All posts by Robert M Ellis

About Robert M Ellis

Robert M Ellis is the founder of the Middle Way Society, and author of a number of books on Middle Way Philosophy, including the introductory 'Migglism' and the new Middle Way Philosophy series published by Equinox. A former teacher, he now runs a retreat centre in Wales, Tirylan House, and is in the process of creating a forest garden there.

Max Weber and the iron cage

Economics, Great Thinkers, Religion, ,

Recently reading a review of a new book about Max Weber (1864-1920), I was reminded of how much of an effect his thinking in ‘The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism’ had on me when I was first writing my Ph.D. thesis (which was when I first started to develop Middle Way Philosophy about 15 years ago). He’s often thought of as a pioneering sociologist, but you could also see him as a kind of historian and/or philosopher, and his interests took in religion, politics, and economics among other things. In effect, he was one of those great thinkers who refuses to be pigeonholed. He famously said “I am not a donkey and I do not have a field”. He was also relatively uninterested in most of the trappings of academia, and managed to maintain a relatively objective political position through the First World War in Germany without being dragged into what he called the ‘politics of vanity’.Max Weber

In ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ he points out the important historical link between Catholic monasticism, Protestant worldly asceticism, and Capitalism. The story is roughly this: the medieval monks developed an ascetic mentality of self-denial in a higher cause, together with an individual relationship with God in which they felt accountable to him for their deeds. The monks were also used treating the monastery’s property as corporate. In the Protestant countries at the time of the Reformation, this asceticism was taken over into wider society rather than being confined to the monasteries. The Protestant began to have an individual relationship to God that went together with the literacy and accounting that had formerly been a monastic preserve. Capitalism then began to develop in Protestant societies because the basic requisites for it were there: an ascetic culture of self-denial allowing investment for future profit, a culture of book-keeping (whether moral or financial), the specialised organisation of free labour, and the separation of corporate property. Though of course, trade and industry had existed before this, it is these practices that enabled it to really take off in Europe and create the capitalist world we know today.

What makes this particularly interesting from the standpoint of the Middle Way is the way in which it shows the increasing dominance of a left-hemisphere formed, regularised, bureaucratised view of the world in Western culture. Far from being separated or antithetical, the worlds of ‘religion’ and ‘economics’ also turn out to be deeply inter-related, both shaped in parallel ways by this narrowly focused view of the world. To begin to loosen the grip of that narrow perspective and integrate it into a wider one, it helps to understand some of the conditions that formed it for us. These conditions have now spread into nearly every other area of life, where they tend to take the form of what is often called ‘managerialism’: if you can represent things and keep close control over them, this view goes, they will fulfil your desires more fully in the future. Max Weber seemed to understand clearly, more than a hundred years ago, how much of a delusion resided in this approach to life.

The last few pages of ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ offer a remarkably prescient account of the ‘iron cage’ created by this narrowed, bureaucratised view, and the ironic way this has emerged from religious other-worldliness. Though written in 1905, it begins to foreshadow modern concerns about sustainability. I will finish with a quotation from there:

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling: we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic production, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilised coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment”. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.

(A more detailed discussion of Max Weber’s arguments and their critics can be found in my thesis here.)

Dan Siegel on integration

Brain, Health, Psychology, Science

Dan Siegel, author of ‘Mindsight’, here offers a scientifically precise take on integration, and on the kind of view of the mind that is needed to make sense of integration. This is well worth a view if you are interested in understanding the working of integration more clearly.  We’re not just talking vague psychobabble here, but something that can be understood quite precisely both in terms of brains and in terms of experience. There is also an interesting transcribed interview with him here.

Riding the greenwave

Middle Way Philosophy, Politics

An earthquake appears to be afflicting the politics of the UK at the moment, somewhat like the radical changes occurring in Greece and elsewhere. As we run up to a General Election in May, parties that were formerly marginalised by the First Past the Post electoral system – UKIP and the Greens – are now polling about 10% each and threatening the main parties from both the left and the right. Yesterday the Green Party’s membership passed 50,000 – one of which is me from when I joined a few days ago. It’s a good time to reassess one’s view of politics, and indeed of the place politics plays in one’s personal life. Old certainties are slipping, and the biggest personal dogma held by many up until now – that what we do will make no difference to an entrenched system – is the biggest one to slip. I think it is primarily the personal recognition of this responsibility that has made me act at last to join a party, for the first time since my brief previous involvement with the Green Party in 1985 or so.Sunflower_(Green_symbol)

I continue to think that the Middle Way itself implies no one particular political ideology or party – not because it is neutral, but because it begins with individual judgement, and the conditions affecting each judgement in each situation are varied. There are, I am convinced, better and worse ways to go politically from wherever you start now, not just equally indifferent options. I can tell you about my experience and the conditions that impel me in one direction, but I cannot prescribe that direction for you. The better direction will be the one that addresses conditions better, from wherever you start, and that avoids dogmatic ideological assumptions and thus reduces impediments to awareness. That will be so whether the ideologies that most tempt you involve socialist caring and equality, conservative rootedness and scepticism, liberal love of freedom or Green concern for the wider environment. You are unlikely to be able to find that direction without dogma unless you really try to understand the alternatives.

For me, however that direction has recently become a lot clearer, and apparently that has also become the case for many others too. I do not agree with every detail of Green Party policy, but my recent process of thought about the acute limitations of growth economics (see previous blog) and reading Tim Jackson’s book ‘Prosperity without Growth’ made the importance of the general direction the Greens are going in doubly important. It is not an easy direction. There is much that is not seriously worked out yet about how a society without growth can work, and how we can navigate the transition to it, but the important point is that this is the only direction that addresses key basic conditions of human society which no other political movements seem to be addressing. If you think creating a sustainable society is difficult, try continuing to live in an unsustainable society for another hundred years or so.

This central requirement is far more important to me than the various reservations I have about the occasional appearance of Green metaphysics. No, I don’t believe in ‘nature’, or holism, or any of these other big dogmatic Green ideas that involve appeals to ultimates. I expect that I will occasionally encounter thinking based on such absolutised abstractions in Green circles as elsewhere, and disagree with it. However, that need not stop me working with those who are largely going in the same direction, and seem to be largely motivated, not by dogmas, but by pressing conditions.

Of course, the Green party also wants other things, such as a citizen’s income, loosening and eventually opening of migration, and abolition of nuclear weapons and big cuts in defence spending. All of these seem to me like obvious ways to address conditions. Above all, if one wants integration in society and the world just as in the individual, one does not achieve this by building walls: whether these are the social walls that exclude benefit claimants from decent compassionate treatment, the walls of fortress Europe that are vainly trying to keep out the African poor, or the walls of nuclear ‘deterrence’. These are walls of repression, not only in the world but in the psyches of those who build them.

More of the same – more tactical voting for parties that will maintain the unsustainable mainstream consensus – is no longer an option for me. That’s not because there’s no case for tactical voting, but just because the reasons for doing so are no longer so important compared to wider conditions. Whatever your political habits at present, I urge you just to think critically about those habits, not just in terms of one or two issues but in terms of the widest possible context of conditions. Whoever you vote for, vote for the Big Picture.