The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment”. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. (p. 123)

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. London: Routledge Classics, 2001.

I have been re-reading Weber for reason other than the connection between Christianity and capitalism, however Byron’s question Can Christians be capitalists? reminded me of this rich paragraph.

Considering that Weber’s thesis puts the blame for the birth and growth of capitalism at the door of Protestantism, perhaps it is appropriate to re-turn to Protestantism (or at least Christianity) for a solution to throwing off the ‘iron cage’ before the last ton of coal is burnt and our lives are fully determined.