/lit/ - Literature

>Now, the desire for money, Thomas Aquinas pointed out, knows no limits, whereas all natural wealth, represented in the concrete form of food, clothing, furniture, houses, gardens, fields, has definite limits of production and consumption, fixed by the nature of the commodity and the organic needs and capacities of the user. The idea that there should be no limits upon any human function is absurd: all life exists within very narrow limits of temperature, air, water, food; and the notion that money alone, or power to command the services of other men, should be free of such definite limits is an aberration of the mind.

>In the ideal capitalist ego, the miserly hoarding of money blended with the zealous acquisition of illimitable riches, just as the abstemious habits of the monk combined with the adventurous activity of the soldier. The new capitalists deserved in large measure the title later bestowed on them, 'Merchant Adventurers'; and at an early period these conflicting yet complementary strands of inheritance came together in the order of Knights Templars, those warrior-bankers of the Middle Ages. So, too, it was in no defiance of the new capitalist spirit that the trading posts of the great Hansa towns were in fact run as monastic enclaves, under a strict military discipline.

>This combination of traits was in due course transmitted to the scientific ideology of the seventeenth century: a readiness to entertain daring hypotheses, a willingness to dismember organic complexities, while subjecting every new theoretic insight to cautious observation and experimental test. Despite their different origins and their seemingly incompatible aims, the monk, the soldier, the merchant, and the new natural philosophers or experimental scientists were more closely united than they realized.

>But at the same time capitalism, in satisfying its insatiable desire for pecuniary riches, took over and translated into its own special terms the economy of abundance that had originally been the work-and the mark of divine kingship. The actual increase in productivity brought an often happy release from the nagging constraints of natural poverty and economic backwardness; and it prompted a steadily growing revolt against the ascetic inhibitions of orthodox Christianity, which had been easy to popularize in a Time of Troubles when no tempting alternatives were available, but now seemed gratuitous and needlessly life-denying.

>The capitalist scheme of values in fact transformed five of the seven deadly sins of Christianity-pride, envy, greed, avarice, and lust-into positive social virtues, treating them as necessary incentives to all economic enterprise; while the cardinal virtues, beginning with love and humility, were rejected as 'bad for business,' except in the degree that they made the working class more docile and more amenable to cold-blooded exploitation.

technocommerical-monastic story-time with lewis mumford is just so cozy.