Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
How Capitalism Humanized the Family
How Capitalism Humanized the Family
Nov 27, 2024 4:50 AM

Capitalism is routinely blamed for rampant materialism and consumerism, accused of setting society’s sights only on material needs and wants, and living little time, attention, or energy for muchelse. But what, if not basic food, shelter, and survival, was humanity so preoccupied with before the Industrial Revolution?

As Steve Horwitz arguesin a preview of his ing book, Hayek’s Modern Family, our newfound liberty and accelerated activity in the Economy of Creative Service has actually freed us to devote moreto other spheres of stewardship, not less:

Understanding how capitalism has met our material needs is one thing, but as we more easily meet our material needs, we open up the ability to pursue all kinds of non-material values. The less time and fewer resources we have to spend on life’s necessities, the more we have to spend on things we want simply because we enjoy them.In 100 years, we’ve almost doubledthe percentage of the e of the average American household being spent on things other than food, clothing, and shelter. We indulge our toys and our hobbies like never before. We give gifts and we travel. Even what we do spend on the necessities can be spent on not just items that are merely functional, but those that please us aesthetically. Our expenditures on food are on vastly better food than a century ago, if not even a generation ago.

More generally, this expansion of wealth has freed us to engage in education, art, and leisure that was possible only to a tiny fraction of humanity for most of our history. Even relatively poor Americans can get a college education and have access to books, music, and art that even the wealthy of generations past did not have. For others, the expansion of wealth is an opportunity tocreateknowledge, music, literature, and art that would not have been available generations before. Even the fact that so many young people spend the first 18 to 22 years of their lives just learning and not engaged in much in the way of economic production is a luxury of the wealth capitalism has produced.

Horowitz focuses more specifically on how this relates to the family (the Economy of Love), arguing that economic prosperity has not only changed the way many view the family (no longeras survival assets), but created more room for love, sacrifice, and investment along the way:

The changes in economic activity and the wealth that capitalism brought have freed the family from a concern with material survival and have opened the space for it to be the site of our deepest non-material aspirations. We look to the family for love and emotional satisfaction rather than sheer survival.

For most of human history the family was hardly the Victorian domestic ideal. Children died young and those who did not were expected to work hard for the household and eventually leave to earn their own keep at what would to us be a young age. Like the cattle, children and women were seen as assets to be managed by the male head of the household. Often this meant that the needs of humans were less important than those of cattle, or that the opportunity cost in terms of market production foregone of engaging in human labor-intensive forms of child care was simply too high. The pre-industrial and pre-capitalist family was simply not a pleasant place. Capitalism, and the wealth it brought, began to change all of this pletely for the better.

… Capitalism offered ways to earn e outside of the household and in doing so slowly eliminated the family’s role as an institution of market production and thereby removed it from the realm of narrow economic calculation and “Prudence Only,” or at least “Prudence Mostly.” …As Prudence began to spend more time out of the household and in the market, capitalism made it possible for Love (and perhaps Faith and Hope as well), e in and take its full and rightful place at the family table. In making this transition possible, capitalism thereby humanized the family. By providing us with such bountiful material wealth, capitalism has enabled us to treat other people, including our families, less instrumentally. The less we have to worry about the material, the more we can engage in the non-material.

It’s important to notethat many of those peting forces surely persist, not to mention that we now face a whole new setof challenges given these developments.

For one, the drift away from the family as “market producer” has left many children spoiled and selfish, overly insulated and sheltered from the powerful lessons of manual labor and hard work.Likewise, it’s not that we are all of a sudden empowered to actually love our families, but rather that we at least havea choice as to whether and how we spendour extra time with them (which can then lead to increased investments and exchanges). In both cases, people can and do make the wrong choices, and although they won’t involve starvation or diphtheria, the destruction can be sweeping.

As Jonathan Last argues quite convincingly, many of these great and powerful achievements of modernity have, as an unintended side effect, led more and more people to abandon marriage and child-bearing altogether, focusing not necessarily on career and wealth, but just plain old convenience or personal hobbies. This is fineif you aren’t called to pursue the family, but prosperity makes it easierto sideline that question altogether.

All of this is simply to say that although we have indeed “humanized the family” (and many other areas), in celebrating this, we ought to be careful that we don’t abuse that privilege for the cause of new pet idolatries.Which is why, with so much time and resources on our hands, in the end this will all boil down to what we want and enjoy, which ultimately hasto do with who or what we serve.

As we go forth into each of these economies of service, then, let’s remember that God isthe primary source, Jesus the way, and obedience a daily stepping stone.We’ve been blessedwith enormous opportunities to invest our lives in the Economy of Love, and if we seize it for the glory of God, the prosperity and flourishing of civilization will follow in turn.

HT: Brad Birzer

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
You Say You Want A Revolution? Count The EU Out
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble is a frustrated man. With unemployment rates in Germany hovering at around 8 percent, and Greece and Spain at almost 60 percent, he believes the EU is on the brink of “revolution.” His answer is not to scrap the welfare model however; he wants to preserve it. While Germany insists on the importance of budget consolidation, Schaeuble spoke of the need to preserve Europe’s welfare model. If U.S. welfare standards were introduced in Europe, “we...
Don Draper Meets Abraham Kuyper
Russell Moore on how Abraham Kuyper predicted the era of Madison Avenue’s culture of art and mammon: [James Bratt] writes that Kuyper saw the bination of “Art as captured by Mammon.” Here the bined to a mercialized, lowered, prostituted, feeding the pulsion for excitement, excess, and the erotic.” In this, Bratt contends that Kuyper was hitting close to explaining the contemporary rise of Madison Avenue as a cultural force, “the marriage of Art and Mammon that mercial advertising.” Here’s where...
How Did the Global Poverty Rate Halve in 20 Years?
From 1990 to 2010, the global poverty rate dipped from 43% to 21%. The Economist explains why the rate halved in twenty years: How did this happen? Presidents and prime ministers in the West have made grandiloquent speeches about making poverty history for fifty years. In 2000 the United Nations announced a series of eight Millenium Development Goals to reduce poverty, improve health and so on. The impact of such initiatives has been marginal at best. Almost all of the...
New Acton University Billboard in Grand Rapids
Acton University is fast approaching. As a way to greet our speakers and attendees we’ve placed this billboard on 131 South near the Wealthy St. Exit. If you’re in Grand Rapids, be sure to check it out! ...
Interview: Conversations on Orthodoxy
Back in January, I was interviewed for the podcast Conversations On Orthodoxy. After some wonderful editing, the interview has recently been posted. In particular, the focus of the interview is mostly on how I went from an American Evangelical upbringing to ing a convert to the Orthodox Church. However, I wanted to link to it here because it concludes with some thoughts about my work at Acton. In particular, I talk about Acton’s vision for a free and virtuous society,...
Dirt and Development
“We poverty junkies spend a lot of time examining the fruits and the roots,” says Mark Weber at PovertyCure, “But what of the soil?” Tyler Cowen also recently noted that economists don’t talk nearly enough about soil, despite their contributing to some of the biggest problems in the entire world. The problems can be seen in the European Union’s Institute for Environment & Sustainability recently published Soil Atlas of Africa. Robin Grier highlights some of the findings: 1. “While Africa...
Samuel Gregg: Charles Carroll, Founding Father and Catholic Businessman
Acton’s Director of Research, Samuel Gregg, has a column in the latest issue of Legatus magazine. In it, he recognizes the plishments and Catholic faith of one of America’s Founding Fathers, Charles Carroll. Carroll, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, was an established businessman, and signing the Declaration was a risky move. It literally put his entire fortune at risk. mercial interests extended far beyond those of the typical Marylander of his time. They ranged from grain...
A Lesson in Economic Policy from Mother Teresa
Forbes‘ Ralph Benko explains what a chance encounter with Mother Teresa taught him about good economic policy: I had walked by a homeless man (or, as then was called, bum) sleeping on the 41st Street sidewalk. People sleeping on the sidewalk were a familiar sight in the New York City of that era. I hadn’t even noticed him. But Mother Teresa had noticed him. And she had stopped to get him to his feet. As I approached the group, Mother...
Religious Liberty Does Not Require Us To Minimize Our Faith
Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, a professor at Yeshiva College in New York, says religious liberty does not mean we need to water down our beliefs in order to get along. Rather, he says that people of different faiths must learn to live as both “stranger and friend“: The rabbi explained that “America is the first country in a long time founded around an idea,” and that religious freedom “is the philosophical lynchpin of what lies at the heart of American ideals.”...
G8 Summit Protests Sponsored by Capitalism
Leaders from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the U.S., and UK will meet at Lough Erne in Northern Ireland for the G8 Summit June 17-18, 2013. These international negotiations among the world’s largest economies provide opportunities to discuss the fluidity of trade between nations but also provokes public protest. All over social media, various groups are set to organize protests about the global trade conference because capitalism and international trade are viewed as evil. For example, the “Stop G8...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2024 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved