The Bourgeoisie and the Frustrations of Theology: Part 3, The Saints of Ordinary Life

Gregory Clark in his book A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World states that if you want to tell the history of the world one graph would tell most of the story. It is a plot of average personal income across history (p. 2):



As discussed in the last post, economies before 1800 (from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers to stable agrarian city-states) were remarkably stable, dancing around the subsistence income. Kingdoms may have have come and gone and great persons may have lived and died, but the lives of 99.9% of all people were remarkably similar from generation to generation and from culture to culture.

Then, in 1800, something remarkable happened. Average personal income began to rise and it has yet to stop rising. Our world looks nothing like world of the late 1700s. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence by candlelight. I now type on a Mac and you read this over the Internet. What happened between 1776 and 2009?

One of the things that has happened is a profound shift in the modern Western identity. Charles Taylor has called this modern identity the punctual self (in his book Sources of the Self) or the buffered self (in his book The Secular Age). Labels aside, we know the modern self to be individualistic, independent, and interior.

Along with this punctual/buffered self was a new emphasis upon the "ordinary life" of work and family. Further, ordinary life was governed by self-discipline. As Taylor writes in Sources of the Self the ethic of the ordinary life displayed a "horror at disorder: at a social disorder, in which undisciplined gentry and the unemployed and rootless poor, the underclass of rogues, beggars, and vagabonds, pose a constant threat to social peace; at personal disorder, in which licentious desires and the hold of intemperate practices make impossible all discipline and steadiness of life; and the connection between the two disorders and the way they feed on each other. What was needed was personal discipline first, individuals capable of controlling themselves and taking responsibility for their lives; and then a social order based on such people."

According to Taylor, the rise of this "disciplined society" was the result of changes brought about by the Protestant Reformation. During the Reformation the division between the clergy and the laity was dissolved. The clergy/laity fusion had the effect of increasing the moral burden upon the laity. In Medieval Christianity holiness was an occupation carried out by church professionals: The clergy, the monastic orders, and the saints. The "holiness professionals" built up reserves of merit that could be appealed to, purchased, and relied on. These "merit reserves" carried the laity, spiritually speaking. But with reform holiness specialists were dissolved. Everyone was now a saint and was expected to behave like one. This moral pressure upon the common person was unprecedented. As Taylor writes in The Secular Age with the rise of reform there was "an attempt to make the mass of the laity...shape up more fully as Christians." This led to a breakdown of the spiritual/monastary versus world/town distinction:

"[Now] all valid Christian vocations are those of ordinary life, or production and reproduction in the world. The crucial issue is how you live these vocations. The two spheres are collapsed into each other. Monastic rules disappear, but ordinary lay life is now under more stringent demands. Some of the ascetic norms of monastic life are now transferred to the secular."

These trends were a part of what Taylor calls the modern "affirmation of the ordinary life" and the rise of discipline in Western consciousness:

"In a sense, one might argue that reform, re-awakening, re-organization, re-newed dedication and discipline has become a part of the standing culture of all the churches which have issued out of Western Christendom...Around 1500, this drive begins to take a slightly different direction. It begins to take up a more ambitious goal, to change the habits and life-practices, not only religious but civil, of whole populations; to instill orderly, sober, disciplined, productive ways of living in everyone. This is the point where the religious drive to reform begins to become interwoven into the attempts to introduce civility, thus to 'civilize', as the key term came to be. This was not a simple take-over, a deviation imposed on the drive to religious reform; because religious reformers themselves concurred that the undeniable fruit of Godliness would be ordered, disciplined lives. They also sought to civilize, for good theological reasons." (The Secular Age)

Obviously, the rise of the disciplined "ordinary life" helped to fuel the rise of market economies:

"Weber thought that the Puritan notion of the calling helped to foster a way of life focused on disciplined and rationalized and regular work, coupled with frugal habits of consumption, and that this form of life greatly facilitated the implantation of industrial capitalism...A spiritual outlook which stressed the necessity of continuous disciplined work, work which should be of benefit to people and hence ought to be efficacious, and which encouraged sobriety and restraint in the enjoyment of its fruits surely must be recognized as one of the formative influences of the work ethic of modern capitalistic culture..." (Sources of the Self)

Taylor's sociological analysis converges on Clark's economic analysis. Specifically, Clark writes that:

There were “…profound changes in basic features of the economy within the Malthusian era. Four in particular stand out. Interest rates fell from astonishingly high rates in the earliest societies to close to low modern levels by 1800. Literacy and numeracy went from a rarity to the norm. Work hours rose from the hunter-gatherer era to modern levels by 1800. Finally there was a decline in interpersonal violence. As a whole these changes show societies becoming increasingly middle class in their orientation. Thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent, and leisure loving.” (Farewell to Alms)

Clark differs from Taylor in that Clark believes that the rise of the middle class--as a psychological type--was due to natural selection pressures operative during the Malthusian Era. Clark writes:

“Why was Malthusian society, at least in Europe, changing in this way as we approached the Industrial Revolution? Social historians may invoke the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, intellectual historians the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century or the Enlightenment of the eighteenth...There is, however, no need to invoke such a dues ex machina in the Malthusian era, given the strong selection processes [selecting for] a more patient, less violent, harder-working, more literate, and more thoughtful society…”

For our purposes it doesn't matter if the rise of the bourgeoisie was sociological or biological in origin. What matters is that there is broad agreement that the rise of the bourgeoisie identity and ethic profoundly changed the world.

Why should this make any difference to us, theologically speaking?

As I have noted, the bourgeoisie tend to get a bum rap from a lot of contemporary religious thinkers. To be bourgeoisie is to be a kind of spiritual sell-out. The bourgeoisie are the engine of commerce and capitalism. This stains them. Plus, morally speaking, the bourgeoisie tend to focus on personal self-discipline and family stability. That seems narrow when we look at calls for social justice. Plus, the bourgeoisie identity is autonomous and individualistic when we want Kingdom living to be communal, relational, and Trinitarian.

So many people struggle with the bourgeoisie, trying to squeeze more out of them. The trouble is, being bourgeoisie, they don't have a lot more to give. They work too much. Spend too much time with family. Water the lawn. Stuff like that.

But I'd like to argue, at least for this post, that the bourgeoisie changed the world and we should pause in every theological conversation and give them credit for that. More, theological conversation should be a bit awed by the bourgeoisie. What the church had struggled with for 1800 years the bourgeoisie remade in 200. So when we criticize the bourgeoisie we have to keep in mind that their revolution, as nerdy as it was, because that guy watering his lawn in black knee-high socks doesn't look like Stanley Hauerwas or Che Guevara to me, has been remarkably successful in reducing poverty and violence. More so than any other class or Christian motivated revolution. Might the bourgeoisie, as the Protestant Reformers hinted, be closer to the Kingdom of God than their Christian critics?

We should be more thoughtful and more respectful before we criticize the bourgeoisie. Because where some people see a sell-out to the Powers of Empire and capitalism I see the mighty revolutionaries, the Saints of Ordinary Life, who changed the world the way the church never could.