Edward Hadas

Revolution was not on the agenda when the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church opened on Oct. 11, 1962, almost exactly 50 years ago. However, the gathering marked the start of a new era, not only for the world’s largest centrally-run religion. During the following years, the hope for a better, freer world led to everything from the sexual revolution to the Prague Spring, from African independence to the hippie culture of Woodstock. A half-century on, it seems a good time for an economist to take stock.

The economy was not the top concern of the ’60s would-be revolutionaries, but calls for a new society had two revolutionary economic implications.

First, like so many other parts of the established order, the economic “system” was to be overthrown. The target was clear enough in Eastern Europe – the Communist planned economy. Elsewhere, the economic villain was harder to pin down, although it was often assumed that “capitalism” was intrinsically evil – heartless corporations and excessive materialism in the West and post-colonial exploitation in the Third World. It was time for radical change; if not a return to some imagined pre-industrial communal paradise then at least a massive refusal to become cogs in the machine. It hardly seemed to matter then that dissidents in the East were longing for what protesters in the West were loathing.

One of those 1960s dreams has come true. Communism is gone, save for Cuba and North Korea. Otherwise, the “system” appears well entrenched. Corporations, larger and more impersonal than ever, have extended their reach in a globalised world. Developing economies may be less in thrall to the former colonial masters, but indigenous entrepreneurs are just like their western exemplars. The communes are closed or have gone commercial. Alternative careers are rare, money and finance ubiquitous.

The second economic revolutionary demand was for the abolition of poverty in the midst of post-War plenty. This sentiment led to the foundation of the United Nations World Food Programme in 1961 and the U.S. government’s war on poverty in 1964. The post-Vatican II Catholic Church was one of the keenest promoters of global economic “Justice and Peace”.

That dream has come closer to reality. True, hunger still plagues a billion people, but abject poverty has diminished as GDPs have risen around the world, and safety nets have helped the needy in richer countries. Nonetheless, the 1960s’ revolutionary and religious fervour made only a minor direct contribution to these improvements. Developing countries primarily copied the practices of rich countries while the welfare state mostly expanded existing programmes.

It might sound like “the system”, which was not overthrown, has actually been good for the world. Was the rage against the machine all in vain, and the idealism unnecessary? I think not, and not only because of the collapse of the Soviet economic model.

While most of the children of the 1960s eventually signed up for work within the system, many did not completely abandon their higher aspirations. As a result, the counter-culture spirit has infiltrated the corporate world. Capitalism has proved flexible enough to change in response to its critics. In the 1960s, theory Y management – the idea that employees should be encouraged more than disciplined – looked original. It is now obvious. Corporate claims to “social responsibility” may often sound hypocritical, but executives would not even bother to pretend if they didn’t believe that companies should do more than merely provide profits for shareholders. “Don’t be evil”, as Google’s founders put it, is a 1960s-style slogan that most bosses would now endorse.

The 1960s commitment to the elimination of poverty has also borne fruit. Without it, companies would be less willing to offer better conditions for their employees in poor countries, or to demand better conditions for their suppliers’ employees. Without it, western politicians would be more hostile to the expanding power of China and former colonies. Without it, there would be even more hostility to economic immigrants struggling to earn a decent living in rich countries.

Of course, history does not repeat itself. Last year’s global Occupy Movement didn’t amount to much. In a way, that failure is a sign of the greater success. The decade’s economic idealism has had enough influence that calls for radical change now sound silly.

Nonetheless, idealistic dreamers are still valuable. They can remind the world that the ultimate purpose of a prosperous society is not wealth for its own sake, but something better. I would suggest three goals for the grandchildren of the 1960s. First, the battle against pollution is not yet won in rich countries and has only begun in the developing world. Second, there is an urgent need for a financial system which doesn’t have greed as its only engine. Finally, the gulf between rich and poor is still too wide. It is too often forgotten that a poor man’s rise from wretched poverty does more good for the world than a rich man’s latest bauble.

Thomas Carlyle’s fulminations against the spiritual damage wrought by factories are almost two centuries old, but the sentiment is current wherever industrialisation is rampant. “The huge demon of Mechanism,” he wrote, “smokes and thunders, panting at his great task, oversetting whole multitudes of workmen … so that the wisest no longer knows his whereabout.”

In China, today, government leaders and dissidents alike worry that, as one commentator put it, “frenzied competition for a better life [has] lobotomized the people of inherent values like common decency, compassion and feelings of fellowship”.

A century ago, Max Weber described the process as “disenchantment”. The German sociologist thought the transition from a culture of faith and farming to the narrow-minded and bureaucratic “iron cage” of modern civilisation required the destruction of a spiritual worldview. He saw a modern society made up of “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart”.

Weber was certainly on to something: industrialisation does break down old religious ways. In pre-industrial societies, the transcendental and the everyday were closely woven together. Social rituals couldn’t be separated from ethical expectations. Such unity is impossible in a world of material plenty, big cities, and high technology.

Vast increases in wealth, consumption and education create opportunities for personal expression and eliminate the economic rationale for many socio-religious restrictions. Urbanisation brings people physically closer, but often as anonymous neighbours rather than in communities with shared values. Omnipresent media, telecommunications and transport erode the borders between the ‘us’ of family or village and the ‘them’ of the outside world. The old religious and spiritual ways cannot survive this transition.

But Carlyle, Weber and many modern social observers make bolder claims: common religious belief and shared moral values are gone forever; modern society has no room for old-fashioned certainties; there is no exit from what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls “A Secular Age”.

Are they right? In a rich economy, the grim fight for survival is eased and there is more time for emotional and religious exploration. Modern scientific knowledge invites speculation and wonder. As Weber noted, spiritual discipline is required for the “worldly asceticism” which makes modern economies so productive. Prosperity and urbanisation might engender greater spirituality.

Karl Marx condemned religion and shared morality as “illusory happiness of the people”. His case is weakened by the failure of his alternative. Marxists in opposition were often idealistic, but in power their rule was both inefficient and cruel. Their promise of an economic justice which would make life satisfying now sounds like a bad joke.

While Marxism has been an outstanding failure, its more successful modern counterparts have failed to convert everyone to secularism. Democracy is desired, but is hardly inspirational, and there’s no need to travel to China to hear complaints about excessive materialism, selfishness and shallowness. In less restrictive nations, praise for freedom is often matched with complaints about the tyranny of the media, the government and society in general.

Relatively few people seem to make prosperity serve spiritual ends. Industrialisation and secularisation have come together, mostly, as inseparable elements of the turn from the transcendental to the worldly. The modern package of high consumption and individual freedom appears irresistible, even if the loss of old ways is sometimes regretted.

But the facts do not support the case for permanent radical secularity. While religion is down in many parts of the world, it is hardly out. In many countries, industrialisation and prosperity seem to nourish Islam. Even Christianity, the religion first threatened by industrialisation and urbanisation, is not doing badly outside of increasingly atheistic Europe. In China, the lamentations over the loss of a moral compass should be set against the rapid growth of indigenous and imported spiritual teachings. The new middle class there seems to be particularly enthusiastic.

More fundamentally, questions of religion and morality are questions of human nature. How strong and how universal is the desire to find something that is higher and more certain than anything offered by the physical world?

The answers are not changed by the onset of industrialisation. Religious practices organised around old economic patterns, social relations and folk beliefs will wither away, but that decline could be followed by the growth of spiritual organisations and the development of moral standards which fit with urbanised, industrialised, societies. In the words of a Chinese investment banker, “The desire to make sense of life doesn’t go away just because I’m rich”. He has been spending more time at a Buddhist temple.