Melting the Golden Calf: Berkeley and the Links Between Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism

George Berkeley had the unenviable position of being right when everyone else was wrong. The context was the early Hanoverian period in Great Britain. Berkeley was the descendant of Anglo-Irish, a bishop in the Church of Ireland (the little sister of the Church of England), and a reformer. Avoiding censorship through a novel genre, Berkeley wrote a list of questions as to what the root cause of Irish poverty was (The Querist). In short: Berkeley believed the problem was Mammon. The Anglo-Irish gentry were obsessed with their hard money (gold) because they wanted access to a world market of luxury goods (silk, wine). The result was hoarding money, spending it in overseas markets, and depriving Ireland of any native industry. The landless poor survived through scratching the dirt and localized barter. Despite Ireland's potential wealth in beef and farming, the Irish poor seemed listless and indifferent. They owned nothing and survived through feigned ignorance to their greedy landlords. The Irish economy would remain poor as long as its native industries were underdeveloped and its money was spent abroad.

Berkeley's project was to create a national bank for Ireland, but one differing from the Bank of England and John Law's experiment in France. The bishop's main obstacle was "idolatry". Like Law, Berkeley saw through the monetarist fixation with gold or other hard currencies. However, here the similarities end. Law's national bank linked money directly to royal fiat. He engaged in grotesque forms of street theater to make his point: throwing gold from his carriage and pouring buckets of pig shit on the commoners who rushed to grab it up. Yet this project rapidly came undone. Royal fiat money had no internal mechanism to regulate its spending. It ran wholly on futures, mainly the Mississippi company's projected wealth in Louisiana land. When this project collapsed, with currency value run up by greedy investors and dumped for a killing when success stalled, Law discredited his own theories. French elite rejected any idea of a national bank, leaving the crown dependent on all kinds of private contracts with investors and bankers (shady or otherwise). Money grounded on nothing, except royal control, could easily destroy the economy it supported.

The key to this project was Berkeley's assault on "idolatry". Like Law, Berkeley saw through the monetarist fixation on gold. A consummate schemer, Law sought to create a national bank for France linked to royal fiat. He was reputed to engage in forms of grotesque street theater to make his point: riding his carriage into Paris, stopping to throw gold coins, and pouring buckets of pig shit on the people stooping to pick them up. However, as Berkeley noted, this project ran out of control because the fiat currency ran out of control with greedy investors. Seeing the potential for infinite wealth, financiers backed the Mississippi land bubble, ruining the fortunes of not a few (and poisoning the French crown against central banks). But Berkeley agreed with Law that gold was nothing, except whatever man imputed to it.

Berkeley, like Law, thought gold itself was nothing. Money was what men imputed to it. However, the bishop's project involved Irish parliament's supervision of the money supply, managing the currency for the public good. The superiority of parliamentary involvement, than simply royal control, was that parliament involved the gentry whose wealth was necessary to create Irish industry. The more the gentry became involved with managing funds, the more they would realize the need to enliven Ireland's industry. Additionally, with a government led project to create national industry, the peasantry would have a reason to participate for their own good. Berkeley's intent was to create incentives to stir up public activity, to get the Irish gentry and peasantry to think of themselves as a single nation. Additionally, to prevent Law's bubble, Berkeley proposed the bank hold reserve currency in various forms of wealth. The bank would not only possess gold, but also land and linen. Berkeley did not believe gold's mystique could disappear overnight, but its monopoly of symbolic potency could weaken if it was convertible. Gold was not a fetish that innate power of wealth. Possessing shiny rocks did not make a nation wealthy. Rather, industry produced a nation's wealth. Thus a national bank could "excite" (per the title) and direct Ireland's industry to enrich the entire people. However, parliament rejected Berkeley's plan (which he introduced as bishop). After turmoil racked Ireland, the parliament eventually got a carbon-copy bank modeled on the Bank of England (a privately owned national bank that printed paper-money linked to gold). Berkeley's plan, though rejected, had been to "excite the industry of mankind", as only a central money supply could do.

This quote, as much of the above content, is from Constantine Caffentzis' Exciting the Industry of Mankind (2000). Caffentzis sees in Berkeley a subtle economic mind that met ruin when his ideas were blown apart, but a voice worth recovering. There are obvious parallels to much of what goes on today. Private banking/financial institutions dictate national policy under threat of loan restructuring and debt collection. Nations are plunged into decay through austerity policies that reorient tax bases to servicing debt. Large quantities of natural resources (land, minerals, oil) are repossessed in this mad grab. Yet we don't live in the gold economy anymore, but in alternative fetishes (dollars, oil, etc.). As the 2008 financial bubble showed, wild speculations built upon nothing but man's desires end up consuming all. Of course, in our world of corporate socialism, the bankers shed some crocodile tears as they begged for QE saving. And in a figure like Obama they got it. As the president so poignantly put it to the bankers:"my administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks". Fiat currency at the beck and call of investors will spiral this boom-bust cycle in even more dramatic and insane forms. And as the current Corona virus economy shows (with the rapid adoption of QE for people), money reflects the energies of people and should be serviced to their benefit.

Berkeley's major opponents weren't fiat currency madmen, but gold-bugs. Locke and Newton, with this empiricist epistemology, led the way in defending a species-only economy. And it could be brutal: Newton's governance of the national mint saw the death penalty for coin-clipping (such became necessary to control currency quality and the price of gold). Locke was quite clear that only the rational and better sort had claims to reaping the fruits of the land. Similarly, William Petty (a pioneer of political-economy) thought Ireland should be converted into a giant cowherd, the people be damned. Berkeley rejected this gold fetish, which enslaved men to things with ideas of innate value.

Caffentzis picks up (and I think rightly) the conceptual parallel with Marx's notion of "commodity fetishism". Not unlike the stereotypical savage with a bone in his nose, the goldbug trusted an arbitrary substance to offer power and protection. Collect enough gold (or have an economy that circulated enough in to create a positive balance, or at least a claim on it) and you were rich. Berkeley knew this could end in disaster: the influx of American gold ruined Spain's economy (and not, as some were apt to say, a native pride and laziness among Iberians). Gold was believed to have an innate power and potency that man could then manipulate for their (or their country's) betterment. To Berkeley this notion was idolatrous. In Marxian terms, this was the deification of a substance that had almost purely exchange-value. It was no different than setting up one's wooden idol in the center of town to protect the community. Executions for coin-clippings were no different than throwing babies into Molech's flames: a supra-human order had to be satisfied lest catastrophe strike.

Thus, one learns an economic lesson from Moses' destruction of the golden calf. The problem with idolatry was never physicality, but imputation of agency and power to things which were inert. It was rejecting the Creator (as supreme mind) for the creation (the mindless qualia). It turned the world upside down. Israel's idolatry was not abandoning the Creator per se, but transforming the Creator into an image they could see, touch, and control. Loss of control bred fear, as God (and Moses) seemed to have disappeared. In their place, the Israelites manufactured a new medium for divine presence. It reversed the order of things: God had summoned Israel (through Abraham's seed and Moses' prophetic intervention), Israel had not summoned God. Hence why God's wrath was so severe (through the Levites who zealously destroyed the idolators).

This judgement wasn't naked divine omnipotence (i.e. listen to me or else!). It was to preserve the justice and humanity of the created order. Man is made erect to lift creation up to the heavens, not to bend down to the earth and serve what is made.

 The clown-prince of philosophy, Slavoj Zizek, offers a relevant analogy here. Attacking the scholarly fad of deep-ecology, Zizek recounts how someone had given an account of a trash heap from a more neutral vantage. Avoiding anthropo-centrism, the process of decomposition reveals swarming and creative production. It is only from a human perspective (with all the sights and smells of decay and rot) that we judge a heap of trash to be repulsive. However, Zizek says, why don't we apply the same approach to a Nazi death camp? The symmetrical beauty of fire, corpses, worms, and dirt all combine to create an energetic ecosystem. The point here, as it should be obvious, is how morally sinister deep-ecology is. This "neutrality" is obscene because the humanizing of nature is beautifying nature. Green philosophy rightly rejects the destruction of the environment for human greed. But it does so for all the wrong reasons. Inert things don't have rights. Even animals don't have rights. Nevertheless, it is humans who should hold account other humans for the destruction of things and animals when the priestly vocation of mankind is rejected. To humanize creation is to administer the task of stewardship and care. Such is to make the world a lovely place.

To try to imagine a world from a sub- or supra-human perspective is ultimately to miss its beauty. It's why Berkeley was disgusted with Mandeville's Fable of the Bees: how can you marvel at the harmony of a system full of prostitution, drugs, and murder? Apparently Mandeville tried to reconcile with Berkeley, as his intent wasn't to valorize greed, but the point still stands. You can never cease to see things humanly, for to think humanly is to think intelligently (made in the image of the Logos). Perverse attempts to see things from Mother Earth is simply a myth to advance an alternative judgement. Perhaps it's necessary to judge rightly (the way fiction snaps us out of bad paradigms). But when the myth is believed for itself, idolatry is afoot. And the end result of idolatry is the enslavement of man to nature forces.

Freedom from idolatry is equally freedom from commodity fetishism. Man does not serve mammon, but God. Yet, whether its gold or dollars, the things we worship become the haunt of demons, pulling men into the dark depths of bondage.