The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber

This book was somewhat difficult to get through because of the footnotes (I have trouble with footnotes), once you get over that though, it's a fantastic book. It discusses why the capitalist system we have now, and the morality we have now, is the way it is. We have all heard of the protestant ethic, yes? It is the idea that you must work hard, without receiving too much pleasure, for the sake of pleasing God. Working as hard as you can allows a person to 'most effectively' utilize the gifts God has given them, but they cannot take pleasure in the fruits of this because too much pleasure would result in the breaking of some sin, greed or sloth or what have you. But if you can't have fun with what you're working so hard to create, why work so hard? Because you are pleasing god, setting yourself up for the next life. Well this is wonderful for a historical reference, but we're very much secularized in society today so why does any of this matter? Well, Weber contends that a man named Calvin (yes Calvinism) took the protestant ethic and tied it to capitalism. Calvin took the protestant ethic, which was good because it got things done with little complaint from the workers, and connected it to the economic system by turning the idea of pleasing God into earning money. We can imagine the problems with this. If nothing else, there would be trouble behind the fact that what motivated people before was spiritual, and now we expect the same results because of different motivations. That's like using a car to float down a river instead of a boat. Ya cars go forward wonderfully, on the medium they were designed for.

So now we all ascetically put ourselves into our work towards the end of making more money. I'm not a history buff so I don't know if this is true or was just used as an example of how religion effected capitalism, but I don't really care as I can see the connections between the protestant ethic and our capitalist morality.

Weber calls where we are now the iron cage, kind of pessimistic, but he believes that now that we're in this position, we're stuck here. We can't get out of the mental state we are in now, which I don't necessarily agree with, but can see how someone could. If you leave the economic system today and do not movie to some isolated cabin in the woods, chances are you'll end up on the street. I think this is my favourite quote, it's right at the end of the book and sums up the final point quite well.

"No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self- importance. For the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never achieved before"

An eye opener to say the least, but a really good read.

A Short History Of Progress by Ronald Wright

This was an interesting book discussing the possibility of collapse. Wright makes a point that there is a tendency for something to bring itself to an end, whether this is intentional or not. There is the unintentional way, say, the dying out of a species of animal. Sometimes a species or group of people just can't cope with a change and they die out, like the sabre toothed tiger, as wright discusses. Sabre toothed tigers survive on big game, that's why they need those big teeth to rip into the huge animals, but those teeth get in the way if they were hunting say a rabbit, so as big game died out so did they. But the other kind of extinction, the one more relevant to us today, us being the leading countries with the power to carry out wright's fears, is very much intentional. An example from wright explaining this is the Easter Islanders... there were a few but I like this one best because it makes it more real for me as I live in suburbia. The Easter Islanders cut down all the trees on their island and because of the implications of that, went extinct. That might sound kind of ridiculously basic to us, but we're doing the exact same things today. Wright calls these progress traps and examples would be farming and nuclear weapons. We have become so dependent on farming and use that solely to produce food that if the climate were to change we'd be in something of a pickle.. and I'd assume you can guess how nuclear weapons would hinder the progress of the human species. Wright brings our attention to our possible demise by our own hand. A decent quote is "the most compelling reason for reforming our system is that the system is in no one's interest. It is a suicide machine".

It's not so much a history book as it is a call to attention. It uses history to explain the theories it proposes, because history is all we have, but it is not an all encompassing guide to the progress of humanity throughout time. I thought it was a pretty good book, readable.