Article

Culture

Economics

Ethics

Sustainability

3 January 2025

9 min read

Acquisitiveness is the key modern vice

When it comes to consumption, we keep our ethics on a lead.

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

a hand hold a black payment card that reads 'buy'.

Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.

“Sell-out!” When I arrived in Seattle around the turn of the century, I was too tardy and too scrupulously Christian to make much of what was left of the fading grunge scene. Still, I had arrived in time to fumble my way through various university dorm room arguments with more musically astute peers about when this or that band had sold out, when they abandoned the authentic homemade purity of their sound for the greater financial rewards of mainstream pop. These bands still traded on their image as rebels and outsiders, but we all knew it was a pose. Even so, we sympathised. Who wouldn’t be tempted by selling-out if the alternative was poverty and virtuous obscurity?

I have been thinking about those conversations recently, not just because Nirvana T-shirts suddenly seem to be everywhere again, but because the other form of ambient idealism circulating in Seattle at that time, techno-utopianism, seems to have reached the end of its own version of selling out. In my decade in Seattle, I learned to scoff at those who didn’t embrace new technologies, dutifully parroting the slogan, “Information wants to be free!” The hackers of my generation had founded companies which were going to remake the corporate world. Many of my friends from university went to work for them. They were excited about building exciting new tools at lower costs, while doing it all with a social conscience. The bosses of these companies were rock stars in T-shirts and jeans, changing the world.

Two decades later, few of us are happy with the world they’ve built. The professions threatened by their innovations started with music and journalism and have now moved on to just about anything that an AI can imitate. Many of those bosses are still in T-shirts and jeans, still pretending to be outsiders, even as their wealth has piled into unimaginable sums. Their continual need for more has led many of them to decide that a social conscience is too expensive a liability to retain. They prioritise profits and share prices above employee well-being and social cohesion. Some demur from taking stands against authoritarian politicians, pretending that such neutrality is a matter of principle and not economic self-interest. Others openly egg on our broken politics, eager to snatch still more spoils from their demise.

What has gone wrong? As an ethicist, my temptation always is to say that if only these bosses were better advised, reminded of the responsibilities of their power, things could change. What is a skilled ethicist if not someone whose rhetoric and erudition can move the hearts of the mighty?

There is one immovable object that all his ethical demolition work could not shift. His king had palaces to build, heretic German princes to bring to heel, and an ancestral homeland to recapture.

At the advent of European colonialism, there was perhaps no more skilled or erudite moral theologian than Francisco de Vitoria. After taking the premiere professorship at the best university in Spain, what was becoming the richest state in Europe, he pioneered legal and ethical theories which reverberate in international and human rights law today. There were few more incisive critics of the self-deceptive rationalisations of his contemporaries and few better placed to have the ear of one of the most powerful rulers of the age, the king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V.

Today Vitoria is often pointed to as a prophet, someone who drew on his theological expertise and rhetorical acumen to tear apart Spanish justifications for their growing overseas empire. This reputation largely rests on his On the American Indians, a speech he gave in response to the horrific reports of “bloody massacres and of innocent individuals pillaged of their possessions and dominions” which were filtering back to Spain. In it Vitoria does indeed dismantle dozens of quasi-legal entitlements to which the Spanish appealed to justify these actions. By the time he reaches the end of the speech he even seems to be contemplating Spain abandoning the Americas. He says, “The conclusion of this whole dispute appears to be this: that if all these titles were inapplicable…the whole Indian expedition and trade would cease”.

However, when he turns to acknowledging the financial implications of this, he allows that it “would mean a huge loss to the royal exchequer, which would be intolerable.” Here Vitoria concedes that there is one immovable object that all his ethical demolition work could not shift. His king had palaces to build, heretic German princes to bring to heel, and an ancestral homeland to recapture from the French. Money was needed for Charles to play his role as a king among kings, and no ethical quibbles about evil deeds carried out far away could be allowed to impede its flow. After this admission Vitoria sputters to a conclusion with a few unworkable and naive suggestions about how to at least make colonialism marginally less terrible.

If there is a historical parable calculated to drive an ethicist to despair this is it. It shows ethical reflection for what it all too often is, an ineffectual expression of moral anxieties we air and then largely ignore. Our institutions, whether nation-states or companies, make a show of acting ethically, but few of us are fooled. It is a pose. The sorts of ‘ethics’ practised by countries and corporations are strictly those which aren’t a serious threat to the appetites of their leaders for more wealth, power, and security. Like Charles V, they too have peers among whom it is intolerable to contemplate losing status.

These priorities are reflected even among those of us with less stratospheric power or wealth. Many of us worry about the origins of our food, our clothes, and our cheap electronics, having heard stories of labourers spending long hours in fields or cramped sweatshops. We may even buy Fairtrade as a response, but only if the price isn’t too high and if this ‘ethical consumption’ doesn’t mean giving up our middle-class lifestyle.

The ‘ethics’ of our consumption are kept on a convenient lead. They are allowed to nibble around the edges of our consciences, but never to tear into the heart of the way we inhabit the world.

In his work, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that the sorts of goods we pursue can be lumped into two broad categories, goods of effectiveness and goods of excellence. The former are the things like wealth, power, and fame, which can be conferred and even sometimes transferred and which bear little relation to the characters of the people involved. The latter are the sorts of skills and performances, the virtues and virtuosities, which people attain through long and disciplined development.

For MacIntyre, both kinds of goods are necessary, but it matters a great deal which one gets priority. In a society which prioritises goods of effectiveness – such as Vitoria’s, but also, for MacIntyre, most modern societies as well –procedural justice reigns supreme. As long as we didn’t break any rules in getting our money and status or, for that matter, our exciting new clothes or smart speakers, we are in the clear. The problem, as Vitoria’s case demonstrates, is that in such societies even this minimal kind of justice cannot be allowed to block the flow of wealth. So procedural justice winds up being a tamed tiger in the service of the powerful. It is let out of its cage only when convenient – typically to demonise the failings of others. This is not just true of billionaires and politicians. Those of us who are western, middle-class consumers play this game too. The ‘ethics’ of our consumption are kept on a convenient lead. They are allowed to nibble around the edges of our consciences, but never to tear into the heart of the way we inhabit the world.

What would it mean to prioritise goods of excellence? This is one of those questions MacIntyre poses, but does not answer, because he is convinced that in each society it would look different. Each community would need to begin by wrestling with what kinds of people they should be, what excellences they can and should pursue within their communities, and what virtues should be emphasised. Only then should they move on to think about what sorts of wealth or power are necessary to achieve these. Still, it can be frustrating that MacIntyre does not lay out his preferred programme. He offers no ready-made blueprint for a just society.

Of course, neither did Jesus when he counseled his disciples to seek first the kingdom of God, telling them that if they did so the necessities of life, food, drink, and clothes, would be provided. What Jesus meant by the kingdom of God is elusive, now and not yet, hidden and revealed in parable and aphorism. What it was not, however, is clear. It was not a kingdom founded on acquiring earthly power and wealth. In fact, much of the teaching of the gospels can be boiled down to Jesus’ warning about the dangers of prioritising the goods of effectiveness (“Where your treasure is there your heart will be also”, “One thing you lack. Go sell everything you have and give to the poor”, “The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them. Not so with you”, “Man does not live on bread alone”, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?”) and urging his disciples to embrace the goods of excellence that constitute the kingdom of God.

Understood this way, the reason it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom is that the hunger for riches, wealth, and fame pulls those enamoured with goods of effectiveness away from true fulfillment. There are always more houses to own, new neighbours to impress, and new areas to conquer. Acquisitiveness, MacIntyre reminds his readers, is the characteristic vice of modernity. That many of us, from billionaires down to underpaid academics, habitually think that what is missing from our life is a little more money or fame, is evidence that he’s right.

For Jesus, virtuous obscurity and poverty were preferable to fame. We remember this at every nativity play when we acknowledge that the best God could manage for witnesses to the divine arrival was a hard scrabble group of animal herders and a few foreign astrologers. It is not that Jesus refused to use his abilities or hid away from public notice. However, the public he chose to act among was nestled in a corner of a corner of the empire, far from the rewards offered by the cultured salons of Roman power and privilege. In two of the gospels, Jesus is tempted to sell out. He is offered unimaginable fame and power at the outset of his ministry. He forcefully rejects it. For Jesus, an itinerant life spent ministering to fishermen and farmers was enough.

What would it look like for us to embrace Jesus’s priorities? A place to start would be actually listening to Jesus about practices such as fasting, praying, and the almsgiving. Each of these is an act of resistance against the continual appetite for more and a testimony to an economy of grace that exists beyond all human economies. We also could try preaching in a way that takes seriously the admonitions of Jesus. I have heard numerous sermons about the rich young ruler which include an extended caveat on how maybe it was important for him to sell his possessions, but that doesn’t mean we have to. Maybe not, but shouldn’t those of us who call ourselves Christians, at least be open to God having that radical a call on our life? If our ethics and our faith are not allowed to ask these questions of us, if we have sold out in such a way that the real possibility of them radically disrupting our lives is intolerable to our imagination, what good are they?

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Molly Worthen on the charismatic leaders of America's cosmic drama

The plots and plotters that hold us spellbound

Nick Jones

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

Viewed from behind, Trump raises a fist.

Trump on the stump.

White House via Wikimedia Commons.

What happens when Americans lose faith in their religious institutions—and politicians fill the void? In Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, Molly Worthen sweeping history helps us understand the forces that create leaders and hold their followers captive.

Everyone feels it. Cultural and political life in America has become unrecognizable and strange. Firebrands and would-be sages have taken the place of reasonable and responsible leaders. Nuanced debates have given way to the smug confidence of yard signs. Worthen asks just how did we get here?

Worthen, a historian argues that we will understand the present moment if we learn the story of charisma in America. From the Puritans and Andrew Jackson to Black nationalists and Donald Trump, the saga of American charisma stars figures who possess a dangerous and alluring power to move crowds. They invite followers into a cosmic drama that fulfils hopes and rectifies grievances—and these charismatic leaders insist that they alone plot the way.

Author and historian Tom Holland loved this book.

“The great story of charisma in American history, from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to MAGA, has never been more thrillingly told, never more learnedly explicated.”

In this extract, entitled Plotlines, Worthen introduces her four categories of charismatic leader: Prophets. Conquerors, Agitators, and Gurus.

Plotlines

Over the past several years, whenever I told friends or family that I was writing a book about charisma, they responded with a reasonable question. Which charismatic figures would I include? They peppered me with suggestions: What about Elvis Presley, or Dolly Parton? Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali? Surely I had to say something about Taylor Swift, right?

None of these fascinating people appears in this book. As you read it, you will probably think of a dozen others whom you wish I had included, and I’m sure you’ll have a point. I have mostly stuck to individuals who worked to build a movement in organized religion or politics, rather than musicians, artists, or athletes. Even within the spheres of religion and politics, I’ve been selective in order to craft a manageable story and bring into focus the patterns and transformations of charismatic leadership over the course of American history.

Sometimes this is an inspiring story, because charismatic leaders often turn up—and people decide to follow—out of a desperate response to alienation and injustice. People in anguish seek a savior. Yet charisma has no fixed moral standing. It can carve a path to freedom or to enslavement; it can lead people to embrace the rule of law or to sneer at it. Charisma causes problems for democracy as well as for authoritarian regimes. Without a sustained analysis of charisma over the long haul of American history since European settlement began, we are doomed to bumble along, blandly observing that ordinary people declare many allegiances that seem to contradict their own material interests and sabotage democracy—but never understanding why.

Over the past four centuries, five types of charismatic leaders have surged to dominance, each offering a variation on the great paradox, a different way for followers to hand over control while feeling liberated. I use these categories both to classify leaders and their movements, and to chart historical change: each type reacts to the type that came before, and responds to the pressures and anxieties of its own era. Like all typologies, this one maps imperfectly onto real people. Almost no one is a “pure” example of these categories, and some leaders are interesting precisely because they react against their age’s dominant type. But these categories have compelled even leaders who defied easy labels—that’s most of them—to respond to the ascendant charismatic style of their age.

The Prophets take us from the end of the Middle Ages into something beginning to resemble our own world. They drew on ancient patterns of contact with the divine to challenge authorities and captivate followers with the terror and ecstasy of God’s presence. They hewed close to tradition, operating in a time when Old World strictures still constrained life in the New World rather tightly. But some used those traditions to undermine reigning institutions, whether by violent rebellion or illicit gatherings—and so provoked a backlash. If the Prophets conceived of freedom in terms of divine salvation, they often harnessed mystical power for this-worldly ends. Usually this meant dismantling any structure that stood in God’s way.

The Prophets were, essentially, destroyers. In their wake they provoked an age of builders.

The Conquerors rose to prominence in the early nineteenth century—an age of mythology, mass media, and frontier enthusiasm in the European American imagination. They swung away from the age of the Prophets, who had so much to say about how powerless humans are.

Some of the Conquerors wielded military power, but all of them pursued what we might call metaphysical conquest. They fought to control spiritual forces. As the predestinarian Puritanism of earlier generations lost its appeal, more people placed an almost fundamentalist faith in the power of free will. It was tempting to think of spiritual forces—perhaps even the Holy Spirit— as a kind of technology, ready for manipulation. The stakes in these campaigns were high at a time when new advances in science impinged on everyday life. Waves of immigration made the country more religiously and ethnically diverse. Americans felt both freer and yet more confined than ever before.

The Agitators gained sway at the turn of the twentieth century, protesting modernity as a raw deal and democracy as tyranny in disguise. The Conquerors had, overall, expanded government authority over Americans’ lives and advanced a golden idea of progress. Now the pendulum swung back toward calls for destruction. The Agitators found a market for attacking the state and denouncing so-called progress as a lie. They defined themselves as outsiders whether they were or not, and discovered that gaining material power does not mean that one must stop telling a story of exile and affliction. This proved to be an important lesson in an age of world war and economic disaster: global crises have a way of transfiguring an outcast dissenter into a credible threat tot he standing order. Meanwhile, Christians grew wilder in their displays of New Testament charisma—because, paradoxically, it was easier to grapple with what Max Weber called the “iron cage” of modernity by embracing ever more outlandish signs of divine power.

The Experts were, on the face of things, the Agitators’ opposite in charismatic style. They were builders. In the wake of World War II, they capitalized on a backlash against the nightmare years of fascist demagogues, embraced the zenith of traditional institutions’ authority across Western culture and politics, and nurtured Americans’ faith in the power of technology and bureaucracy to solve large-scale problems.

They claimed the mantle of reason and procedure and did their best to relegate the political or religious clout of charisma to the distant past or primitive cultures.

But in fact, the three decades after World War II witnessed an explosion of religious revival in America—led by Christians who spoke in tongues, looked for the end times, and claimed to heal through the power of the Spirit. Even in the domain of credentialed and supposedly secular healing, the line between medicine and spirituality grew fuzzier. These years were the Experts’ apogee of cultural prestige, but Americans’ long- standing ambivalence about intellectual elites persisted. The most successful leaders capitalized on those mixed feelings. They nursed the tension between the Cold War celebration of science and freedom and, on the other hand, the lurking sense that technological leaps obscured eternal truths and needed the organizing power of a good story.

By the end of the twentieth century, as Americans lost faith in established media, churches, government, and nearly every other bulwark of modern society, the destructive strain of charismatic leadership re-surfaced in the form of the Gurus: preachers of self-actualization and get-enlightened-quick schemes, promoting God’s new temp job as personal assistant. Old-fashioned Pentecostal revival persisted too, but its leaders struggled to prevent the culture wars from capturing the Holy Spirit.

The Gurus looked, at first glance, like the Prophets and the Agitators. But in the generations since those earlier eras, it had become harder to pay obeisance to tradition—which was just fine, since the erosion of institutions had weakened traditions anyway, and opened a path for Gurus to achieve more influence than their destructive predecessors. Religious and philosophical tradition, in the hands of the Gurus, was no longer a firm guide but a palette for painting illusions of independence. Sometimes they used it to depict a new reality impervious to fact-checkers.

“Guru,” which means “remover of darkness” in Sanskrit, was originally a religious term. But in the third decade of the twenty-first century, the most prominent guru in the country was a businessman named Donald Trump. Trump was not, personally, a paragon of conventional religious devotion. Yet his political career depended on a hunger among his most dedicated supporters that can only be called spiritual. Like so many relationships between charismatic leaders and their followers, it stumped and angered those on the outside. Against the backdrop of the American charismatic tradition, however, his success makes perfect sense.

How, then, did early modern mystics and Puritan heretics who heard the voice of the Holy Spirit give way to devotees at a modern presidential rally, jostling toward the candidate iPhone-first, praying for a selfie? By the early twenty-first century, most religious institutions in the West had declined into husks of their former authority—at least by the usual measures. Today commentators turn more than ever to materialist explanations for political dysfunction, polarization, and the culture’s general crisis of confidence. They cite growing social inequality, impassable disagreements on policy, persistent racism and xenophobia, evil automated forces lurking on the internet. All true—yet all insufficient accounts. If we define the religious impulse as a hunger for transcendent meaning and a reflex to worship, then it is a human instinct only slightly less basic than the need for food and shelter, and Americans are no less religious than they have ever been. They will always find a way to satisfy these desires, even if charisma carries them down strange and costly paths.

Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, Penguin Random House, 2025.