Christian and Nostalgic criticism to Capitalism

There is a common misconception in our times that if you dislike or criticize the capitalist society you must be a left-wing socialist. In the same way if you disagree with state run economies you must be a right-wing capitalist. However, not all criticism to capitalism comes from a socialist progressive approach. The best example in our times is the criticism waged by the Pope Benedict XVI in his multiple writings and sermons. Capitalism leads to self-interest as selfishness, which produces alienation, and ends charity within the human heart. I come from a similar perspective.

There are two layers of thought that I use to address the modern world. The first one is the pessimist and pragmatic. The second one is the Christian and judgmental.

1) By pessimism and pragmatism I mean yielding to reality. Yielding to the times you were born in. This is a scientific approach. It simply tries to understand our world to the limit of our intellectual capacities, without making universal moral judgments.

You can still make moral judgments, but they will always be in pragmatic form, which is almost the same as to say that they are not moral. I deny any claim of utilitarianism of being a moral philosophy. There is nothing moral in the useful. Morality demands sacrifice, because it is the external form of love, and love is the core of moral actions. In the extreme this demands martyrdom. Profiting from moral acts runs contrariwise to common sense.

The whole point of this layer of understanding capitalism is playing by the rules, because you acknowledge that it is beyond your human capacities to really "make a difference". Economic success is not making any difference. It's playing by the rules. Actually, you come to understand that if you want to be efficacious in this world, you first need to take it as the starting point, and this demands playing by the rules.

Understanding how things are is the ultimate goal. If you start from a moral judgmental vantage point, the task of understanding is totally blocked, you will fail to differenciate between truth and falsehood, and any enterprise set from these principles will ultimately fail, or turn into monstrous consequences, like it happened to Marxism. Hence, philosophy of praxis is denied.

2) But we don't want to yield our capacity to judge. We still want to preserve our ability to say that murder is a reproachable act. But this is where we must accept that we move in a different layer, not completely disconnected with the previous one, but with different rules.  

The idea is that we can be good, and all good comes from God. And the teaching of Jesus is the ultimate content of God's will. Jesus points to love and rebuff self-interest egoism. As I said, taken to the extreme, this reaches martyrdom. In sooth, true Christian behavior runs contrariwise to capitalist demands and conceptions. But it also runs contrariwise to socialism. Why? Because socialism is nothing but the next step in the progressive movement. It is supposed to be the next stage after capitalism. But Christianity already rejects capitalism from the very start. It rejects the logic of economics, which socialism and Marxism push to its ultimate consequences. In this debate, capitalism and socialism are allies against Christianity and any other kind of religious thought and feeling. In my view, this includes Islam.

The cleavage would be, then: capitalism/socialism vs. Christianity/Islam. Curious way of seeing it, right? We are not taught to see it this way. Well, this is what I want to offer. Any kind of religious thought and feeling is concerned with God and with loving concrete human beings in need. Capitalism only promotes egoism and individualist alienation and socialism only promotes social consciousness at an abstract level, detached from concrete human beings, because it considers charity to be an obstacle to revolution.

But Christianity rebuffs any universal call to change the structural conditions of society. It does not consider it to be possible. Its call is for individuals to engage in charity, not in spurious revolutions or big and ambitious political agendas. Christianity is realist in the sense that it takes the world for granted. In few words, it acknowledges that capitalism is a foul system and liberalism a false and self-defeating ideology, but its call is not to change the world or men or societies. Christianity has been going around the world for quite a long time to realize that such a call is spurious and filled with pride and self-righteousness nonsense. It would simply be ideological delusion. Philosophy of praxis is again denied.

The world cannot be changed, but that doesn't mean that we cannot criticize it from a nostalgic point of view. That is, from a pessimist approach. Acknowledge men as he is, acknowledge his vulnerability to corruption and sin. Don't pretend that you can create a society of angels. Don't pretend that you can extricate capitalist evil from the world, because you can't. It's better to understand with a cool head, and act pragmatically. But on a higher layer, create the Christian consciousness that would allow you to work in this world by imitating Jesus and helping the poor, not with grandiloquent ideologies, but with humble and true charity.

Conclusion: Capitalism sucks. Liberalism is its false and self-defeating ideology. But this is the world in which we were born. Live with it, as long as you don't fall into trap of believing, like many fools, that it is really a more just, more fair and more happy world.