a review published August 1992
"Priests of old usually asked whether an action was consistent with God's design for the world," writes Robert Nelson. "In the message of contemporary economics the laws of economic efficiency and of economic growth have replaced the divine plan." Economics, he claims, is today fulfilling a role claimed by theology in times past. Secular progress has made both religious messianism and religious perfectionism obsolete.
For many modern men and women, the power to eliminate evil in the world is no longer a divine prerogative, but is instead primarily a matter of eliminating economic scarcity. If all important material needs could be fully satisfied — economic theology preaches — then the main cause of past wars, hatreds, and other banes of human history would be ended. There would be far less basis for envy, jealousy, and other sources of evil thoughts and actions. People could live in a happy harmony and devote themselves to the higher and finer things of life. (p. 2)
Nelson has found the parallels between economics and theology so striking that he has devoted nearly four hundred pages of Reaching for Heaven on Earth to describing them. In so doing, he has produced a delightful and challenging book, one of the most enjoyable treatments of intellectual history to come along in years.
But I confess, my pleasure in reading this book was not that of the awestruck acolyte; I did not feel that I had received the gospel truth. Indeed, as much of the book's value lies in its errors as in its successes, and disagreeing with Nelson is as much fun as agreeing with him.
Nelson suggests that economics has supplanted theology because of the scientific revolution; faith in science, he says, has replaced faith in God. Though the Enlightenment faith in science as a source of progress has imbued all social sciences with a sense of mission, these days it is running on hard times: "social scientists outside economics . . . have begun to have more doubts. Today, it is the members of the economics profession who offer the strongest assurances." What kind of assurances? "Economists argue that — beneath the surface of what often appears to be widespread ignorance, miscalculation, and self-deception — there are in fact deep and powerful forces at work that obey rationally discoverable laws." According to Nelson, economists have kept the Enlightenment faith "that the behavior of individuals is not random but follows definite directions that are grounded in the rational" (5).
Unfortunately, Nelson never adequately distinguishes between "faith in science" and religious faith, and seems to take an agnostic attitude toward the validity of scientific method, at least as it applies to economics and theology (though he does mention that the predictions of economists stand up very well when compared to the prophecies of the divines). His discussion of method in economics is almost nil, and his discussion of method in theology is nonexistent. Despite trenchant discussion of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin, he never really gives the reader a good idea of what theology is all about.
Nelson uses the phrase "economic theology" to call our attention to the social function of economics as the discipline of political legitimation. This peculiar construction rests on an odd working definition of theology. Nelson uses the word "theology" instead of "philosophy" or some other seemingly more appropriate phrase because it "more precisely suggests a system of thought that is a source of fundamental meaning and purpose" (xxv). But theology primarily deals with the attributes of God, and Nelson seems interested only in the attributes of man. Though "theology" finds its way onto nearly every page, God's name is dropped with alarming infrequency, and is, of course, not cited in the index.
There are aspects of Christian theology that would have helped make his points much better, but he mostly ignores them. He never mentions such theological subdisciplines as soteriology (the science of salvation) and eschatology (the science of the "last days"), both of which make the theory of divinity relevant to flesh-and-blood human beings. Since Nelson is trying to get a handle on the idea of progress, and has chosen an analogy between economics and theology to do so, he might have profited by exploring in greater depth the eschatological dimension of theological traditions, and called that domain by its name. His two-page general discussion of the ideas of salvation and the various forms of millenarianism is not really adequate.
Indeed, Nelson leaves quite a few promising areas of inquiry alone. But then, given the nature of his book, this is not necessarily out of line. Reaching for Heaven on Earth is not a theoretical treatise on the relation between religion and science. It is a story of a line of thought's progress. It presents not arguments but explanations, not analysis but interpretations, not debate but vision.
As the old adage tells us, there are two kinds of people: those who divide people into two groups, and those who don't. Nelson, a divider, splits theological and economic thinkers into two categories.
He calls his first category "the Roman tradition," after both the empire and the Catholic Church. The thinkers he discusses under this rubric range from Aristotle to Paul Samuelson. "The leading figures of the Roman tradition," he claims, "have not been the great revolutionaries of history, but men who typically saw moderation as a virtue and favored an incremental process of human development" (31). He lists 15 characteristic views of those in this tradition:
Nelson's second category is the "Protestant tradition," which includes thinkers as diverse as Plato, Augustine, Karl Marx, and Herbert Spencer. For these thinkers, the moral status of law is "much less exalted. . . . Law is necessary in the Protestant tradition, but is merely a coercive device required to keep wicked men from doing still greater damage to one another. Indeed, all government is seen in this light, as a sinful product of man's condition. Nevertheless, its decrees must be obeyed until God — or history — finally opens the way to a happier destiny" (55). Nelson's list of characteristic Protestant views diverges dramatically from the Roman:
Doubts naturally arise upon comparing these two lists: how can so many qualities be kept separate in so many different thinkers? Don't most people liberally mix the Roman and Protestant views? Is there any point in trying to keep, in our heads, these two traditions distinct?
There is no obvious theoretical reason. But Nelson is not a pure theorist like Ludwig von Mises; he is a visionary historian like Camille Paglia. The reader should expect his book to begin a hundred arguments, and not end a single one of them. In Nelson's words, "Rather than the scientific method, the method of history is in large part the art of persuasion. In history, the best test is whether readers are convinced: Does the historical interpretation illuminate and make more comprehensible the events of the past and the present? Success . . . is not to be judged immediately, but only after ample discussion . . ." (xxiv) *
Do Nelson's two categories help organize the history of thought about "the good life"? I think it does. Viewing John Locke, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham as members in good standing of the Roman tradition of social thought strikes me as almost inspired — though including socialist nutcase Claude Henri de Saint-Simon in the list is a bit jarring. His discussion of the Protestant tradition, comparing such theologians as Augustine (yes, this makes sense), Luther, and Calvin to such secular theorists as Rousseau, Darwin, and Marx is no less provocative.
The problem with his treatment of the Protestants, however, is readily apparent: only one of them is an economist (Karl Marx). Truth is, very few economists fit the Protestant mold. They tend not to see the human lot in such catastrophic and bleak terms, and such paradigmatically Protestant concepts as alienation and irrationality do not fit well with such tools as demand schedules, indifference curves, and the like. To make the Protestant tradition relevant to real, practicing economists, a more extended discussion of actual, dissenting economists would have been in order. But Nelson pushes right ahead with his survey, capping his chapter "The Protestant Church of Darwin" with a discussion of Sigmund Freud!
He also places nineteenth-century Britain's most prominent individualist, Herbert Spencer, in this list. This seems more than a bit wrong-headed to me. I can think of few figures who more evenly straddle Nelson's Roman/Protestant fence than Spencer. The supreme rationalist of his time, and the author of an ambitious ten-volume synthesis of philosophy and science, Spencer nevertheless was his age's most consistent critic of the popular rationalisms that placed faith in reason as man's salvation — or even as man's chief characteristic. An evolutionist with a healthy fear of revolutionary change, Spencer believed that social change must proceed slowly, so that people could adapt to changing circumstance; but he held to a radical political ideal, and combined an almost utopian future vision with a millenarian's belief in its inevitability. His notion of virtue as habitual behavior best adapted to a given social state has a distinctly Roman flavor; but his warnings that many conceptions of virtue and "the good" were often either too old-fashioned or too new-fashioned to have any practical relevance, and that a stoic acceptance of hardship was the best attitude regarding some social ills, has a decidedly Protestant odor. Too much of Nelson's characterization of Spencer seems strained, overemphasizing the Protestant at the expense of the Roman; almost everything said about him in this section better applies to America's most eminent laissez-faire Social Darwinist, William Graham Sumner. And since Sumner was an economist as well as a sociologist, a discussion of him, rather than Spencer, might have fit better to Nelson's purpose.
What is Nelson's excuse for treating non-economists at length in this section, when his book is ostensibly about economics? I suspect that he is not really interested in the positive, scientific aspects of the science. (In his preface he confesses that he lost his faith in Wertfrei economics some years ago.) He is much more concerned with what Thomas Sowell has called "visions of social causation"; that is, with one's basic outlook, the values presupposed by the outlook, and the moral and political prescriptions that follow from these visions and values. And economists are not the only ones influenced by such visions; ecologists, sociologists, and psychologists have them, too. The "conflict of visions" can work its way upon social life through the preachings of non-economists as well as economists. After all, one can hardly assert that Rousseau, Darwin, and Freud failed to make their mark on history.
Nelson's best use of the distinction between the Roman and Protestant traditions is in his fascinating survey of the American political tradition, from the founding period through Progressivism to the welfare state.
If the good life is for the Roman tradition the proper goal on this earth, Americans . . . typically agree. If the Roman tradition has seen all mankind as fundamentally equal, it has been America that has opened its borders widest to the immigrants of the world offering the opportunity to participate in the forward march of progress. Indeed, of all nations the United States . . . has illustrated the characteristic outlooks of this tradition better than any other. (175)
This, despite America's largely Protestant religious heritage. Though Nelson argues that the whole of the American tradition fits this characterization, he is most convincing when he moves from the earlier, individualist phase to the present era. The stolid, Roman character of modern social engineers is convincingly sculpted, and their visions of progress carefully set in place. And nowhere else is Nelson's analogy between religion and social science more persuasive than in this section.
Constituting yet another modern economic theology, American progressivism once again preached a message of salvation through economic progress. Still another Roman priesthood, the members of the U.S. economics and other social science professions, would emerge in the progressive era to spread the message of the economic redemption of mankind. (175–6)
Provocative, yes. Controversial, too — I suspect that admirers of the Progressive era might not care for the comparison. But the bold assertions are borne out in the analysis, and the characterization has more than a ring of truth.
At about the same time that Robert Nelson's tome hit the bookstores, a book on a similar topic, with a similar title, appeared from American social critic Christopher Lasch. In The True and Only Heaven, Lasch asked, "How does it happen that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea once and for all?" For Lasch, "the persistence of a belief in progress in a century of calamities" is anomalous.
My usual reaction to such trendy, sophistic pessimism is to break the question into pieces and expose the fallacies. Intelligent people can "believe" in progress with good faith. For one thing, this has been more than a mere "century of calamities." Consider just a few of its positive developments: nearly painless dentistry, effective contraception, quick and inexpensive transportation, a near universal access to the music of the ages. Progress can be believed to be both possible and desirable; when calamities occur, progress simply isn't happening. That is why we call natural and social disasters "setbacks" and "tragedies." The more pertinent questions are how do we know what progress is, when it occurs? and how can we ensure that progress will occur?
But while reading Nelson's discussion of the American welfare state and its "economist priesthood," I experienced some Protestant knee-jerks, sympathizing for once with the likes of Lasch. The hubristic confidence and intrusive meddling of America's social engineers is more than a little sickening. I eagerly moved on to Nelson's optimistic final section on "postmodern economics," which treats both real-world trends and intellectual movements.
Nelson dubs as "postmoderns" some of today's most interesting economic theorists: Mancur Olson, Donald McCloskey, James Buchanan, Kenneth Boulding. These economists tend to see the world as a less manageable place than did their precursors in the economic mainstream of the Keynesian/neo-classical synthesis. Postmodern theory recognizes diversity and even encompasses chaos in ways that the old line of equilibrium economics sought to deny. Postmodern economists are making room for disequilibrium — and for widely divergent schools of thought. In Nelson's words, "As Christianity earlier had to come to terms with a seeming permanent pluralism within institutional religion, modern secular thought is today being compelled — and not without great stresses and strains — to consider the prospect of a long-term social and economic pluralism. Indeed, such a pluralism could well be a defining feature of the 'postmodern' world — the emergence of which many social thinkers are now predicting" (257).
Nelson's own prophecy is that an idea familiar to libertarians through writers as dissimilar as Mises and Jane Jacobs will become the next major revolutionary social development: the right of "free secession." He sees this proposal — ensuring that any geographical area may secede from its larger, overarching political jurisdiction — as allowing for a new, culturally diverse world to cope with a plurality of philosophies, "economic theologies," and life-styles. Although he does not deal with many of the problems economists might have with this program, I believe he is on the right track.
The right of free secession points to the kind of constitutional rules that may be necessary to achieve and maintain peace in a rapidly changing world. Even if we ultimately find this proposal wanting, it is an admirable attempt to break out of the ruts of the old debate concerning centralization, federalism, and independence. In any case, Nelson cannot be faulted for irrelevance; devolution of political jurisdictions is a hot topic in the former U.S.S.R., Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, South Africa, Ethiopia, and even Canada.
Though I have more confidence in the feasibility and relevance of such older-fashioned classical liberal notions as free markets and free trade — which Nelson suggests that the right of free secession might supersede — I've got to admit that he has his heart in the right place.
He is surely right to believe that pluralism is the great challenge of the emerging world order. He is also on the money to insist that whatever economic situation emerges, it must have a moral component, and that this morality must deal with a plurality of cultures and peoples head on. After all, this is what that old "Protestant" heretic — and libertarian — Herbert Spencer suggested long ago, when he defined progress as an increasing degree of both heterogeneity and integration, and ethics as the habits and rules that allow people to adapt to their evolving situation. Nelson may not have come up with the best way to deliver this message — "economic theology"? really! — but he is nevertheless onto something important.
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