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David Bentley Hart on capitalism and consumerist culture
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- Опубліковано 2 бер 2017
- David Bentley Hart is a Christian philosopher, theologian, and cultural commentator. Hart earned his MPhil from Cambridge, and MA and PhD from the University of Virginia. In 2015, Hart was appointed as Templeton Fellow at Notre Dame. He has also been an endowed fellow of the Center for Theological Inquiry in Princeton.
I happen to be a Muslim and I thoroughly enjoy the videos on your channel. I've learned a great deal from the profundity of Christian intellectual giants such as David Bentley Hart and John Milbank. Please keep posting videos of this caliber. It's most definitely an invaluable service for those of us who both believe and think.
Me too. Have you read Frithjof Schuon/Shaykh Isa Nur ud Din ? He's also very profound when it comes to criticizing modern ideologies.
MrBoogiePope shaykh abdal hakim murad too, probably the best at dissecting our miserable modern condition.
me 4
I don't know anyone, who is intellectual, that could be a Muslim. It's quite obviously a scarce of medival Syriac/Arabian heretical Christianity scoped and packaged as Islam.
@@kieran296
There's stuff on the floor of a truck stop bathroom that is less stupid and vile than you are. Leave the thinking to other persons, pinhead.
2:04 "There is no value more problematic than God, because, you know, he might actually send you out into the desert rather than into the world of business"
Thank you for the videos you upload. It's a true service and I appreciate the time you spend doing it.
You're welcome. Glad you enjoy the videos.
Nope, I have not had the pleasure of meeting him.
Crysus Bu That's an interesting question actually.
Jerome Danner
*clapping* Solidarity Comrade Hart, I'll see you on the other side of the Great Reversal.
Marx has entered the chat
Best comment :D
Can someone help to recognize a word he uses at 2:17?
"This isn't been a ???? ('progry' smth.) of cast of people who make their lives making things and employing people"
opprobrium?
@@ObjectiveBob yeah, seems like it, thank you!
@@ObjectiveBob it seems that my other comment with transcription of this fragment was deleted. Was it mistake from my side to post it here?
(I suppose also that there was some technical problem so it didn't show up, or it may be deleted by some kind of algorithm if there is one like that)
Amen!
Something new, especially problematic? Tech empowerment ?
Church and state, gifts from above? Where the h. does commerce emerge from?
I can't buy , sell or trade without seeing man's mark on what people both say and do!
Sound
The only light that comes from the East is the Sun - who said this ? Riley ?
Gilbert Ryle
David Bentley Hart writes beautifully and has unique insights into Neoplatonist thought within the Christian tradition. Or rather, he explains it better than any other writer I can think of. But he is a fascist on the left, an elitist who enjoys historically unprecedented privileges and wealth taking pot shots at the culture that makes it possible for him to write books and reach a large public, not to mention the fact that the same division of labor we enjoy since the Bronze Age, and especially the Axial Age, which he excoriates using Marxist language for "creating desires" is also what made vocations like philosophy possible, indeed created a taste for philosophy. His vulgar ingratitude is incongruent with the wisdom you find in his writing, but it is not incongruent with his tone, because he pours scorn on everyone, with the exception of a few Neoplatonist mentors like Nicholas of Cusa & Gregory of Nyssa. The same moral failing that leads him to make sweeping condemnations of "capitalism" lead him to make sweeping condemnations of other thinkers, writers and popularizers (of which he is one, despite his attempt to excuse his arrogance as just the occupational hazard of an academic). C. S. Lewis said in retrospect of his book Pilgrim's Regress that it embarrassed him, because it committed several (for him) unpardonable sins, one of which was a tone of unremitting peevishness, and that's Hart down to the deepest corners of his soul. He is not a Christian academic, like Lewis, who praised Billy Graham as a "modest man" whom he "liked very much indeed" but a vile elitist who wants everyone to be a subsistence farmer except himself and feels the most intense resentment toward anyone who would disrupt his own notion of power hierarchies where he is conveniently perched on the top. He is an advocate of fascist hierarchy claiming to be the pacifist egalitarian. He claims to be a man of prayer. How could anyone with such a pathetic lack of self-knowledge be a person with a commitment to prayer & self-examination. Your Christianity is all in your head, Mr. Hart.
Spoken by a man who doesn't even know what Christianity is. Jesus spoke clearly you cannot love God and mammon. How much money does a Christian billionaire need just to prove he doesn't really love it?
It is up to the individual in the consumerist culture to not fall into worship of the fruits of that culture. You can be a good Christian/atheist/Buddhist/Nondualist in any culture on the planet.
With that being said, I’d much rather take my chances in a capitalist society than risk floating away from reality in a socialist hot air balloon.
MINEIRO Yes, you’re right. Thank you for pointing that out to me. I’ll just continue to be dumb over in the corner here.
@@Domispitaletti yea but if you read marx his analysis of capitalism has him come to the exact same conclusions as hart.
Our mode of production necessarily instills us with purely materialistic and hedonistic values.
@@philip8802 "...if you read marx his analysis of capitalism has him come to the exact same conclusions as hart." : A fact which, notwithstanding, fails to render either thinker correct.
@@philip8802 "Our mode of production necessarily instills us with purely materialistic and hedonistic values."
(1) Yet Marx's idea of the material productive forces (the tools and machines) as the first cause of human ideas has it backwards: Tools and machines are the result of ideas. If anything, cause/effect runs in the contrary direction: human desires of materialism and hedonism inform producers, who fashion the machines and tools to satisfy those desires.
(2) That being said, however, I would agree that consumerism is partly a function of a populace inundated with marketing and advertising. However, I say, human nature is such as never knowing when to say when. This isn't a problem of the economic system. Humans, it seems, in general take the easiest path possible. If we lived in a communist system, people would be clamoring to join the Party in order to get all the goodies stolen from the impoverished population. As well, the USSR and East Germany had all kinds of problems incentivizing people to work and to follow the great plan, and so by necessity had to maintain a vast system of secret police and surveillance, and induce people to work under the threat of violence. I don't know about you, but I'll take somebody else's consumerism over everybody's systematic surveillance and being violently coerced any day.
(3) "Purely"? Surely, marketing and advertising exercise some influence---great in some, very little in others, and shades in between for the majority. But you say this results in a populace with PURELY materialistic and hedonistic values? However, you for one are an exception to your own rule. So is everybody who attends a Sunday church service. And, again, I say that hedonism mostly isn't a function of the economic system---but of human nature itself.
(4) You're missing a key element here: fractional reserve banking. This (now global) institution sustains artificially low interest rates, causing the supply of money to grow, both of which in turn erode the value of the monetary unit and place a governor on the incentive to save and invest, and instead encourage spending and consumption. This institution is purely a function of bureaucracy, and is entirely unnecessary to a healthy economy (indeed is antithetical to one). I don't expect you to either agree or understand this argument without learning a great deal more about it, but it nonetheless is a major contributor to the erosion of cultural norms and practices of delaying gratification. Back in the day, for instance, one could buy a War Bond and get 6% interest. Compare that to 1% today. (Or some such, I don't know the exact numbers). But that was when the dollar was backed legally by gold (in principle at least), which since 1933 and finally in 1971 came to an end. Ever since, the government has had no systemic barriers to monetary manipulations and debt monetization. The value of the monetary unit---and the incentive to save---has fallen commensurately. And, to repeat, fractional reserve banking is wholly a (unnecessary and, indeed, detrimental) function of government, not capitalism.
(5) Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the mass of humanity lived in pervasive poverty, want, and disease---generation after generation. Capitalism has its faults, but plentiful and progressively higher quality food, clothing, shelter, medicine, and sanitation aren't it. Socialism, by way of contrast, has all these problems plus a whole lot more, irrespective of the good intentions of (most of) its proponents.
The evils of the society needed where one cannot be tempted is far worse than the one where you can.
"Someone someday will explain to me what Twitter is!!!"
Lol keep dreaming
Bandying logisms such as "consumerist capitalism" isn't helpful. Nevertheless, the point is well taken that one---perhaps the central---modern cultural imperative within capitalism is, indeed, an atheistic "fabrication of desire" as Mr. Hart says. However---speaking at the theoretical level---free market capitalism (i.e. laissez-faire...i.e. completely free markets) is founded upon private property, and its concomitant, the sanctity of individual free will. In which case, this "fabrication of desire" cultural imperative is NOT a necessary component of capitalism itself, but is instead a consequence of a sinful, idolatrous, human nature manifesting through individual decisions within and into a (somewhat)* free market context. Short of establishing a thoroughgoing theocracy (which didn't work very well even for the Israelites), laissez-faire capitalism is, imho, the least bad option around, despite its obvious, and I'm sure not-so-obvious shortcomings.
* "somewhat" refers here to the fact, contrary perhaps to common conception, that once upon a time, only, were the markets of the Western world to be considered largely laissez-faire. Today, by contrast, there exists so much intrusion into markets---read: impingement upon individual property, and the invidual's freedom to contract---that to classify them as "free" would be at this point a large stretch.
EDIT: Also, I find it perhaps less than ideal to speak of "the culture," as if it were some entity independent from that which in it actually consists---the decisions and behaviors of individuals. The individual is the locus of volition, choice, and responsibility. Too easy to forget this when one thinks and speaks in, what amount to, amorphous abstractions such as "culture" and "society," "race" and "class."
EDIT II: Arguments such as the one forwarded in this video, vis-a'-vis the fact of a "consumerist capitalism," imho, do no justice for the listener, in the sense that an ethical argument is posited with reference to a specific economic context, meanwhile the relationship between the ethics and the economics, in Mr. Hart's argument, is left ambiguous. The problem here is that the listener is left wondering, exactly, what Mr. Hart has in mind as to cause/effect. Specifically, what exactly does Mr. Hart object to here, merely the "consumerist" aspect of the economic system, or the fact of the economic system itself (i.e. Is a necessary causal connection being argued between capitalism, on the one hand, and a moral degeneration of the individual into "idolatrous consumerism," on the other?). It does no good for Mr. Hart to criticize consumerism, but then leave the listener to wonder whether he would defend the honor of capitalism, or if instead he has some unspoken allegiance to a different type of economic system in mind. The difference is significant, and if Mr. Hart is unwilling to make explicit this fundamentally important distinction (which appears to be the case), imho, the argument ought to be left unspoken.
I agree with Sean's well written reply to this video. The reason we have the opportunity comes from only one entity, and it is our personal choice to build a culture where companies thrive or they die. Leadership, a personal choice, teamwork to build capital in a company, is a personal choice of each individual. If you can go into the desert, it's where deep change happens for a person. If you can't change your paradigm in how you see opportunities in business and in life, you will run out of water (money)!(Edit I)
Nobody's going to read nine inches of tripe, moron. Sorry.
@@chanting_germ. What relationship, exactly, has been "well established"?
For, if you say Mr. Hitchens is a socialist (which I myself have come to believe of him, subsequent to my original post), this yet doesn't square the circle.
The problem remains: Does Mr. Hitchens believe an impulse to acquisitiveness, by participants in capitalism, inheres in capitalism qua economic stystem, or are the two separable, according to him? In other words, what is he protesting, the fact of acquisitiveness, or the fact of capitalism?
And what, according to him, meets the standard of being "acquisitive," anyhow? Because he, being a socialist no less, nevertheless himself lives according to a private property ethic. Of course, he would protest that his is no "acquisitiveness," to be sure.
In sum, whatever truths are to be found in his presentation of these matters are in no way self-evident. Indeed, Mr. Hitchens appears to me---like so many socialists do---to rely on the fact of ambiguous argumentation, and mere moral posturing, to make his as-yet-groundless point, which is---no doubt---ultimately that socialism is the great panacea to our human material condition. But on this point he couldn't be more wrong.
@Sean Kennedy If 'capitalism,' here, connotes alienable, fee-simple property with absentee tenure, the 'distinction' is superfluous. Any property norms, mediated through the cash nexus, serve ONLY to cultivate the most acquisitive impulses. Caught in that sphere, consociation is tainted by a preening sense of 'mutuality' that barely conceals a meanspirited proclivity for acquisition. Hart's Kropotkinian brand of usufruct differs qualitatively from the quid pro quo of exchange & avoids the latent impersonality of trade & insatiable appetite for gain.
He says that prayer is not compatible with capitalism. But how do you explain the fact that prayer and other religious activities were heavily restricted and sometimes banned in the Soviet Union. In fact, both Marx and Lenin explicitly warn that religion and socialism are absolutely not compatible. So much for socialism as far as I can see...
Capitalism and Marxism are both based on the mechanistic philosophical model.
Hart illustrates the attitude of the New Atheists with the phrase “the only light in the East comes from the Sun,” yet Harris, who wrote the first New Atheist book (depending on how exactly you define New Atheism I suppose) takes almost all of the most important pieces of his worldview from Buddhism and other Eastern thought. He literally has a meditation app based on the Vipassana and Dzogchen schools of Buddhist meditation. Imagine saying of someone who gets the core of their worldview from the East “they think the only light in the East is the Sun.” So sloppy and disingenuous. As is drawing a necessary connection between capitalism and atheism. Total shit lol.
No it's not total shit. Sam Harris' app is total shit, and he has demystified a beautiful religion and distilled it into a series of mindfulness exercises for idiots like you to gawk over. You clearly don't know Sam's work; Sam has the attitude enshrined by Hart's quote, which you also misunderstand in taking it as a discrete claim that he's saying each new Atheist has literally made. No, that's not the point, tho it may be for someone like Dawkins. Sam has a dismissive and illiterate attitude towards the aspects of religion that claim transcendence and a belief that their benefits to the human being can be reduced to physiological psychologism in a way that treats the vehement and venerable claims made by actual Buddhists in the East about the reality of their spiritual exercise as little more than dispensing gibberish and justifies in his mind the appropriation of centuries old mystical practices into a west-corrupted self-help routine.
No, no, no. Your shamefully, pathetically, embarrassingly ignorant comment about Sam having somehow "extracted all that is useful from buddhism and PUT IT IN AN APP! 🎉😂😊" is proof of the very concept Hart elucidates. Really? You think the entire tradition was doomed to its fate of use by superstitious Neanderthals before Sam "man of science" Harris heroically separated the objectively useful from the objectively useless? Ah, yes. The neuroscience media influencer with an iPhone app knows more about the benefits of a centuries old tradition bc SSSSHHIIENCE!! than the actual individuals whose people have for countless generations lived and breathed it. No, no, and no. His separations - and your hilariously retarded faith in them - are arbitrary, and by doing all that I've unpacked him doing to the tradition, he has treated the East in the condescending way implied by Hart's quote. "I know you guys have cultivated these meditative practices over hundreds and hundreds of years of tradition, meditation, and refinement, amf i know that so much of who and what your ethos is revolves around this tradition, but I am a scientist, so step aside and let me show you how actually useless so much of what you do is and how the few useful parts aren't even useful for the reasons you think, but the reasons I'll show you. I know better than you."
^ takes a child's brain to spot this, dude.
Additionally, there is nothing inherently "Eastern" about his worldview, especially not Buddhist. How can you say such a thing without slicing the tongue out of your mouth to prevent such an ignorant and depressing comment from ever escaping your lips again? I shall never know the strength it must take to be so hopelessly unintelligent and yet so determined to continue drawing breath daily.
Outside of that, tho, Sam Harris is a moron. He couldn't even follow a consistent line of argumentation in a debate with a mind as third rate and mediocre as William Lane Craig, making himself look mortifyingly out of his element in their rudimentary discussion on the metaphysics of morality only to sell a 100 thousand more books to idiots like you who, in reading them, have been so deprived of good intellectual nourishment for so long that you confuse dirty excrement with culinary delight.
To hell with you and your thoughts. Burn them away and try anew
The primary medium of capitalism is money which can be exchanged for a variety of goods and services both good and bad, uplifting and degenerating. The primary medium of socialism is power. The more power one has, the more access to luxuries, freedoms, and excess. I don't think that would be an improvement over the current sorry state of affairs.
Very interesting but the speaker's MUMBLING gets in the way of understanding him.
Its an educated upper-middle class Baltimore accent.Think Hannibal Lecter, without the killing and cannibalism
I'd ask for your money back, lady.
He's incredibly articulate. Are you kidding?
His characterisation of capitalism is laughable.
I like Hart, but this Pinko take on capitalism ("fabricating desires" 🤣🤣) is as much of a caricature as Marx and Engels'! It sounds similar to the Marxist view of a "false consciousness."
Nobody "fabricates" desires. They offer what could be innovative products. The consumer doesn't have to buy the product. If they do and the product becomes popular, then more are sold.
Basic economics isn't that difficult to grasp.
Oxycotton fabricates desire, nicotine fabricates desire, plastic surgery fabricates desire, logos and brands fabricate desire.