In Praise of Failure by Costica Bradatan

Author:Costica Bradatan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Losers in the Land of Success

Calvin’s reprobate, then, is the ultimate loser—the archetype of our social failures. How we think about losers and failures today seems to be a late echo of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination—weak perhaps, but still an echo. To an extent, the connection is genealogical. Max Weber, for one, argued strongly for such a genealogy. His classic study on the relationship between the spirit of capitalism and Protestant ethics engendered by Calvin’s theology remains persuasive.

Along with our economic type, Weber suggests, we seem to have inherited from the early Calvinists an understanding of what worldly success is, and implicitly a certain way of looking on the unsuccessful. Central to all this is a commitment to productive work—all-absorbing and all-absolving work, which translates into quantifiable wealth and visible social respectability. Since work and grace are tied together, a lack of commitment to the former can only mean the absence of the latter. “Unwillingness to work is symptomatic of the lack of grace,” observes Weber.32 The social response could be unforgiving. In Puritan New England, communities of the self-proclaimed elect (“visible saints,” they called themselves) wanted nothing less than to expel the reprobate from their church. Since the “external church” contained both elect and reprobate, the former did not want to share even the same physical space with the latter. The presence of the reprobate could blemish the purity of the elect. For these people, writes Garry Wills, “the only religion recognized as authentic, as what God wills, was the Covenant of Grace, under which God’s chosen were predestined to salvation.” The others, those “not consciously saved in this way,” could not be considered “communicating members of the church.”33

More important, perhaps, than a detailed genealogy of our attitudes to failure is their morphology. Fundamentally, and despite the intervening historical distance, the early Calvinists and we late capitalists employ the same patterns of thinking. Save for some niceties of language, today’s successful relate themselves to the losers of the social and economic game not very differently from how the communities of chosen believers treated the reprobates in their midst. The same assumption of ontological damnation defines both cases: it’s who you are, and not what you do or say or think, that seals your fate.

The pattern exhibits several features: a primary need for differentiation, a good measure of self-righteousness, an obsession with purity and fear of contagion, a compulsion to exclude, a great anxiety over personal worth. Most important, in both cases there is the same postulation, through an act of societal fiat, of a group of people as “bad” human material, something the others single out and ostracize. Should our losers happen to meet Calvin’s reprobates in the street one day, the meeting would be the least eventful of encounters. They might not even notice the other group, thinking it must be their own passing reflection in some shop window.

Elect and reprobate, successful and failure are thus chained together, like those doomed to remain in a marriage where love is absent and divorce out of the question.

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