Two Cultures

The Ancient of Days: William Blake (1794)

When Max Weber wrote the Protestant Ethics and Spirit of Capitalism, it was a master creation in the field of sociology. His impressive method of explanation through long foot-noting and love for society, culture and economic pattern of production and change made him an exemplary scholar of social sciences. His study towards religious organizations was inclined to unearth the deeper psychology behind the "disenchantment of the world" (Max Weber, Science as Vocation 159-204). In the period of renaissance, cities like Florence evolved as a hub for the  business and exchange; the exchange took place not simply at the level of material goods, rather ideas also travelled with the high speed from one landscape to another. It was the period of Protestant movement, which challenged the Catholic doctrine of other worldly leisures and pleasures. The Protestant movement had its own protagonists like Thomas Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and a new jurisprudence of "calling" emerged at the sight of history. American way of life is a deeply religious life, in that sense, which is poetic and lyrical as far as embracing the utilitarian ethics in toto. This conjectural portrayal could be understood in context of Benjamin Franklin's writings, when he says, "The good paymaster is lord of another man’s purse" (Franklin, Advice to a Young Tradesman). This new religious doctrine had a role in divorcing the other worldliness from the religious beliefs. Even Bible was quoted in the  justification of this practical religion of calling. As per Bible, "Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings” (Max Weber, Protestant Ethics, Routledge edition, p.19). This practical-religious doctrine in the name of calling, redefined the very character of society. In that sense, Max Weber was an angel writer of sociology, who discovered a deep rooted relationship between the Protestant ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism for his anticipated an American way of life. In his words, "The earning of money within the modern economic order is, so long as it is done legally, the result and the expression of virtue and proficiency in a calling; and this virtue and proficiency are, as it is now not difficult to see, the real Alpha and Omega of Franklin’s ethic" (Weber, Protestant Ethics, Routledge, 2001, p. 19).

He found a rationalized system of labour, land, and production as the new spirit of capitalism, which was absent from the ancient traditional societies, tribal communities, or in Graco-Roman cultures. That absence is visible in Aristocratic society whereas the ownership of land was the leitmotif of that period, anything like an organized pattern of market was absent.

The diverse writings of Max Weber were an extension to the first culture, culminated from a romantic tradition in pre-christianity, known as Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism, which found a bond of love for nature, spirituality, tradition, clan or society, etc.

The Second culture is what we know today as Enlightenment values, conceptualized in the writings of Immanuel Kant, Condorcet, Humboldt, Bentham, J. S. Mill, Adam Smith, etc. This tradition is prevalent today across the world, whereas rationality, reason, and progress are considered as the inherent necessities. Humanism is its chief belief. This tradition has cultivated liberty, autonomy, equality, utility, as the desirable values. The second culture has conceived nature in material sense, devoid of value property, which could be quantified and commercialized; from mining the minerals to polluting the rivers; plethora of hazardous wastes are produced in the name of production. Liberalism has been emancipatory in many ways, particularly, it has democratized the voices of subaltern, but its limitations are also apparent; materialism cannot produce the meaning for life. Materials are means only, end is always beyond the basic needs. Liberty is an uncompromising value, but meaningful in the companionship of equality. Unfortunately both the values were introduced in Western hemisphere, and kept in a dialectical tension to each-other (Akeel Bilgrami, Secularism, Identity, and Disenchantment, Harvard University Press, 2014, p. 125).This tension has stripped liberty into irresponsible licence to plunder the nature and has transformed it into natural resources; this tension has impoverishes the sense of equality, which has remained a paradigm of "few are more equal than others" (George Orwell, Animal farm). Thomas Piketty has portrayed this relationship with an interesting equation, i.e. R is greater than G, whereas R stands for the rate of return from capital and G stands for the rate of growth (Thomas Piketty, Capital in Twenty-First Century, Belknap Press, 2014, p. 355). Perhaps, Second culture has to learn from the first one for a balanced "un-alienieted life" (Akeel Bilgrami, Secularism, Identity, and Disenchantment, Harvard University Press, 2014, p. 129), whereas social and individual tyrannies are kept in abeyance.