MayerBlog: The Web Log of
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Three Cheers for Commercialism!
The annual approach of December 25 brings with it, unfortunately, the annual complaints about the “commercialization” of Christmas. Some of the typical criticisms, drawn from a random sampling of comments posted on the Internet: “Americans spend too much money on Christmas gifts”; “stores have made Christmas little more than a great time to sell product”; “Christmas has become nothing more than the greatest gimmick for corporations to make millions at this time of year”; and “the corporate commercialization of Christmas is at its all-time high,” with Christmas decorations and displays put out “right after Halloween and before Macy’s even has had its Thanksgiving parade.” With all this commercialism and “secularism,” it is further alleged, we have lost sight of the “true meaning” of Christmas. Such criticism is just a load of “bah, humbug” – in other words, bullshit. As Dennis Prager maintains in his “Defense of the `Commercialism’ of Christmas,” the complaint is “beyond silly” and “actually harmful.” “Before you criticize something,” Prager advises, “imagine its alternative”: “Imagine that Christmas came around, the stores put up no Christmas decorations and no one bought gifts. Would we be a better society?” The obvious answer is, No, of course not: “When you buy Christmas gifts, you bring joy to the recipients, you feel good about giving, you have spent time thinking about what the recipients would like, you keep many businesses alive, and, most of all, you honor the holiday,” he persuasively concludes. What is it about commerce that makes so many people despise it – and demonize the “commercialization” of anything, including the Christmas holiday? One clue can be found in the writings of Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy, an early 19th-century French philosopher whose writings include some of the best discussions of commerce, both its essential nature and its significance to society. Commerce is simply exchange – the trading of goods or services by individuals, for mutual benefit – and Tracy considered commerce “not only the foundation and basis of society” but also “the fabric itself of society.” (This identification of commerce with society, from Tracy’s Commentary on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, is even more explicit in its original French: commerce, as Tracy described it, is “l’essence, qu’il est la societe ellememe.” The English translation, by the way, was by Thomas Jefferson, who was so enthusiastic a fan of Tracy’s writings that he undertook their translation in order to help make them more familiar to Americans.) Commerce, far from being an evil, is “the author of all social good,” maintained Tracy: There is nothing immoral about industrious persons seeking “only rewards for their talents, by means of free agreements entered into with good faith and guaranteed by the laws.” Indeed, he believed, the industrious man “does more good to humanity, often without knowing it, than the most humane idler, with all his zeal.” That observation is reminiscent of Adam Smith’s famous statement in The Wealth of Nations, that “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.” Smith added, “Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.” Tracy actually went further than Smith in embracing free-market capitalism and in regarding as equally valuable all productive work – the trader as well as the manufacturer or farmer. Indeed, Tracy was critical of other “economical scientists,” including Smith, who tended to favor agricultural labor, a “prejudice” or “false idea of a sort of magical virtue attributed to the earth,” as Tracy put. (Given Tracy’s embrace of free-market capitalism – going even further in his enthusiasm for market principles than even Adam Smith – it’s noteworthy that Thomas Jefferson’s mature thinking on matters of economics was so profoundly influenced by Tracy. This suggests that Jefferson was far friendlier to market capitalism than has been recognized by many scholars, who quote only his earlier pro-agrarian writings. In fact, Jefferson was so enthusiastic about Tracy’s free-market principles that he also personally undertook the translation into English of Tracy’s Treatise on Political Economy, which elaborates on these ideas and which Jefferson helped get published in 1818, so it could be used as a textbook at American schools, including his own University of Virginia.) In a free, capitalist society like the United States, when individuals engage in commerce, they treat one another with respect as equal moral agents. Any economic transaction – ranging from the simple purchase of a consumer item (say, a CD or a bottle of perfume) as a Christmas gift for a friend or family member, all the way up to multi-million- (or even billion-) dollar corporate deals – involves people voluntarily trading for their mutual benefit: they choose to exchange things (goods or services) because, after the trade, they regard themselves as better off than they were before the trade. If I pay $15 for a CD as a Christmas gift for a friend – which is to say, if I choose to spend a portion of the money I have earned from my own work on this particular good, for this particular purpose, rather than all the other alternative things I could have done with what I’ve earned – it’s because I voluntarily choose to do so, seeing myself as better off with fewer dollars in my wallet but a nice gift for a friend. It’s my choice. And the store employee who sells me the CD also does so willingly, because it’s in his employer’s interest to have one less CD in its inventory but an additional $15 in sales. Take that one simple example and multiply it by millions and millions of such transactions, occurring simultaneously throughout our prosperous and diverse capitalist society, and you can imagine exactly how important commerce is to our society. It is its “essence,” the “fabric itself of society,” for in a free society, it is by such trading that individuals can order their lives (and order society itself) for their mutual fulfillment and happiness. The alternative to commerce – the alternative to free trade – is to use force, in all its forms (physical coercion, violence, fraud, etc.), to get what one wants. And, sadly, throughout human history, there have been far too many societies in which people get what they want by force (typically by using the coercive powers of government) rather than by free trade, for mutual benefit. Modern Americans are truly fortunate to be living in a society that, however imperfectly, limits the use of force and instead aims to maximize the ability of individuals to achieve their desires by trading with one another, freely, for their mutual benefit. The philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand, whose philosophy of Objectivism I have chosen as my own philosophy of life, in her writings has identified this “trader principle,” as she called it, as the moral basis of capitalism. In one of my favorite passages from her novel Atlas Shrugged, Rand has one of her heroes, Francisco d’Anconia, explain the meaning of money: “Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. . . . To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss – the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery – that you must offer them values, not wounds – that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade – with reason, not force, as their final arbiter – it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability – and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money.”
Rather than being “the root of all evil,” Francisco proclaims, money is in fact the root of all good. And the most reverent tribute he (like Rand herself) could pay to the United States, to his adopted country, is that “to the glory of mankind,” it is, “for the first and only time in history, a country of money”: “If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose – because it contains all the others – the fact that they were the people who created the phrase `to make money.’ No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity – to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words `to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.”
Ayn Rand also nicely summed up the secular meaning of Christmas: “The secular meaning of the Christmas holiday is wider than the tenets of any particular religion; it is good will toward men – a frame of mind which is not the exclusive property (though it is supposed to be part, but is a largely unobserved part) of the Christian religion. “The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: `Merry Christmas’ – not `Weep and Repent.’ And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form – by giving presents to one’s friends, or by sending them cards in token of remembrance.”
Indeed, as Rand added, it is the very aspect of Christmas that so many people today lament – its so-called “commercialization” – that makes it most worthy of celebration: “The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has become commercialized. The gift-buying . . . stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decorations put up by department stores and other institutions – the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors – provide the city with a spectacular display, which only `commercial greed’ could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle.”
(Ayn Rand, in The Objectivist Calendar, December 1976) This secular meaning of Christmas has a longer, better-established history in Western (or at least in Anglo-American) culture than does the religious celebration. Those who allege that the “true meaning” of Christmas is “Christ” – in other words, Christians’ celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ – ignore a number of key historical facts. The “Yuletide” observance has its roots in pagan Germanic, and pre-Christian, Britain; like similar observances in other pagan societies (such as the Saturnalia celebration in ancient Rome), it coincided with the Winter Solstice – the shortest day of the year, celebrated because its passing represents the beginning of the lengthening of daylight hours and the eventual coming of spring – and many of the holiday-season traditions (including the exchanging of gifts, the “Yule log,” kissing underneath mistletoe, etc.) also have their origin in these pagan observances. There is no historical evidence for Jesus’ birth in December – indeed, the historical evidence suggests that he was born in springtime, not in winter – and early Christians simply expropriated the existing Winter Solstice celebrations for their mythical observation of Jesus’ birthday. (Indeed, recognizing the pagan origins of Christmas celebrations, English Puritans discouraged observation of the holiday, viewing it as a form of heresy.) Other aspects of what many people see as “traditional” Christmas celebrations had their origins in secular culture: for example, Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, brought the German custom of decorating a Christmas tree (which in turn was based on ancient, pre-Christian Germanic customs) to England, from where it spread to the United States, in the mid-19th-century, about the time that the custom of exchanging Christmas cards also originated. It was largely due to the influence of 19th-century English novelist Charles Dickens that Christmas, both in England and America, became popularly associated with Christianity – and not only with a religious significance (the myth of Jesus Christ’s birth) but also with the Christian morality of altruism. Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol helped establish the new Christian paradigm for the celebration of the December 25 holiday. As I observed in my entry of December 27, 2004, "In Defense of Ebenezer Scrooge," “What is often overlooked about Dickens’ story – often because the popular film or stage adaptations soften its hard edges – is that it is propaganda for a social philosophy, one that is essentially anti-capitalist and anti-individualist. Dickens shared with many of the literary men of his time a trait common among so-called intellectuals today: a disdain for business and for the virtues on which capitalism rests. The `moral’ of Dickens’ story is that it is `evil’ for humans to be productive and motivated by their self-interest. Rather than urging individuals to be responsible for themselves and to deal with others as equals, trading value for value for their mutual interests, Dickens exhorts individuals to act as their `brothers’ keepers,’ to sacrifice their own interests to those of the `needy,’ to put others’ interests (or desires) above their own.” I added, “Dickens preaches his altruistic morality through the story of Scrooge’s personal redemption,” and then I showed how that code of morality, as told through Dickens’ story, really is perverse. I confess that I like the “old sinner” in the first part of the story – the unredeemed Scrooge – whom I see as the most real character in the story, the one character in the book who acts responsibly and who treats his fellow-men justly. (He's certainly more moral than his gold-digging nephew, Fred, or those irresponsible breeders, the Cratchits.) “After his transformation – that is, after he becomes a “born-again” believer in Dickens’ altruistic morality – he loses his humanity and becomes just another boring character in just another boring Dickens book. (Indeed, as Douglas Kern puts it in his hilarious take on the book on the Tech Central Station website – “A TCS Christmas Carol” – Dickens’ story can be aptly described as a “melancholy tale of a productive businessman who gets worked over by three meddling supernatural social workers one Christmas Eve, transforming him into a simpering socialist.”) The passage that best shows the full implications of Dickens’ altruistic moral code – and which also perhaps reveals the unconscious anti-business biases of those who today decry the “commercialization” of Christmas – is the scene where Scrooge is visited by the ghost of Jacob Marley, he tells his former partner, “You were always a good man of business, Jacob,” to which Marley responds, shrilly: “Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing his hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
As I wrote last year, commenting on this scene: “Again, the businessman is made the scapegoat, when all a good businessman does is expect fair value in return for the goods or services his customers buys. In a world where people do not treat each other with equal respect, trading value for value, for their mutual profit – as business people do – what room is there for the virtues of charity, mercy, forbearance, and especially benevolence? Indeed, one could argue, perhaps the most benevolent person in society is the businessman, because he’s the one who doesn’t try to cash in on negative emotions such as guilt (as the social workers do) but insteads treats all whom he does with respect, as his equals. For this, in A Christmas Carol and in countless other works of anti-capitalist propaganda, the businessman is condemned, for his virtues!” This is why I like the unredeemed Scrooge, the “good man of business”: “He asks no man for charity, for he earns his own way in the world, and he expects others to do the same. He asks only that other people respect him as he respects them, that they just mind their own business, as he minds his. For all that he is, Ebenezer Scrooge should be admired – and, yes, loved – for he’s truly a moral man. That is, until he’s transformed into just another whining altruistic wimp!” As I also noted in my essay last year (see the second part of my Dec. 27, 2004 entry, on the “Christmas Culture Wars”), it also has become something like an annual tradition for Christian conservatives – and, I’d add, demagogues of various ideological stripes – to decry, in addition to the “commercialization” of Christmas, the so-called “war” on Christmas itself: the efforts of various people (typically characterized by conservative demagogues as either ACLU “liberals” or the “political correctness police”) to de-emphasize Christmas, as a holiday imbued with Christian religious significance , and instead to emphasize “the holidays” of December, including not only the Christians’ Christmas but also Jews’ celebration of Hanukkah (which this year happens to begin on December 25), Muslims’ celebration of Ramadan, some African-Americans’ celebration of Kwanzaa, pagans’ celebration of the Winter Solstice, and even the secular celebration of New Year’s. This year the complaints about the so-called “war” on Christmas are particularly shrill. Glenn Beck, the conservative talk radio commentator, plays a satirical song suggesting “Merry Christmas” be replaced with “Happy Rama-Hana-Kwanz-Mas.” John Gibson, host of “The Big Story” on the Fox News Channel, has written a book, The War on Christmas, arguing there is a “liberal plot to ban the sacred Christian holiday.” Among the evidence he cites is the renaming of the Christmas break in schools as the “winter break” and the renaming of Christmas trees as “holiday” trees. (A heated debate brewed in Boston when the city’s Parks and Recreation Department advertised the lighting of its “Holiday Tree,” while in Washington, D.C., House Speaker Dennis Hastert got headlines by announcing that he has ordered the “Capitol Holiday Tree” to be again called the “Capitol Christmas Tree.”) And FoxNews’ Bill O’Reilly – surely one of the most shameless demagogues in the USA today – has suspended (no doubt just temporarily) his bashing of oil companies to instead bash other corporations: major department stores that have committed the grievous sin of asking their employees to wish customers “Happy Holidays!” Various Christian groups have urged their members to boycott stores such as Sears/K-Mart and Wal-Mart because they use the generic term “holiday” instead of “Christmas,” while other groups want to boycott Target stores because the retailer does not allow Salvation Army bell ringers. (I don’t know about you, but that’s reason enough for me to patronize Target and to urge my friends to do so as well: any business that has the courage to say “No” to those obnoxious bell-ringers deserves our patronage!) Even President Bush has been criticized for failing to use the word Christmas on this year’s White House “holiday” card (even though the card does include a quotation from a Biblical psalm). The notion of a “war” on Christmas and/or Christianity is popular among American social conservatives because it so poignantly epitomizes their paranoia about the so-called “culture wars” in American society today. Many conservatives have been put on the defensive because they perceive threats to the traditional Judeo-Christian moral code that they hold so dear (and which they, as a matter of faith, regard as moral “truth”). And they’re on the defensive with good reason, for that moral code is threatened – by the realities of modern life (and of human nature itself), with which that traditional morality is increasingly seen (by more and more individuals) as being out of touch. The very concept of a “war” on traditional values reflects a paranoid view that ignores the essential nature of culture itself. In a free society like that of the United States, culture is neither homogeneous nor static. Society (which is nothing more than the mass of individuals who compose it) has not one but many cultures – indeed, a seemingly infinite number of different “cultures,” each reflecting the choices and values of different individuals. And each of those various cultures is constantly changing, as the choices made and values held by the individuals who are constituents of that culture also change and evolve. In this sense, societies – like the individuals who compose them – do indeed “mature,” or evolve, over time. This phenomenon is universal, for it is rooted in human nature itself; and it is especially true in free societies, like the United States, where the marketplace left relatively free, unhindered by the heavy hand of government, to spontaneously coordinate the various choices made by millions of individuals. All cultures – including “traditional” Christian ones – are also constantly evolving. Indeed, one might ask, What is “traditional” Christian culture in modern America, and – if it exists – how does it celebrate the Christmas holiday? Obviously, there are many significant differences between Roman Catholic Christians, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and the various denominations of Protestants and other Christian faiths. Add to these faith-based differences the many other significant differences due to ethnicity or nationality (for example, how Christmas is celebrated by Hispanic Roman Catholics as compared with Catholics from northern European countries, or with Greek Orthodox celebrations), and then add the peculiar traditions of individual families – those variations within particular families that their members pass down, from generation to generation – and you can see how difficult it is to identify even what a “traditional Christian” celebration of Christmas it. Other than as a very loose generalization (one that glosses over all these various religious, ethnic, and familial variations), it doesn’t exist. As I wrote last year, it’s understandable why some Christian conservatives have a chip on their shoulder, given the anti-Christian bias that undoubtedly does exist in some circles of American “elite” culture. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to take very seriously these complaints, for the reasons I noted: “The majority of Americans are Christians, and the Christian religious gloss on the Christmas holiday is so pervasive, that those few examples of counter trends mentioned above are relatively minor. . . . Indeed, given that one of America’s fundamental founding principles is religious freedom – that is, the freedom of the individual to believe (or not believe) whatever he or she wishes, with regard to religion – it can be argued that it’s far better to err on the side of anti-, rather than pro- Christian bias in our public life, particularly where government is concerned. An essential reason for having a constitution (and for empowering the courts to enforce its provisions, including such rights guarantees as the First Amendment religion clause) is to protect the rights of minorities – and the lone individual, of course, is the most vulnerable minority – against what Alexis de Tocqueville, in his classic book Democracy in America, famously called “the tyranny of the majority.” With a majority of Americans professing belief in the Christian religion, in some form, it is especially important that the freedom of non-Christians (whether believers in other religions, such as Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, etc., or agnostics and atheists) be respected. . . . Toleration of those with different beliefs (or no religious beliefs at all) is the minimum that our constitutional traditions require. Given not only the diversity of American society but also our strong protection for individual rights, we should all – to be good American citizens – not only tolerate those who think differently, but also genuinely respect their equal rights to do so. Arguably, at this time of year, Christian Americans ought to be even more scrupulous in their toleration of and respect for the rights of non-Christians.” And, as I concluded last year, “Therefore, governments (and their entities, such as public schools) ought to err on the side of freedom, even if it seems (in the eyes of some Christian believers) that they are being `anti-Christian.’ And businesses that downplay the Christmas holiday, and instead celebrate a generic `holiday’ season, ought not to be boycotted – or even criticized – but rather ought to be praised for their respect for ALL their customers’ views.” In the interest of full disclosure, I should add that Christmas has never held a religious significance for me: I am a lifelong atheist and a fairly militant non-Christian (see my future entry on “Why I Am Not a Christian,” planned for Spring 2006). Thus, for me, Christmas has been worth celebrating only because of its secular dimensions; and I agree wholeheartedly with Ayn Rand’s view of the meaning of Christmas, discussed above, including her enthusiastic embrace of the holiday’s commercialism. As one of those radical secularists whom some religious conservatives abhor, I freely admit that I resent their efforts to cram their silly Christian holiday down the throats of those of us who are non-Christians: whether atheist or agnostic, Objectivist or relativist, Jew or Muslim, “secular humanist” or pagan, neo-Druidian celebrant of the Winter Solstice or Africentrist celebrant of “Kwanzaa.” Christians may “own,” as their special religious holiday, Christmas as a celebration of the myth of Jesus’ birth. But they don’t own other celebrations of the Yule holiday – especially in the United States, a nation founded on the principle of an individual’s freedom of conscience. Let us all celebrate the “holiday” season in our own way – and let’s allow our wonderful, free-market capitalist system give us as much “commercialism” (and all the resulting freedom of choices) as possible!
| Link to this Entry | Posted Monday, December 19, 2005 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
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