Isn’t it obvious how reprehensible is the commercialization of Christmas? I read in a Montréal newspaper that “the development of the mass market stimulated by material desires” and of the “consumer society” around the late 19th or early 20th century led to the “commercialization of the Holiday season” and created an “artificial” Christmas. The commercialization of Christmas was criticized by both the religious authorities and then the bien-pensant socialist intelligentsia. This last expression, nearly blasphemous, is used neither by the journalist nor by the highbrow academic he quotes.
We are told that today is even worse: “Everything is excessive, from the decorations to expensive food, through the competition for gifts purchased on credit.” This “alienation through mass consumption” has lately been attacked by environmentalists too. “We are far from voluntary simplicity and negative growth.”
To compensate for so much nonsense and out of respect for the poor people in Afghanistan, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, etc.) who can only dream of a consumer society and a plush commercial Christmas, let’s reflect on the contempt of statist intellectuals for ordinary people. (We can also compared China, where GDP per capita lies between that of Belarus and that of Thailand, with the history of Hong Kong.) How ordinary people could only hope to improve their conditions by voluntary exchange and free trade, against the exactions of the establishment and the scorn of the crony intelligentsia, is a historical phenomenon well depicted by Deirdre McCloskey in her trilogy on the bourgeoisie, to whom are due the Industrial Revolution and the Great Enrichment that followed.
In the exordium of the third volume, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (University of Chicago Press, 2016), McCloskey summarizes the opposition between the bourgeoisie, which arose in the eighteenth century “out of a new liberty and a new dignity accorded to ordinary people,” and the “clerisy,” a German term representing “the cultivated and reading enthusiasts for Kultur as against the commercial and bettering bourgeoisie.” Artists, intellectuals, journalists, professionals, and bureaucrats made up the clerisy, attacking the bourgeoisie and the commercial society that were launching a unique and monumental phenomenon in the history of mankind: in three centuries, a multiplication by 10 of the average standard of living in the world, which had heretofore stagnated and kept most human beings in dire poverty. A few excerpts from the first pages of Bourgeois Equality:
After the failed revolutions in Europe during the hectic year of 1848—compare 1968—a new and virulent detestation of the bourgeoisie infected the artists, intellectuals, journalists, professionals, and bureaucrats—the “clerisy” … The clerisy of Germany, Britain, and especially France came to hate merchants and manufacturers and anyone who did not admire the clerisy’s books and paintings. …
In the eighteenth century certain members of the clerisy, such as Voltaire and Tom Paine, courageously advocated our liberties in trade. And in truth our main protection against the ravenous has been just such competition in trade—not Citi Hall or Whitehall, which have their own ravenous habits, backed by violence. …
The commercial bourgeoisie—despised by the right and the left, and by many in the middle, too, all thrilled by the Romantic radicalism of books like Mein Kampf or What Is to Be Done—created the Great Enrichment and the modern world. The Enrichment dramatically improved our lives. …
Much of the clerisy … mislaid its former commitment to a free and dignified common people. It forgot the main, and the one scientifically proven, social discovery of the nineteenth century … that ordinary men and women do not need to be directed from above, and when honored and left alone become immensely creative. …
The modern world was made by a slow-motion revolution in ethical convictions about virtues and vices, in particular by a much higher level than in earlier times of toleration for trade-tested progress—letting people make mutually advantageous deals, and even admiring them for doing so, and especially admiring them when, Steve-Jobs loke, they imagine betterments. … Trade-and-betterment toleration was advocated first by the bourgeoisie itself, then more consequentially by the clerisy, which for a century before 1848, I have noted, admired economic liberty and bourgeois dignity … By then, however, as I also noted, much of the avant-garde of the clerisy worldwide had turned decisively against the bourgeoisie, on the road to twentieth-century fascism and communism.
To all EconLog readers, Merry Commercial Christmas!
