In La Defaite de l’Occidante, Emmanuel Todd claims that the collapse of the American empire was caused by the evaporation of Protestantism, which he describes as its hidden grammar.
America is now facing defeat in the Ukraine because of the complete disappearance of the Christian foundation of its culture, “un phénomène historique crucial qui, justement, explique la pulvérisation des classes dirigeantes américaines.”[1] Protestantism, which “to a large extent, has been the economic strength of the West, is dead.”[2] Both the United States and England have been caught up in a “centripetal, narcissistic then nihilistic drift,” which has led both the present empire and its predecessor to something which Todd calls the “Zero State,” which he defines as a nation state which is “no longer structured by its original values,” which in this instance means that the Protestant work ethic and the feeling of responsibility which previously animated its population has evaporated.[3] Both Trump and Biden epitomize the apotheosis of the Zero State because Washington’s decisions under both administrations have ceased to be moral or rational.
The Zero State was preceded by the Zombie State, which retains the form but is emptied of its content. Todd sees Benjamin Franklin as a typical Zombie Protestant, who no longer practices his religion but retains its ethics, attached to the values of honesty, work, seriousness, and always aware that man only has a limited amount of time.[4] Zombie Protestant society emerged in Europe when Germany and Great Britain created a world:
in which religious practice withers but where the social values of religion persist, as well as the rites of passage prescribed by the various Churches. Neither baptism, nor marriage, nor burial are called into question. But, as a sign that the West no longer respects the biblical commandment to “grow and multiply,” –fertility is falling in the middle classes. Deprived of its supervision, the Protestant work ethic in Britain devolved into pure nationalism.[5] Literacy is a fundamental Protestant value because sola scriptura requires the masses to be literate in order to have access to the Scriptures, which makes every man his own priest, thus promoting democracy and egalitarianism.
Todd derives his understanding of Protestantism from Max Weber’s famous book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In his attempt to answer the question “Qu’est-ce quel’Occident?” Todd identifies himself specifically as a pupil of Weber. Todd is “en bon élève de Max Weber, qui plaça la religion de Luther et de Calvin à la source de ce qui apparaissait à son époque comme la supériorité de l’Occident.”[6]
The best exposition of the Weber thesis in the English-speaking world is R. H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Tawney writes: “Weber, in a celebrated essay, expounded the thesis that Calvinism in its English version was the parent of capitalism.” According to Weber, “religious radicalism . . . went hand in hand with an economic radicalism.”[7] One of the first critiques of Weber’s thesis, however, noticed the connection between the Puritans and the Jews. In his 1907 book Jews and Modern Capitalism, Werner Sombart points out that everything Weber said about Puritans was a fortiori true of Jews. If Sombart’s earlier book on capitalism caused Weber to write his articles on the Puritan spirit, those articles led Sombart to write his book on the Jews. “In fact,” Sombart writes, “Max Weber’s researches are responsible for this book. I have already mentioned that Max Weber’s study of the importance of Puritanism for the capitalistic system was the impetus that sent me to consider the importance of the Jew, especially as I felt that the dominating ideas of Puritanism which were so powerful in capitalism were more perfectly developed in Judaism and were also of a much earlier date.”[8] Having read Weber’s thesis, Sombart wonders:
whether all that Weber ascribes to Puritanism might not with equal justice be referred to Judaism, and probably in a greater degree; nay, it might well be suggested that that which is called Puritanism is really Judaism.[9]
According to Sombart, Puritanism is nothing more than an aberrant form of Judaism because both are based on:
the preponderance of religion interests, the idea of divine rewards and punishments, asceticism within the world, the close relationship between religion and business, the arithmetical conception of sin, and, above all, the rationalization of life.[10]
Sombart was hardly the first one to notice the connection. He cites Heinrich Heine who asked: “Are not the Protestant Scots Hebrews, with their Biblical names, their Jerusalem, their pharisaical cant? And is not their religion a Judaism which allows you to eat pork?”[11] Or as one Calvinist put it: “If I am to say on my honour why I am become a Calvinist, I shall have to confess that the one and only reason which persuaded me was that among all the religions, I could find nothing which agreed so much with Judaism and its view of life and faith.”[12]
Writing 60 years before Sombart attempted to correct the Weber Thesis by claiming that Capitalism was Jewish, Karl Marx wrote in Zur Judenfrage that the worldly cult of the Jew was huckstering and his worldly god, money, and that the most Jewish country on the face of the earth was New England because of the Puritans who settled there:
the devout and politically free inhabitant of New England is a kind of Laocoon who makes not the least effort to escape from the serpents which are crushing him. Mammon is his idol, which he adores not only with his lips but with the whole force of his body and mind. In his view the world is no more than a Stock Exchange, and he is convinced that he has no other destiny here below than to become richer than his neighbour. Trade has seized upon all his thoughts, and he has no other recreation than to exchange objects. When he travels, he carries, so to speak, his goods and his counter on his back and talks only of interest and profit.[13]
Marx too emphasizes the practical sphere of life, specifically commerce, as the area in which Jewish values have most influenced their nominally Christian imitators and admirers, the Puritans. Money, not theology, is the true ecumenical lingua franca:
Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist. Money abases all the gods of mankind and changes them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-sufficient value of all things. It has, therefore, deprived the whole world, both the human world and nature, of their own proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and existence; this essence dominates him and he worships it. . . . The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of this world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.[14]
As Tawney showed malgré lui, there is no difference on the theoretical level between the Puritan Divine and the Catholic Schoolman when it comes to the relationship between morality and economics. On the practical level, however, the opposite was true. If we ask what the Jew and the Puritan have in common on the practical level, the answer is Capitalism, not theology.