Max and the anti-vaxxers
In 1904, the sociologist Max Weber traveled across the United States, loved what he saw and wrote about it. In return, America became a fan of Max Weber’s writings long before his homeland Germany. His most famous book? “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” a product of his American field trip, in which he comes to the conclusion that Lutherans and Calvinists are better entrepreneurs than Catholics. The latter, according to Weber, were stubbornly resisting modernity and mired in medieval traditions and rituals. And yes, you guessed right, Weber wasn’t Catholic. But half of Germany was and that’s probably why his book didn’t fly off the shelves over there.
Weber was in awe of America’s many “voluntaristic sects.” He saw them operating as social and economic networks, which, due to their members’ Protestant work ethic, were thriving in a capitalist society. There was nothing voluntary or progressive about the Protestant Church in Imperial Germany where Weber came from. It was a quasi-governmental agency, always in line with the Kaiser’s agenda and just as authoritarian and top-down as the Prussian military. Despite all his enthusiasm for the New World, there were a few things that struck Weber as odd — “Christian Science” being one of them, still new at the time and teaching that diseases were mental errors that could be healed by reading the right books. Weber, however, wasn’t fazed by outliers and predicted authoritatively (as German professors tend to do to this day) that these pockets of superstition would be swept away by cultural rationalization, secularization, and bureaucratization. This, after all, was his theory of Western society where scientific understanding leads to “disenchantment” of the world and a society that no longer needs belief systems or mythical explanations.
Fast forward to 2021 and Weber would be blown away by the anti-science attitude of so many Americans who prefer to stay in their “enchanted garden full of magic and wonders”. Earlier this year in a study by the Pew Research Center, 45 percent of white evangelical Protestants said they would not get vaccinated against COVID making them one of the least likely demographic groups to do so. Immunity comes from God and only infidels or godless communists need vaccines — this form of Christian science fiction was on full display during recent interviews at Trump events and the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. Interestingly, in the same Pew study, opposition against vaccination was only 22 percent among Catholics, who Weber in 1904 considered to be backwards and opposed to modernity. Something must have changed since then, or in other words, who is in the Middle Ages now?
Weber never made it to Minnesota when he crisscrossed the Midwest and the East Coast by train. If he visited today, he’d probably end up in a car on Interstate Hwy. 35 or Hwy. 52 staring with disbelief at those giant roadside billboards. He might still be ok with the many signs insisting in huge letters that Jesus is alive “beyond reasonable doubt” and view them as clever attempts by his beloved Protestant sects to network with the legal community. But I bet somewhere down the road he will give up and throw his claim out the window that Enlightenment in Western societies is unstoppable. That will happen at the latest when he is driving by the billboards that spew anti-science propaganda — against evolution, which was already widely accepted at his time, or against vaccines, which would have saved his life. Max Weber was one of 50 million victims that died during the 1918 influenza epidemic, also known as Spanish flu. He was only 56 years old — most likely with many famous books still in him.
Henning Schroeder is a former vice provost and dean of graduate education at the University of Minnesota and currently teaches in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch. His email address is schro601@umn.edu and his Twitter handle is @HenningSchroed1.
An earlier version of this article was published in MinnPost.
