On your Way to San Jose…Turn Right!

In a 7/19/2024 edition of The New York Times, columnist Ross Douthart wrote about the convergence of High Tech and the Religious Right. Natural enemies on culture and lifestyle issues, techno-elites and religious conservatives are surprised to find that they have  common ground after all. There’s philosophical overlap on “a set of premises held in common about the nature of the universe and the condition of America today”.

First, they share faith in the cosmic order, “a belief that the world is still a puzzle waiting for solutions” and not just a collection of random events or a permanently indecipherable mystery. BTW, these later two gnoses are equivalent – they’re just dressed differently. 

Second, they share the belief that “human beings have some important cosmic destiny, that we aren’t just doomed to blink out in some entirely meaningless apocalypse”, like Heat Death.  

Finally, there is a shared recognition of the sorry state of Western civilization. How could we have allowed something so incredibly beautiful and profound to devolve into an amoral collection of trinkets? Business as usual will not produce the cultural earthquake needed to rescue us from the malaise of all pervasive despair which threatens productivity and spirituality alike. 

As is often the case in politics, the two ends of the spectrum find common ground against the middle. But this goes deeper. Our two groups share a common, if unpopular, anthropology: Human beings matter! It’s hard to believe that we’ve reached a state where this proposition must be stated…with the expectation of strong opposition from the cultural elite: “Dust in the wind/All we are is dust in the wind.” (Kansas)

Strange as it may seem, this convergence is only ‘new’ now; in prior generations, the confluence of religious and economic interests was taken for granted. While Karl Marx labeled religion ‘the opiate of the people’, JP Morgan never failed to attend Sunday services…with full fanfare, of course.

Critics view religion as industrial propaganda: “Work hard and endure privation for you will have your reward (back wages?) in Heaven.” But that is not it at all! The cosmology embedded in most religions spotlights human behavior. Sloth is a waste of God’s great gifts. We have talents and resources, not so we can wallow in them, but so we can put them to use for the glory of God and the service of humanity. The urge to build, to discover, to innovate is innate. Not to do so disrespects not only God but humanity as well.

I think most entrepreneurs would agree with this sentiment; at one time the entrepreneurial class and the religious community overlapped (recall Max Weber’s iconic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism); not so much today! But if we are to believe Ross Douthart, that may be changing. 

Of course, this admittedly facile analysis carefully obscures a number of crucial issues. Marx and his followers went to great lengths to point out these chinks in the argument, but they made the ‘mistake’ (IMHO) of throwing the baby (religion) out with the bath water (injustice). Imagine the impact they might have had if they’d chosen to revolutionize religious institutions, making them the vanguard in the struggle to bring prosperity and justice to the world…just as Moses, Joshua, David and Jesus intended.

Instead, communism divided economic revolutionaries from spiritual revolutionaries, turning the Church reactionary and the State totalitarian. Any rapprochement between Silicon Valley and Vatican City (symbol of the institutional locus of Western religions) must be grounded on some basic principles:

1. The ‘work ethic’ cannot be used to conceal or excuse economic injustice.

2. Workers own their labor and are entitled to retain it (for their own benefit) or sell it (for wages) as they see fit.

3. In any case, workers are entitled to a generous share of the fruits of their labor.

4. Work must produce goods and services helpful to other human beings without harming the biosphere…or the planet.

   
   

As long as these four principles are scrupulously accepted, there is no reason why productivity and spirituality should not converge. The notion that production needs to be rapacious and spirit quiescent is peculiar to the 19th/20th Centuries. An alliance of positive thinkers against the malaise of wokeism is natural…and most welcome…in Century 21.

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