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hope will be realized only where there is a distinctive, favoring
historical culture. One cannot be too optimistic about the economic
development of those poor countries outside the East Asian cultural
complex.
Berger concludes by taking up the problem discussed by Joseph
Schumpeter, Daniel Bell, and Irving Kristo!' Capitalism may be an
economic success. But that gives it no credit with intellectuals, with
the best minds of capitalist society . "The insight that an enduring
human community requires a belief in its essential rightness," Ber–
ger writes, "long antedates modern social science. It is implied in the
biblical statement (Deuteronomy 8:3, quoted approvingly by Jesus)
that man does not live by bread alone, in the statement of Confucius
(Analects 12:7) to the effect that government requires food, wea–
pons, and the confidence of the people - and that it could, if neces–
sary, do without the first two but never without the last." Capitalism
is deprived of a legitimating myth: not so socialism. "The mythic
deprivation of capitalism is, very likely, grounded on the fact that
capitalism is an economic system and nothing else...." And "all
economic realities are essentially
prosaic,
as against the poetry that
inspires, moves, and converts human minds." Berger proposes no
heroic effort to add the dimension of myth to capitalism. After all,
capitalism has survived for a long time without much in the way of
myth.
It
may be able to appropriate and attach to itself other com–
mitment-producing myths (liberty? personal liberation?) . But even
without that, as long as capitalism
works-produces
a better life for
most people- it should continue to survive despite the absence of
"mythic potency."
Perhaps capitalism can survive without creating for itself the
kind of myth that keeps socialism going despite its failures. But the
sympathetic analysts of capitalism's contradictions have pointed to
other problems, to which Berger does not devote much attention, in
particular the impact of production for the market in the sphere of
cultural products, and where it turns out the most successful prod–
ucts may undermine the values - the commitments to work, disci–
pline, saving, family-which early and mature capitalism assumed
and built on. This may be a greater danger to capitalism than the
failure to develop a potent myth: it may well be the reason Japan
and the little dragons do so weI!. Their values are changing too and
largely under the impact of capitalism, but they started on this
course later, and they still have the advantage of values less desic–
cated by cultural modernity and cultural production for the market.
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