And now in the The New York Review of Books this adaptation (subscription required) from Marilynne Robinson’s first lecture. An interesting (and unusual) discourse, with as a starting premise: capitalism, as an economic theory at the very least misunderstood and often very well perverted, an altar worshiped upon by many and just as equally disavowed, as American as the proverbial whatever but with its historical and societal roots in a reaction against the brutality of the Poor Laws and conditions of pre-Modern England (and Europe) and the liberality borne out of an understanding of Scripture, based on love and generosity, dating from Wycliff.
This is me speaking here, wondering out loud: I wonder whether it was the secularisation of this liberal thought in the 18th century, and an intellectualisation that single mindedly focused on the useful and forgot about things like charity and love, that paved the way for, firstly, a brutal capitalism and then the backlash of theoretical Marxism.