Faith, Family, and the Dangers of Capitalism

Do Hobby Lobby’s day-to-day practices contravene many conservative values? That was Patrick Deneen's thesis in “Even If Hobby Lobby Wins, We All Lose”, wherein Deneen managed to articulate a fairly important thesis (even though it was denigrated for sputtering quite meaninglessly at the physical structures that modern capitalism has wrought.) This critique shares in common many of the objections that most careful readings of Wendell Berry usually yield from skeptical readers: paleoconservatism or agrarianism dreams up fanciful monsters created by modern industrialism that can only be fought by an equally fanciful retreat to the countryside. I think that we can apply some of what we have learned from Berry, Deneen, and other wild-eyed idealists while not falling off the proverbial cart (or blowing up the proverbial tractor.)

The benefits of industrial capitalism are enormous, even if they may be frequently overstated. Much of the economic stability, improved health outcomes, and general well-being that we experience now as compared to 200 years ago can be traced to the technological developments and their widespread industrial applications that humans have been applying with ferocious aptitude to the various agricultural, medical, and economic problems that we have faced for millennia. Unsurprisingly, these applications and their developments also disrupted many of the sociological structures that had been carefully formed over the millennia as well. Whether it was moving the locus of economic production out from the home and into the factory or office, increasing the dependence of any producer of goods upon ever-distant producers, or simply scaling up the amount of ecological and personal destruction that any one action could produce, it was usually local knowledge, smaller institutions, and more marginalized groups that ceded power to centralized forces. One of the common examples repeated over the years in Christian worldview classes is that of hormonal contraception; here a technology clearly meant for a good purpose helped fuel the sexual revolution as the natural intent of procreation was artificially divorced from sexual relations. Similarly, technological applications in warfare fueled greater and greater destructive powers with consequences not only for the people who were killed or maimed directly by weapons but their offspring who drank the water poisoned by the same weapons. One could even argue that given how much power has shifted away from the God-given institutions of church and family with an incommensurate rise in the powers of state and capital, the industrial revolution has taken a far greater toll on Christendom than the sexual revolution has.

This is not to say that an idyllic era of thrift and family values preceded the industrial revolution. Children were still overworked and even enslaved prior to the existence of factories, but factories allowed children to be mistreated in greater numbers by people without relationships or structures of accountability. Farmers mistreated animals long before the age of the factory farm, but the advent of modern chemistry, machinery, and even genomics have allowed far more animals to be mistreated-- and thus be consumed by people whose bodies were never prepared to eat that much meat. Technology, in flattening various natural barriers, not only allows us to live without fear of many random destructive happenstances, but also removes the natural limits to human power that kept us from doing harm to one another and to the earth for centuries. The damage that has been done to physical ecology is analogous the the damage done to our moral ecologies; just as technology allows to eat without any regard for where our food comes from or at what (often federally subsidized) cost it was extracted, so technology also gives us the power to live more autonomously in the pursuit of our stubborn sinfulness.

Many of the serious battles that fought against these newly realized powers of destruction were fought in the Progressive Era, when it was clear that industrial capitalism was allowing a few to prosper at the expense of many others. However, since the entities of oppression had already grown more powerful than any previously existing small institution had the power to reckon with, new intermediaries and social compacts formed to deal with these oppressors. Many of them, of course, appealed to the government: whether it was labor laws or temperance movements, it became clear that the most expedient and effective way to enact justice or prevent exploitation was through the law. While there were many different contributions to the rise of governmental power during this era, it is foolhardy to ignore the role that the rising power of industrialism played.

This unyielding cycle of increasing human power and further appeals to governmental authority has continued to spin out over the last several decades.