenbusch, who had been shocked by the conditions he discovered in the parish he served in New York’s “Hell’s Kitchen” neighborhood, advocated what came to be labeled the “social gospel,” which called for the application of Christian principles to the economy. Sometimes he used almost apocalyptic language to express his message: “If the twentieth century could do for us in the control of social forces what the nineteenth did for us in the control of natural forces, our grandchildren would live in a society that would be justified in regarding our present social life as semi-barbarous.” He called for Christians to “snap the bonds of evil and turn the present unparalleled economic and intellectual resources to the harmonious development of a true social life.” Rauschenbusch had come to see that the misery he had found in Hell’s Kitchen was caused by deep-set structural injustices, and he became sympathetic to democratic socialism.8
Influenced in some measure by Rauschenbusch, but taking another step, the distinguished Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote scathing critiques of the excesses of capitalism, even running for a seat in the New York State Senate on the Socialist Party ticket. Niebuhr’s colleague Paul Tillich, prior to immigrating to America, helped found a movement in Germany called “religious socialism.” After World War II, dozens of Catholic men in France became “worker priests,” living and laboring among the factory and dock workers. Most significantly, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, a movement called “liberation theology” proliferated throughout Latin America and challenged the church’s long alliance with the ruling elites. It thrived for a few years and spread to Africa and Korea as successive popes including John Paul II struggled to contain it. Recently, however, liberation theology has staged a remarkable comeback with Pope Francis emphasizing its central themes in his teachings and publicly endorsing some of its key figures. These include Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez of Peru, sometimes thought of as the movement’s founding theologian; Bishop Samuel Ruiz of Chiapas, Mexico; and the martyred Óscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador. The episodic surfacing of movements like this suggests that the protracted cold war between the contending deities we have charted in this chapter might still be capable of some heat.9
Evidently the age-old confrontation between God and The Market is still not finished. But in order to understand it we will need to explore how The Market has appropriated powers traditionally attributed to God, like creating people. We will turn to that in the next chapter.