s0metim3s writes:

The New Protestant Ethic

Arthur Kroker, CTheory

One hundred years after the publication of Max Weber's classic text,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the fateful
relationship between Protestantism and capitalism has been renewed in
American political discourse. Except this time it is no longer the
original convergence theorized by Weber between the spirit of
Calvinism and acquisitive capitalism whereby Christianity was
destined to be ultimately secondary to the unfolding historical
project of capitalism, but the opposite. In a contemporary political
climate marked by the resurgence seemingly everywhere of faith-based
politics, capitalism and its historical correlate — modernism —
have actually folded back on themselves, quickly reversing modernist
codes of economic secularism and political pluralism, in the
interests of being reanimated with the evangelical spirit of
religious fundamentalism. What Weber foresaw as a primal compact
between Calvinism and acquisitive capitalism — this migration, first
in Europe and then in Puritan America, of Puritan attitudes towards
personal salvation based on giving witness by habits of frugality,
hard work, and discipline into the essentially acquisitive spirit of
capitalism — has been renewed in new key. On the centennial of The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the political
universe is suddenly dominated by the spirit of what might be called
the 'New Protestant Ethic' as the ideological reflex of the age of
networked capitalism and empire politics.Animated by apocalyptic visions of the days of wrath announcing the
Second Coming of Christ, motivated by feverish aspirations to be
counted among the spiritually elect in the coming age of division
between the *Predestined* and the *Left Behind*, witness to the
vengeful spirit of the Old Testament, literal in its biblical
interpretations, monistic in its drive to hegemony among the world
religions, in active revolt against secularism, in bitter rebellion
against pluralism, the New Protestant Ethic is the foundational creed
of contemporary American politics.

We, the inhabitants of post-Enlightenment society might have thought
that the current cultural horizon was exhausted by fateful struggles
between modernism, postmodernism and posthumanism, but it turns out
that the past will not be denied. Out of the ashes of the Book of
Revelation emerges a form of faith-based politics which is, in every
political sense, the ascendant historical tendency in American public
life. Here, putting on the policy garments of the "culture of life"
movement, there waging bitter political combat against the heresy of
"same-sex marriage," now opposed to scientific claims concerning stem
cell research, allying itself actively with the crusading spirit of
American imperialist adventures, dominating the media with
faith-based cultural perspectives, the New Protestant Ethic easily
sweeps aside secular discourses in the interests of a vision of
culture, society and politics which is as cosmological in its
theological sweep as it is eschatological in its historical
ambitions.

Understood metaphysically, it may well be that the insurgency
represented by faith-based politics is the representative political
form of what Heidegger's Nietzsche described as the age of "completed
nihilism." In this interpretation, power in its mature (nihilistic)
phase -- sick of itself, possessing no definitive goal, exhausted
with the historical burden of remaining an active will, always
sliding inexorably towards the nothingness of the will-less will --
desperately seeks out a sustaining purpose, an inspiring goal, a
historical mission. Into the ethical vacuum at the disappearing
center of nihilistic power flows a strong historical monism -- the
New Protestant Ethic -- that will not be suppressed. To power's empty
formalism, to liberal humanism's (emotionally) ineffective
proceduralist ethics, to the empire's cybernetic equations written in
violence and in blood across the landscape of imperial wars, the New
Protestant Ethic provides a singular historical purpose -- the
crusading spirit of evangelical Christianity which is
reconstructionist, resurgent, and reanimated -- backed up by the
semiotic purity of the foundational texts of the Old Testament. To
those who would discount faith-based politics as only the most recent
instance of the politics of cultural backlash, it should be noted
that this fateful, and entirely original, entwinement of
(fundamentalist) religion and (imperial) war technologies in the
American mind may well be in the order of a great overturning. With
faith-based politics, we are witness to something entirely
unexpected, and for that reason, deeply ominous -- an ethical
reconciliation between religion and technology in which the
apocalyptic visions of the Old Testament will be future-coded in the
power languages of empire politics and networked capitalism. What is
now only in its preparatory rhetorical stages as the "culture of
life" movement may soon emerge full-blown as the essential
life-principle of American, and by imperialist extension, world
culture.

Consequently, it may no longer be The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism in its original Calvinist evocation of ascetic
propriety and regularity, nor capitalism any longer in its first
pioneering acquisitive expression. However, it appears to most
definitely be the New Protestant Ethic as the moral vision of
American politics in the 21st century -- intolerant, charismatic,
crusading. Breaking beyond the boundaries of private religious
belief, this fusion of religious fundamentalism and the
instrumentalities of increasingly cyberneticized imperial forms of
global warfare is, for example, the moral essence of the Bush
administration's political vision of "redemptive empire." Here,
"Reconstructionist" Christianity -- aggressive, projective,
fundamentalist -- is streamed instantly across the spacetime fabric
of American empire by a military intent both on "full-spectrum
domination of space" and, as recently announced, on "metabolic
domination" of the bodies of its global subjects. A dangerous fusion
then of fundamentalist Protestantism and cyber-war. In his first
press conference after the last American presidential election,
George W. Bush said: "I have earned political capital and I intend to
spend it."

There are intimations here: some known -- the sacrificial violence
directed against the cities of Iraq, recent reports of new versions
of experimental weapons -- poison gas and napalm -- used against the
citizens of Falluja, ominous warnings of adventurism to come in Iran;
and some stories unknown, unreported, already forgotten at the dark
edges of the real politics of empire -- the probable murder in a
southern motel room in December of Ray C. Lemme, a private
investigator, who it is reported was following the trail of The Five
Star Trust -- a secret fund out of Texas, Saudi Arabia, the
Phillipines -- which may have financed the widespread computer
manipulation of the last American election.[1] Thinking of these
events, I again allow those chilling words of George W. Bush to brush
against my thought: "I have earned political capital and I intend to
spend it."

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