Money as a Form of Religious Life

by Keith Hart

Religion belongs to a set of terms that also includes art and science. The last, which
began as a form of knowledge opposed to religious mysticism, is now often opposed to
the arts. If science may crudely be said to be the drive to know the world objectively and
art is mainly a means of subjective self-expression, religion typically addresses both sides
of the subject-object relationship by connecting what is inside each of us to something
outside. Religion binds us to an external force; it stabilizes our meaningful interactions
with the world, providing an anchor for our volatility.

People want to make some meaningful connection between themselves as subjects and
society as an object. It helps that money, as well as being a means of separating public
and domestic life, was always the main bridge between them. Today it is the source of
our vulnerability in society and the practical symbol allowing each of us to make an
impersonal world meaningful. That is why money must be central to making society
more human. If money has separated economic spheres and fragmented human
experience, it can also join what it has divided.

It is easy to debunk religion, but to understand its social force one must enter the minds
of believers. Searching for the source of money’s power is like asking how God gets us to
believe in Him. We made God up, just as we make money up. Since all we can ever
know is the past, why would anyone accept a claim to guarantee an unknowable future?
But we do, because we must — and faith is the glue sticking past and future together in
the present.

As I began writing this piece,1 a blog post in The Guardian (18 May 2010) asked if ‘the
markets’ are our new religion, likening them to a ‘bloodthirsty god’ in primitive religion.
Financial markets are the outcome of thousands of independent decisions, but the media
often speak of them as a single all-knowing entity. Almost a decade earlier, Thomas
Frank (2001) published One Market under God and many others have made a similar
connection. The editors of this journal approached me to comment on the possible
interest the financial crisis might hold for anthropologists of religion. That begs the question of what religion is and what money has to do with it. In what follows I will stick
to a Durkheimian line on the affinity between money and religion. Its relevance to the
current economic crisis must wait for another occasion.

Religion belongs to a set of terms that also includes art and science. It is a measure of the
declining intellectual credibility of the established religions that science, which began as
a form of knowledge opposed to religious mysticism, is now often opposed to the arts. If
science may crudely be said to be the drive to know the world objectively and art is
mainly a means of subjective self-expression, religion typically addresses both sides of
the subject-object relationship by connecting what is inside each of us to something
outside. Religion binds us to an external force; it stabilizes our meaningful interactions
with the world, providing an anchor for our volatility.

Émile Durkheim’s last book, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), is his
most neo-Kantian work. Compared with his reductionist sociological approach of the
1890s, starting with The Division of Labour in Society (1893) where consciousness is
always collective, this study of religion conforms more closely to my definition above.
He divided experience into the known and the unknown. What we know well is everyday
life, the mundane features of our routines, and we know it as individuals trapped in a sort
of private busy-ness. But this life is subject to larger forces whose origin we do not know,
to natural disasters, social revolutions and, above all, death. We desperately wish to
influence these unknown causes of our fate which we recognize as being both individual
and collective in their impact. At the very least we would like to feel they were less
uncertain and to establish a connection with them. For Durkheim, religion was the
organized attempt to bridge the gap between the known and the unknown in our lives,
between a profane world of ordinary experience and a sacred, extraordinary world
located outside that experience. What is ultimately unknown to us is our collective being
in society. Through ritual we worship our unrealized powers of shared existence, society,
and call it God. Society lies within each of us as well as outside. The chaos of everyday
life attains some stability to the degree that it is informed by beliefs representing the
social facts of a shared collective existence. Rituals instil these collective representations
in each of us.

Assisting with the publication of Roy Rappaport’s Ritual and Religion in the Making of
Humanity (1999) sharpened my appreciation of Durkheim’s perspective, since the book is
an extended reflection on ritual as the ground where religion is made. Rappaport’s own definition starts from an emphasis on formality, invariance and tradition to build an
analysis of ritual which, for comprehensiveness and consistency, has no parallel in the
literature. The project of achieving our potential to be collectively human is, in a sense,
barely begun. It is entailed, however, in our origin as a species, according to him in the
discovery of language and with it religion. Religion, which is constantly being made and
remade through ritual, is how we get in touch with the wholeness of things (‘holiness’).
Human society has a precarious unity defined by our common occupation of this planet.
We must now assume responsibility for the stewardship of life as a whole. Religion is
indispensable to that task; hence the echoes of la vie religieuse. Rappaport considered
money to be a false religion, preferring ecology to economics as the scientific ground for
a new world religion. I will suggest that the religious potential of money could be
positive, but it is still the opium of the people.

Money was traditionally impersonal so that it could retain its value when it moved
between people who might not even know each other. It was then an instrument detached
from the person who uses it. The expansion of trade often depended on this objectivity of
the medium of exchange and economists have long debated whether money’s value
derives from its being a scarce commodity or from the guarantees made by states that
issued it (Hart 1986). Bank credit has always been more directly personal, being linked to
the trustworthiness of individuals and, in the case of paper instruments like cheques,
issued by them. The idea that transactions involving money are essentially amoral comes
from its objective form; but until recently, even in societies using impersonal money, the
bulk of economic life was carried out by people who knew each other and could
discriminate between individuals on that basis.

For Karl Polanyi (1944), impersonal markets and money only recently displaced more
humane institutions from the social organization of economy. These were society’s way
of ensuring material provisioning for its members and they subjected exchange to moral
(personal and social) considerations. The self-regulating market dehumanized exchange.
This would be bad enough when limited to what people make, like hats and shoes; but the
market principle was extended to the conditions of our collective existence and these are
not made by human design. Polanyi considered that Nature, Society (in the form of
money) and Humanity had been reduced to the ‘fictitious commodities’ of land, capital
and labour. Impersonal markets thus threaten human survival itself and inevitably provoke a social reaction in the form of people’s attempts to restore a measure of control
over their lives.

All agrarian civilizations tried to keep markets and money in check, since power came
from the landed property of an aristocratic military caste who feared that markets might
undermine their control over society (Hann and Hart 2009). This dialectic of local and
global economy existed long before we came to perceive the modern world that way.
Socialists (and most anthropologists) draw their ideas implicitly from the pre-industrial
apologists for landed rule such as Aristotle. But if we demonize money and markets, we
will be unable to grasp their potential for making a better world.

After the industrial revolution, the wage labour system led to an attempt to separate the
spheres in which paid and unpaid work predominated. One is ideally objective and
impersonal, specialized and calculated; the other is subjective and personal, diffuse,
based on long-term interdependence. The first is a zone of infinite scope where things,
and increasingly human creativity, are bought and sold for money, the market. The
second is a protected sphere of domestic life, where intimate personal relations hold
sway, home. The market is unbounded and, in a sense, unknowable, whereas the bounds
of domestic life are known only too well. The result is a heightened sense of division
between an outside world where our humanity feels swamped and a precarious zone of
protected personality at home. This duality is the moral and practical foundation of
capitalist society (Hart 2005).

The economists’ insistence on the autonomy of market logic cannot disguise the fact that
market relations have a personal and social component, particularly when human
creativity is bought and sold. Human work is not an object separable from the person
performing it, so people must be taught to submit to the impersonal disciplines of the
workplace. The war to impose these rules has never been completely won. So, just as
money is intrinsic to the home economy, personality remains intrinsic to the workplace;
and the cultural effort required to keep the two spheres conceptually separate is huge.

Oswald Spengler (1918) argued that the power of number and money to separate and
depersonalize was even more fundamental. For the Greeks, number was magnitude, the
essence of all things perceptible to the senses. Mathematics for them was thus concerned
with measurement in the here and now. All this changed with Descartes whose new
number-idea was function–a world of relations between points in abstract space. Now a passionate Faustian tendency towards the infinite took hold, married to abstract
mathematical forms that freed themselves from concrete reality the better to control it. In
economic life, a parallel shift took place from thinking in terms of goods to thinking in
terms of money. When a businessman signs a piece of paper to mobilize remote forces,
this gesture stands in an abstract relationship to the power of labour and machinery, only
taking the form of money numbers in a retrospective accountancy process. Thinking in
money generates money. It turns the world into subjects and objects– a few executives
and those who follow their orders. Each individual either joins the money force or is its
victim as part of a mass.

People want to make some meaningful connection between themselves as subjects and
society as an object. It helps that money, as well as being a means of separating public
and domestic life, was always the main bridge between them. Today it is the source of
our vulnerability in society and the practical symbol allowing each of us to make an
impersonal world meaningful. That is why money must be central to any attempt to
humanize society. If money has indeed separated economic spheres and fragmented
human experience, it can also join together what it has divided.

Like Spengler, the classical economists focused on the commodity’s higher-order ability
to enter into abstract relations of exchange with other commodities through money
(quantity) rather than on its concrete value in use (quality). But the commodity remains
something useful and in that use lies its concrete realization. The reality of markets is not
just universal abstraction, but this mutual determination of the abstract and the concrete.
If you have some money, there is almost no limit to what you can do with it, but, as soon
as you buy something, the act of payment lends concrete finality to your choice. Money’s
significance thus lies in the synthesis it promotes of impersonal abstraction and personal
meaning, objectification and subjectivity, analytical reason and synthetic narrative. Its
social power comes from the fluency of its mediation between infinite potential and finite
determination.

We need to understand better how we build the infrastructures of collective existence,
money among them. How do meanings come to be shared and memory to transcend the
minutiae of personal experience? Memory played an important part in John Locke’s
philosophy of money (Caffentzis 1989). For him a person, by performing labour on the
things given to us in common by nature, made them his own. But, to sustain a claim on
his property through time, that person has to remain the same; and personal identity depends on consciousness. Property must endure in order to be property and that depends
on memory. Money thus expands the capacity of individuals to stabilize their own
personal identity by holding something durable that embodies the desires and wealth of
all the other members of society. Money is a ‘memory bank’ (Hart 2000), a store
allowing individuals to keep track of those exchanges they wish to calculate and a source
of memory for the community. One of money’s chief functions is remembering.

Economic history is dialectical. Most people become quite anxious when they depend on
impersonal and anonymous institutions. This is an immense force for reversing the
historical pattern of alienation on which the modern economy has been built. How we
combine the personal and impersonal aspects of money has much in common with
religion. Because our ephemeral economic transactions depend on using money, it seems
to be more stable than the relations it expresses (Simmel 1900). Money may thus be
conceived of as durable ground on which to stand, anchoring identity in a collective
memory whose concrete symbol is money; or as the outcome of a more creative process
where we each generate the personal credit linking us to society. When it is seen to be
what each of us makes of it, we may be ready at last to dethrone money as the archaic
God of capitalism it has become (Frank 2001).

Humanity’s interdependence in a global economy made by markets and money has lately
been increased by a digital revolution in communications whose symbol is the internet
(Hart 2000, 2005). Time and distance have been shortened to an unprecedented degree.
We need to understand this virtual world of abstraction in order to make meaningful
connection with it from the perspective of our everyday lives. From having been an
object produced by remote authorities, money is becoming more obviously a subjective
expression of our own will; and this development is mirrored in the shift from ‘real’ to
‘virtual’ money. It is now possible to attach a lot of information about individuals to
transactions at distance. The trend is thus to restore personal identity to impersonal
contracts, not least in the market for credit/debt.

Of course, powerful organizations have access to huge processors with which to
manipulate an often unknowing public; and rich individuals have always experienced
markets and money as personalities in their own right. But for many people these
developments have introduced new conditions of engagement with the impersonal
economy. The idea is slowly taking root that society is less an oppressive structure out
there and more a subjective capacity that allows each of us to learn how to manage our relations with others. Money symbolizes this shift. It once took the form of objects
outside ourselves of which we had a greater need than the available supply; but now it is
increasingly manifested as digitized transfers mediated by plastic cards and telephone
wires, thereby altering the notions of economic agency that we bring to participation in
markets. Cheap information is undermining the assumptions that supported mass
production and consumption for a century.

Economic anthropology should aim to show that the numbers on people’s financial
statements, bills, receipts and transaction records constitute a way of summarizing their
relations with society at a given time. The next step is to show where these numbers
come from and how they might serve in building a viable personal economy. When
individuals are able to take responsibility for their own economic actions, they will
understand better the social forces impinging on their lives. Then it will become more
obvious how and why ruling institutions need to be reformed for all our sakes. If credit
cards could be seen as a step towards greater humanism in economy, this also entails
increased dependence on the impersonal organization of governments and corporations,
on impersonal abstraction of the sort associated with computing operations and on the
need for impersonal standards and social guarantees for contractual exchange. Once we
accept that money is a way of keeping track of the complex social networks that we each
generate, it could take a wide variety of forms compatible with both personal agency and
collective association at any level of society. It is up to us to build them.

Simmel (1900) argued that money is the symbol of our human potential to make world
society. We all need to participate in global markets of infinite scope, using international
moneys-of-account, electronic payment systems of various kinds or even direct barter via
the internet. We must develop more effective impersonal institutions (‘the state’) at the
level of world society as well as below. Money’s ability to sustain local meaning and
universal connection at the same time is an indispensable means to that end. Like society
itself, money is always both personal and impersonal.

So, if some parallels may be drawn between money and religion, can we apply
Durkheim’s analytical framework to money? Before doing so, we should make a
distinction between those who participate in what Spengler called “the money force” and
the masses who don’t, its victims. The line between these classes is shifting as a result of the digital revolution, but a crude bipolar model must do for now. We could label them
the ‘makers’ and the ‘takers’ of money. An analysis of money rituals lies beyond the
scope of this comment, but I can say something about the nature of belief in money and
how what is known (the everyday) and what is unknown (the world) are broadly
articulated by the two classes.

The money-makers, at least since Frank Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (1921),
have been able to distinguish between future threats that are calculable (risk) and those
that are not (uncertainty). Whereas to you or me a barn burning down is an unpredictable
disaster, insurance companies can assess quite closely the probability of such an event in
a given area and share the risk between those willing to pay a premium. This elementary
principle was forgotten in the three decades of the credit boom, so that the insurance giant
AIG undertook liabilities that its assets were unable to cover in the event of a crash. The
computer programs of some banks issuing mortgages could not even simulate a downturn
in housing prices.

Karen Ho’s ethnography of Wall Street (2009) shows how a spate of corporate
downsizing and mergers in the 1980s elevated ‘shareholder value’ to a primacy that it had
ever enjoyed before. Company workforces, indeed whole company towns, were
sacrificed to maintaining stock prices as high as possible. Alexandra Ouroussoff (2010)
identifies the ratings agencies as the principal source for a belief that the risk of future
losses could be known in advance and factored into share prices, whereas corporate
executives tended to be empiricists who knew that all futures are uncertain. But the
latter’s need for investment capital led them to cook their books in conformity with the
agencies’ expectations. In this climate, the investment banks came to think of themselves
as invincible and Western capitalism took an unsustainable form.

Belief in the efficiency of the ‘free market’, as propagated by an army of economists,
journalists and politicians, took hold especially in the money-maker class. Gillian Tett
(2009) tells how she was denounced as unpatriotic by leading figures in the City of
London, as well as by her employers at the Financial Times, for expressing doubts about
the soundness of the market for credit derivatives. Well-established truths, such as what
goes up always comes down in real estate markets, were forgotten in the rush for fat
salaries and bonuses. William Poundstone (2006) reminds us that three stories have long
circulated side-by-side in money-making circles: the economists’ belief that you cannot
beat the markets; another that you can do so with inside knowledge (often illegally); and one that scientific methods can guarantee steady profits from gambling on asset prices. In
any case, the rich rely heavily on personal relations for knowledge and contacts, even if
the intellectual disciplines that dominate public education invariably represent society as
being governed by impersonal forces.

There is almost no public education about money in Western schools and middle-class
parents do their best to shield their children from direct experience of it for as long as
possible. The American economist, Paul Samuelson used to say in the introduction to his
best-selling textbook (Samuelson 1989) that 10 million New Yorkers go to sleep every
night confident that the economy will still be there the next morning; but how do they
know? In Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went (1975), J.K. Galbraith tells a story
from the 1960s about a member of Kennedy’s administration being paid off with a
directorship of a bank. After his first meeting, he was seen walking down Wall Street in a
daze, muttering “I never knew. I never knew.” What had he not known? Galbraith
surmises that he may have learned the first principle of modern banking: take money
from one party and lend it to another, then persuade both that they still have it. Perhaps
money truly is a phantom conjured up by unscrupulous wizards. In which case, most of
us would rather not know. We prefer to believe that we are standing on solid ground, that
the money we live by is real and will not go away. Failing that, we pay experts to look
after the problem and are reassured by the sound of their technical jargon. In either case,
understanding is unnecessary. That is why inflation is so upsetting: when the value of
money refuses to stand still, what else is there to rely on? Fear of the unknown leads us
into a crippling search for certainty in monetary affairs; and this is as much of an obstacle
to effective understanding as was the old-time religion it so closely resembles.

Perhaps for this reason most people are extremely tenacious of their ill-formed views of
the money system they have grown used to. I know from personal experience that they
refuse to be told that there are viable alternatives to working for wages and pensions,
such as scientific gambling or do-it-yourself trading circuits such as LETS (Hart 2000).
To win as a gambler you need a large fund and to make small bets often; but most punters
ensure that they will normally lose by trying to win a lot with a little occasionally. They
believe that the bookie or the casino must always win. Perhaps that makes it more
tolerable to sacrifice their lives to an economic system stacked against them. It is the
same with resistance to community and complementary currencies (Blanc 2010).

It is relatively easy to debunk religion, but to understand its social force one must enter
the minds of believers. Searching for the source of money’s power is like asking how
God gets us to believe in Him. Of course we made him up, just as we made and make
money up. Since all we can ever know is the past, why would anyone accept a claim to
guarantee an unknowable future? But we do, because we must — and faith is the glue
sticking past and future together in the present. Simmel (1900) made a good case for why
money can make this spurious claim. Since all the ephemeral transactions we wish to
calculate are made in terms of it, money seems to be more stable than the rest, even
though we know it is not really. The river bank seems to be solid and yet in reality it is
just slower-moving deposits thrown up by the fast-moving water. But, if we are
drowning, we settle for its presumptive stability. The physicist may have worked out
what is going on at an abstract level, but for practical purposes we do not need to know
what he knows about the movement of particles.

Given the cultural longevity of money in its present form and the powers of
indoctrination held by ruling institutions, it is not surprising that most people are initially
reluctant to embrace new approaches to finance; but the situation is psychologically
complex. On the one hand, conventional money flatters our sense of self-determination:
with some money, we can exert power over the world at will, moving from infinite
potentiality to finite determination, back and forth. On the other hand, there is another
kind of comfort in the notion that money, as presently constituted, is not in our control at
all. The fact that it embodies an exogenous force of necessity serves, in a manner
analogous to number, to generate clarity of judgment and action where otherwise things
might be frighteningly wide open. Similarly, if they issued their own currencies, people
would not only be freer, but would have greater responsibilities also.

There is a strong parallel with slavery. People feel that the monopoly claimed by national
money must be inevitable, since no-one would freely choose it. To be told that there is an
alternative we could choose makes nonsense of a lifetime’s enslavement to an
unrewarding system. We cling to what we know as the only possibility. We often talk
about wanting to be free, but we choose the illusion of freedom without its real
responsibility. This is perhaps why we prefer money not to be of our own making. We
spend it, but we never have enough of it because ‘they’ keep it scarce. This is perhaps the
underlying reason why eminently sensible schemes for do-it-yourself money get such a
poor reception. It is not enough to develop a superb design for exchange circuits
employing community currencies. People have to be sold the idea; and this involves engaging with their most cherished beliefs.

The word ‘belief’ originally meant ‘something held dear’, which is to say that exchanges
involving money entail at some level a vision of humanity bound by mutual love (Hart
1988). This is how the young Marx ends his remarkable essay on “The power of money”
in the 1844 manuscripts: “If you love without evoking love in return, i.e. if you are not
able, by the manifestation of yourself as a loving person, to make yourself a beloved
person, then your love is impotent and a misfortune” (Marx 1844). But this takes us
beyond the limits of a Durkheimian analysis.