HUMAN NATURE in
What’s most remarkable about the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few corporate players in each industry is how little public angst it has generated, at least in the United States, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While the labor unions’ struggles against corporate power were bitterly fought, they never attracted a majority of the workforce to their cause. Although there have also been occasional populist uprisings challenging the unbridled corporate control exercised over the economic life of society, the most recent being the Occupy Movement, with its rallying cry of the 99 percent versus the 1 percent, such outbursts have generally been few and far between and led to only mild regulatory reforms that did little to curb the concentration of power.
To some extent, the criticism was muted because these large, vertically integrated corporate enterprises succeeded in bringing ever-cheaper products and services to the market, spawned millions of jobs, and improved the standard of living of working people throughout the industrial world. There is, however, an additional and more subtle factor at play that has proven to be every bit as effective in dampening potential public opposition. The First and Second Industrial Revolutions brought with them an all-encompassing world view that legitimized the economic system by suggesting that its workings are a reflection of the way nature itself is organized and, therefore, unimpeachable.
The practice of legitimizing economic paradigms by creating grand cosmological narratives to accompany them is an age-old practice. Contemporary historians point to St. Thomas Aquinas’s description of creation as a “Great Chain of Being” during the feudal era as a good example of the process of framing a cosmology that legitimizes the existing social order. Aquinas argued that the proper workings of nature depend on a labyrinth of obligations among God’s creatures. While each creature differs in intellect and capabilities, the diversity and inequality is essential to the orderly functioning of the overall system. If all creatures were equal, St. Thomas Aquinas reasoned, than they could not act for the advantage of others. By making each creature different, God established a hierarchy of obligations in nature that, if faithfully carried out, allowed the “Creation” to flourish.
St. Thomas Aquinas’s description of God’s creation bears a striking resemblance to the way feudal society was set up: everyone’s individual survival depended on them faithfully performing their duties within a rigidly defined social hierarchy. Serfs, knights, lords, and the pope were all unequal in degree and kind but obligated to serve others by the feudal bonds of fealty. The performance of their duties according to their place on the hierarchy paid homage to the perfection of God’s creation.
The late historian Robert Hoyt of the University of Minnesota summed up the mirror relationship between the organization of feudal society and the Great Chain of Being “the basic idea that the created universe was a hierarchy, in which all created beings were assigned a proper rank and station, was congenial with the feudal notion of status within the feudal hierarchy, where every member had his proper rank with its attendant rights and duties.”
The cosmology of the Protestant Reformation that accompanied the soft proto-industrial revolution of the late medieval era performed a similar legitimizing role. Martin Luther launched a frontal attack on the Church’s notion of the Great Chain of Being, arguing that it legitimized the corrupt hierarchal rule of the Pope and the Papal Administration over the lives of the faithful. The Protestant