Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism by Kathryn Tanner

Author:Kathryn Tanner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300219036
Publisher: Yale University Press

5

Another World?

Within the financial markets that dominate the current configuration of capitalism, the future becomes of special concern because of how likely it is to differ significantly from the present in ways that will either make or break one. One might be riding high but one is very much aware that the stock market could tank in the future, taking one’s job and savings with it. Even if the future is not in one’s control, best then to prepare for it. Precisely because things are likely to change drastically and have an enormous impact on one’s fortunes, it pays to be prudent, to turn attention to the future, to anticipate what is likely to happen, and to take appropriate action now to make the best of things, come what may.

As we shall see, however, finance encourages people to approach such an anticipated difference between present and future in ways that, ironically enough, close up that difference. Its methods for dealing with the likelihood of quite impactful differences between present and future have the effect, in other words, of collapsing the present and future into one another, at least at a second-order level. One does not expect the future to be like the present, but one nevertheless expects the future to be no different from present anticipations of it. The future is quite likely to be significantly different from the present but in ways that financial instruments for dealing with that difference lead one to expect can be reliably forecast.

In order to profit from the difference between present and future, or at least to prevent it from doing any harm, one employs financial instruments that collapse the future present—that is, what the future will turn out to be—into the present future—that is, into the present view of the future.1 Confidence about the ability of such financial instruments to manage for one’s economic benefit what is likely to be a drastically different and quite impactful future depends on considering the one—the future to come—to be the equivalent of the other, the present view of the future. By virtue of such a collapse of future into present, the future one anticipates loses its capacity to surprise; the future to come simply reduces to the future it makes sense to expect given present circumstances. Those circumstances themselves become a kind of self-enclosed world, as one learns to hope for nothing more from the future than what the given world’s present limits allow, what it is reasonable to expect from within them, assuming their continuance. Present circumstances come to constrain imagination of the future, in other words, by setting a rigidly circumscribed boundary of possibility that cannot be crossed. It becomes thereby easier—as Fredric Jameson famously quipped—to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.2

Financial Focus on the Future

If circumstances were not at all in keeping with the volatile ones of finance-dominated capitalism and one expected the future to be just like the present, one would have little reason to give the future much thought.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.