I enjoyed and benefitted from William Cavanaugh’s Theopolitical Imagination, and am now working through his Being Consumed. The subtitle of this second book is “Economics and Christian Desire,” and I believe I really need to post a few installments on it. In my view, Cavanaugh is playing into the new Constantinian error and this is something we really need to guard against in our circles. By the “new Constantinian error” I do not mean the necessity of Christ’s Lordship over all nations, resulting in a second Christendom. That is the point of the Great Commission. What I mean by the new Constantinian error is the idea that Christ can somehow be brought in to prop up our current sentimentalities. Liberalism is dead, and it died because it is godless. Let us therefore turn to Christ, and submit to Him. And let us not ask Him to make our old way of life functional somehow. Christ did not come to make the idols plausible.
This said, Cavanaugh is a serious and responsible thinker, and what he is arguing calls for some careful interaction. His first chapter examines the definition of freedom, and what do we mean when we say free market? The second chapter is on attachment and detachment in the midst of consumerism. Chapter three addresses the issues created by the concepts of global and local. Chapter four examines the economic concept of scarcity, and what the Lord’s Supper has to do with it.
So let’s begin where he does, with the idea of freedom. He objects to a truncated idea of freedom (defined negatively only) as it is commonly set forth by advocates of free markets.
“In the ideology of the free market, freedom is conceived as the absence of interference from others” (p. 2).
“Freedom itself is pursuing whatever you want without interference from others” (p. 4).
Keying off Milton Friedman, Cavanaugh says the traditional view is that a market is free when it is the result of the “cooperation of free individuals without coercion” (p. 2). I want to agree with Cavanaugh here (kind of). That is, I agree that this definition of negative freedom standing alone is entirely inadequate. But there is no reason why we cannot layer our definitions of freedom. Why can we not distinguish economic freedom, civil freedom, spiritual freedom, and so on? Ideologues who want to say that that market freedoms, negatively defined, are the only kind of freedom are obviously being ideologues. They want to say that free markets (defined their way) will create free men. Christian capitalists want to say that free men (defined God’s way) will created free markets. This is another way of saying that spiritual liberty is the precondition for economic liberty.
Consider this, from Gary North, as a sample.
“Economic science is not and cannot be autonomous. It is not and cannot be rational. It is intuitional and ethics-oriented. Its secular neutrality is a sham” (The Foundations of Christian Scholarship, p. 98).
Amen. And this is why Cavanaugh’s counter-illustration of a slave to sin is quite accurate, and it is also straight out of yesterday’s newspaper.
“The alcoholic with plenty of money and access to an open liquor store may, in a purely negative sense, be free from anything interferring with getting what he wants; but in reality he is profoundly unfree and cannot free himself” (p. 8).
The unconstrained market will set the market prices for child porn, moonshine, cocaine, and sex toys just as handily as it can set the prices of leather-bound Bibles. But in what sense can we say a market is really free when all that is happening is a bunch of slaves selling chains to one another? The prices of chains unregulated by a federal agency does not guarantee true freedom. It does, however, guarantee market freedom — which is free as far as it goes. If it is is building materials for houses, then it represents a great deal of freedom indeed. But if it is market freedom for the chains of our vices, then it is a trivial freedom, hardly worth mentioning. In other words, free men know how to use a free market, and men can only be free where Christ reigns. Slaves can be turned loose with some spare change in a “free” market, but who cares really? They can only buy baubles to amuse them in their slavery.
When men are set free from sin, freedom from onerous economic restraints will follow. When that happens, temptations will follow. Cotton Mather said it well — “Faithfulness begat prosperity, and the daughter devoured the mother.” The Scriptures speak of the same phenomenon.
“Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked: thou art waxen fat, thou art grown thick, thou art covered with fatness; then he forsook God which made him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation” (Dt. 32:15).
“And when thy herds and thy flocks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied; Then thine heart be lifted up, and thou forget the LORD thy God, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt . . . And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth” (Dt. 8:13-17).
This temptation is as old as dirt. When your herds and flocks multiply, you say, “Gee, look at the power of unconstrained markets! The engine of which is my hand, my power, my might. Look at our American ingenuity!” You fool. Tonight your life is required of you.
The rise of what we now call capitalism occurred because (and only because) the gospel had brought self-government to large part of the population. As the gospel spread, liberty from sin also spread. When you come to Christ, the cocaine bill goes way down. You start showing up for work. You start providing for your family. A middle class starts to form. Industry flourishes, trade flourishes, free markets develop. And then the greedy show up and want to keep it that way (while taking the credit to themselves), and the envious show up and want a piece of the redistributed action.
Free-market ideologues are those who say “our hand has gotten us this wealth.” They are in sin for making the claim, and Cavanaugh is foolish for believing them. We have to understand that economics has to be understood theologically, and if we are covenantal in our understanding, we will see blessings and curses at the heart of economic history. It is part of a story.
Cavanaugh cites idolatrous or blinkered free-market theorists, as though they have the right idea of where all this came from. But they do not. The free market is a critical component of democratic capitalism, according to Michael Novak, and the whole thing is “built on the explicit denial of any unitary order” (p. 5). No. The whole thing is built on the universal lordship of King Jesus, who sets men free from their sins, so that they might worship Him. Freedom spreads out through a society from there, flowing out over the threshhold of the temple.
The second problem with Cavanaugh’s argument in this chapter is that he doubles back halfway through it, contradicting himself. He begins by noting that Augustine defines freedom as something far greater than the mere absence of restraint.
“Augustine’s view of freedom is more complex: freedom is not simply a negative freedom from, but a freedom for, a capacity to achieve certain worthwhile goals” (pp. 7-8).
“In Augustine’s thought, we desperately need not to be left to the tyranny of our own wills” (p. 11).
“In order to judge whether or not an exchange is free, one must know whether or not the will is moved toward a good end” (p. 13).
Point taken. We are not genuinely free until Christ sets us free to do right. “Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. For he that is dead is freed from sin” (Rom. 6:6-7). That is real freedom.
But then Cavanaugh abandons this important point, and here is where he doubles back. A woman named Rosa Martinez works on a sewing machine in El Salvador for 33 cents an hour (p. 21). And Cavanaugh asks, “Is Rosa Martinez free? If we take Friedman’s definition at face value, then we might answer yes” (p. 24). The reason we might do do is that the way she took the job met the conditions of “no external restraint.”
“For example, if we admit that Rosa Martinez’s exchange with her employer is voluntary and informed, yet still want to claim that it is not truly free, we must be able to muster an argument based on some standard of human flourishing and the ends of human life that are being violated by her working for less than a living wage” (p. 25).
Notice what Cavanaugh has done here. When he asked if Rosa was free, my first reaction was to follow Augustine at just the point where Cavanaugh abandoned him. Is Rosa free? I don’t know. Is she forgiven? Is she part of the Church? Is she free from sin? (It is important to note that this is a separate question from whether her native country of El Salvador is free.) Is Rosa free? If she is in Christ, then absolutely, yes. She is free. And if enough of her fellow citizens follow her into Christ, then at some point, El Salvador will be free as well.
But the free-market ideologues, just like Cavanaugh, want her freedom to be a function of the absence of external constraints. But true freedom is not held hostage by the misbehavior of others. Cavanaugh and his capitalists adversaries only differ on what they think those external constraints might actually be. Milton Friedman wants her to be free from a legal demand to take the job. Cavanaugh wants her to be free from a society that doesn’t care if she gets a living wage. In both cases, her freedom has nothing to do with Christ, and everything to do with the behavior of others toward her. And so it is that we bid Augustine adieu.
Having made this point, let me make a quick practical point about Cavanaugh’s view of wages.
“Why do companies pay such wages? Again, because they can. Transnational corporations are able to shop around the globe for the most advantageous wage environments, that is, those places where people are so desperate that they must take jobs that pay extremely low wages, in many cases wages insufficient to feed and house themselves and their dependents” (p. 21).
But why are the people “so desperate” that “they must take jobs that pay extremely low wages”? The reason is that before this evil transnational corporation showed up, their condition was worse than it is now. If that were not the case, there would be no reason for them to take the job. And granting that the wages they receive are insufficient to take care of their families, the only reason the corporation gets any applicants at all is that what they are paying is less insufficient than they were in the status quo ante. I say this while granting that neither a factory with lousy wages nor one with living wages will be able to set the people free from their sins. That said, lousy wages are better than no wages. Lousy wages might keep them alive long enough to hear the gospel.
“Capital can move freely across national borders, but labor cannot” (p. 21). But if we want labor to be free, we must preach the gospel. Notice how Cavanaugh is assuming that the freedom of labor is dependent on the absence of external restraint. He believes the freedom of labor is in the hands of border agents. But is actually in the hands of Christ, and so we bid Augustine adieu again.
Behind all this, Cavanaugh has muddled the idea of free persons and free societies. But the gospel sets people free as they gather in the truly free polis of the Church. As the free polis of the Church grows in the midst of a particular nation, that nation’s institutions become progressively free. How could it be otherwise? Jesus is Lord. “Humans need a community of virtue in which to learn to desire rightly” (p. 9). This is quite right, but that community of virtue is the Church, and is not related to whether wages are unconstrained by regulations or unconstrained by stingy corporations.
In sum, Christ is freedom. In Christ, we have true freedom. When we are in Christ, lesser freedoms and goods will grow and develop. But in the meantime, we must not fall into the trap of thinking that evil men (whether regulatory bureaucrats or greedy corporations) can hold our freedom hostage. When Christ frees a slave, He never asks the master’s permission first.