What does it mean to say that finance is the spirit of the age? Not pennies, but a quadrillion dollars seemed to fall from heaven in the derivatives markets. These sprite-like financial products were everywhere, leaving long shadows of risk, inviting untoward volatility, forever coming undone and flying away from the underlying values to which they were once attached. But if they appeared to exist in their own spectral world, derivatives visited all manner of attachment and interdependence on hitherto far flung and disassociated items of credit and debt. Mortgages and interest rates, currency exchange and commodity prices where haunted by all manner of claims to wealth whose bodies lay elsewhere. The ascent of these markets was assured by models so perfect, that they required no regulation. Markets moved to divine algorithms whose proof lay in their very capacities of self-expansion. The acme of materialism had morphed into an effervescent tonic, an elixir to be universally imbibed, a remedy for all that once proved poisonous. This new regime of credit did not even need to be seen to be believed. It was faith-based.

But soon, those once exalted as masters of the universe fell like so many corpses of angels. High priests of the financial order like Alan Greenspan, whose every breath (the etymology of spirit) was said to move markets, confessed that he had “detected a flaw” in the animating ideas that had kept the herds a-grazing. Suddenly prophets appeared as devils in disguise among the innocents. Those evil few overtaken by excessive greed would need to be expelled from the flock. These men of confidence were leagues away from the specialists without spirit that Max Weber worried would become prisoners taken by the spread of a calculating attitude. The earlier spirit of capitalism was retrospective in that it relied upon a backward glance to account for a life well lived. Instead, those individuals possessed by financial reason would be oriented by a speculative gaze by which the future could be made actionable in the present. Rather than deferring gratification for judgment day, the measure of a person’s worth would be made a day at a time. The older pieties of a worldly asceticism by which pleasure would be saved for some final investment would be traded for portfolios constantly fondled to yield their greatest returns. The stalwart conviction that deferred gratification will assure a proper end is exchanged for a gratification in deferral by which financial gains are realized. The financial drive has all the thrills of an extreme sport. After the crash the wreckage was spirited away so the race might resume.

What was recently declared a crisis of finance has scarcely yielded its day of reckoning. While some firms are no more, millions have lost homes and employment and all are being asked to sacrifice their futures. The pursuit of blame has etherized responsibility. Accountability is reserved as a downward pressure on mass aspirations and expectations that mandates greater productivity. Public interest has been defined in terms of restoring private trusts. Finance has recovered to once again scale its dizzying heights but now with a sense of generalized disenchantment. This once occult world has been exposed, but without illumination. For all the havoc it has wrought, finance remains oddly de-materialized. It still stands apart from something designated as real in the economy. It is ethereal, incomprehensible, wasteful. It was as if the opacities of political economy could be rectified by a moral economy—the very move from which industry itself sprang. The age-old desire to sort the truly useful stuff of life from the effluvia that people can surely live without.

Moreover, the apocalyptic narratives of the financial meltdown have their mirrored image in all manner of natural and engineering disasters. Each, it is said, precipitated by an over-reliance on the very models of risk management and assessment meant to tame and master the unproductive uncertainties of nature and industry. Pre-emption is the time and the policy of financial logic, to act on opportunities so as to render their anticipation an act of making them so. But a thousand ships so launched will make for very dangerous waters indeed. As one notorious avatar of danger triumphantly proclaimed from the prow of his pre-emptive vessel, “bring it on.”

Yet if finance is the spirit of the age, this may disclose as much about what counts as spirit as it suggests what matters in finance. For what is said in tones of righteous dismissal regarding finance; namely, that it is unreal and ephemeral yes, but also that it engenders a mutuality of debt to which there is no final account, applies to many realms that are also currently being devalued, dismissed, disinvested. Is not the same thing, for example, said about the humanities, or the arts, or higher education itself for that matter? Might it not be more useful to inquire into what other kinds of debt might be derived from circumstances that flash abundance before our eyes only to say that it is not for us; that advertise the pleasures of risks for which so few are authorized to reap the benefits; or that bring so many strangers into contact so that they might proclaim what future they would value most?

Spirit as verb and noun: to carry away, to intoxicate, to breathe, to make active—might be brought to an end or realized under the sign of a finance that augurs winding up differently than where it began. The solids have been made molten, vaporized, and what was profaned can now be re-animated according to collectively-sustainable principles of motion. This sudden materialization of a spirit of association that brings the far near and the future present is a medium by which a transformative spirituality might itself be financed.

The most important item on my agenda when traveling home to “the old country” is scheduling some time with a German stylist. Not only do these visits keep me up-to-date in terms of hairstyles but they allow me to immerse myself in a wealth of “lifestyle,” “fashion,” and “wellness” magazines. Amica, Die Bunte, and Meine Freundin, to name just a few, provide a wealth of information for how their primarily-female audience can lead fuller lives. As a scholar of religion, I was thus tickled when, beginning in the 2000s, a new feature appeared alongside the usual advice on dieting, exercise, work-life-balance, and sex: spirituality.

Amica, for example, states that spirituality is not a word that refers to the allegedly dubious practices of card reading or palmistry but one that expresses a “feeling of faith beyond all religions.” This source of energy “between mind and matter” points to a dimension of our lives that, if we cultivate it, can lead to more contentment and freedom. Thus, in Amica, I can find not only the “Sex-Check” to discern whether I am more prone to wild or romantic erotic encounters but also the “Enlightenment-Check.” This test allows me to measure how far I have advanced on the path to developing my “true spiritual being.”

When I first encountered spirituality in these magazines, I suspected that its arrival in German stylist salons finally proved Max Weber right. After all, the intense individualization of “spirituality” could be understood as a prime example for the privatization and commoditization of religion in modernity. In secular societies, one could say, religion becomes so profoundly privatized and disconnected from its traditional contexts that its remnants appear open for individual and market manipulation in the form of “spirituality,” a point Jeremy Carrette and Richard King explored in their Selling Spirituality: the Silent Takeover of Religion. A prime location for the new commodity “spirituality” is the market of self-improvement products, as witnessed not only by my lifestyle magazines but also by the flurry of offerings for the “spirituality for managers,” breathing techniques for teachers, and the like. I will become a better me through developing my spiritual self. And Amica helps me to see how far I’ve come and how far I still have to go. As the new dimension of human flourishing, the spiritual makeover is promised and facilitated by a market product, namely the magazine and the places for its consumption, like my stylist’s salon. As I am waiting for my body’s transformation I can muse on the improvement of my spirit as well.

But becoming a better self is not to be understood as a private Emersonian imperative. And the workings of religion in modern societies and states are more complex than a simple privatization paradigm would make it seem. Precisely as a market commodity in the service of self-transformation, the discourse of spirituality subtly relates to ideals of citizenship, particularly in the context of makeover culture. How and where we do our shopping—or invest in transforming our homes, bodies, and spirits—determines our access to social capital. As Brenda R. Weber’s Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity showed, the ideas of self-improvement and self-transcendence are an integral part of North Atlantic cultural enfranchisement.

But let me return to my magazines. Meine Freundin Wellfit ran an article in 2009 about four women who successfully transformed their lives. The piece begins: “Finding spirituality. Loving your body again. Being free, finally.” The first portrait describes a woman who, after outwardly fulfilling work in international politics, moves to a “Tibetan-Buddhist” monastery to live and study. She founds a charity in support of “little monks,” teaches English, and helps out at the hospital. “I am happy every day to have found the life that fits me,” she says, summarizing her transformation. The second portrait presents to us a nurse who lost weight with the help of Weight Watchers, Pilates, and a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella, while the third is of a former successful lawyer who finds love with a goat-herder in an Alpine village. The last portrait tells the story of a woman who, as the child of “Turkish guest-workers,” had to break radically with her controlling parents to be freely herself and find romantic love where she wishes.

In German folk-ethnology as Chantal Munch and her colleagues Marion Gemende and Steffi Weber-Unger Rotino demonstrated in Eva ist emanzipiert, Mehmet ist ein Macho, the non-German Turkish other is profoundly linked with a sexually-restrictive Islam. It seems clear that the image of a controlling Turkish family evokes a vision of negative religion. In fact, since the 1970s, it has been a trope in German discourse about immigration to contrast the “emancipated” German against patriarchal migrant sexuality. Thus, it would be highly unlikely to find in magazines like Meine Freundin a testimony of a teacher who, based on her “spirituality,” for example, began piously wearing a veil in her classroom. Instead, in subtly playing on the trope of allegedly “traditional Islamic migrant sexuality” this portrait re-inscribes the boundary between German and migrant culture. Moving from the later to former requires a radical break with traditional (read: Islamic) origins.

For the article in Meine Freudin, spirituality is not only a central ingredient of the politics of the makeover. Rather, it also plays a subtle role in differentiating socially acceptable religion that enhances a positive transformation (Tibetan Buddhism) from unacceptable religion (the Islam of the “Turkish-guest workers”). In both functions, “spirituality” contributes to sending clear signals about what we need to do in order to be transformed into good Germans. In other words, attention to “spirituality” teaches us that the privatization of religion is only one move in its intricate dance with the modern state and society. Privatized religion’s contribution to the policing of citizenship via market forces is the other.

Waiting my turn at the stylist and reading about spiritual transformation and emancipation in Amica and Meine Freundin, I wonder: How will a woman who works in or frequents this salon, and who is also a daughter of Turkish immigrants, receive this story of emancipated sexuality? What will the other middle-class customers make of it? It seems clear to me that we who linger at the salon learn not only about the latest fashion but also take home an important lesson about what it takes to “integrate” oneself into what German newspapers call the “majority society.” Spirituality will make you free and help you become, at last, a “true” German.

Max Weber, the man who christened the spirit of capitalism, is buried in the Heidelberg Friedhof (literally, peace-field). Plots of land zoned, packaged, and sold for the dead and their material commemoration, cemeteries are repositories of spirituality as well as sites of remembrance and recreation. Cemeteries are also spaces of remarkable aesthetic diversity, as ornate and simple grave markers display epochal style, personal taste, and religious affiliation. A tall stone stele, Max Weber’s grave stands in a wooded enclave in the middle of the Heidelberg cemetery. It is situated not far from the Jewish section of the Friedhof, which predominantly houses the graves of Heidelberg’s Jews who died before the rise of the Nazis. Several of those resting there possess the surname of Marx.

The front of Weber’s gravestone bears the names of both Max and his wife Marianne. On either side of the stone are two brief epitaphs. The left side reads Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis, meaning everything temporal is only a likeness, or all that is transitory is only a metaphor. The right side declares Wir finden nimmer seinesgleichen which means we will never find another like him.

These two epitaphs nicely complicate Weber’s life. On the one side there is the great theoretician whose equal will never be found, and on the other there is the undercutting declaration that all reality is, well, theoretical.

We can be reasonably sure that the right side was chosen by Marianne to describe Max, since she believed firmly in her late husband’s greatness and worked tirelessly in the last thirty-four years of her life to ensure the posthumous publication of his life’s work. The inscription on the left side is more interesting, however, since it expresses a view rooted in German metaphysical speculation unlike the more conventional gravestone inscribed with biblical citations. Since Marianne was the one who got to choose the inscription, we can’t know whether it was Max’s choice too, but it would certainly have been a line familiar to him. In German, the phrase Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis conveys rich cultural references. It originates in Goethe’s Faust and has been incorporated in such musical compositions as Liszt’s Faust Symphony and Mahler’s Symphony No. 8.

When I first read Weber’s grave, what came to my mind was not Faust but the American version of such neo-Platonist expressions, namely Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science. Eddy’s view that matter was error worked along a similar vein, encouraging mortal humans to recognize the spiritual truths behind transitory existence in which the body was only an illusion. This conjunction of high culture and popular nineteenth-century spiritual imaginations is not entirely accidental, of course, since the spiritual was kept in play by an active circulation of theories, speculation, and doctrine that incorporated German professors, writers, and cultural theorists, as well as North American professors, innovators, and impresarios. Encompassing psychologists such as Gustav Fechner and William James, as well as Protestant-bred leaders and clergy such as Mary Baker Eddy, Elwood Worcester of Boston’s Emmanuel Movement, and the lesser-known Canadian Archbishop Frederick Du Vernet, early-twentieth-century speculation about spiritual realities was fed by intersecting streams of religious experience, philosophy, biblical study, and pioneering theorists of religion. Like Max Weber.

These thinkers continue today in their books, and as monuments to certain amalgamations of thought, culture, and biography. As material bodies, they came to a perishable end marked by the solidity of their memorials in stone, granite, or metal. A haunting reminder of religious pasts and mortal futures, cemeteries persist as zones of spiritual mixing of the dead and the living, of the Christian and the Jew, of the scholar and the saint, capable of spooking even the most disenchanted of minds.

In a sparse, basement-level room of the Unitarian Church in a small Midwestern city—let’s call it Clifton—the fifteen or so members of the Clifton sangha gather on a Wednesday evening. There is no authorized teacher, though some members have studied with Zen or Tibetan teachers. Elaine, who convenes the weekly meditation session, pulls a ten-inch bronze Buddha statue out of a cabinet and places it on a small table. She leads a short Zen chant, and the group sits in meditation facing the wall for thirty minutes, followed by a reading, then ten minutes of walking meditation. After another brief chant, the group turns toward the Buddha image and bows deeply.

O  Shariputra, form is emptiness, emptiness is form

Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form…

Across the globe, there are countless images similar to the one to which these Midwesterners bow. This one was purchased in Lhasa, Tibet, at one of the dozens of open-air vendors on the circumambulation circuit around Jokhang Temple. Pilgrims come from all over Tibet to walk or prostrate around the circuit, spinning prayer wheels and chanting mantras. During a two-week trip to China, another member of the sangha, Carl, chose this statue from hundreds of others available. The vendor tried first to offer Carl a new factory-made buddha, but he asked for one that looked older, more antique, so the vendor dutifully mussed one up a bit and brought it back the next day. Finally they settled on an older figure that, the vendor claimed, was once used in a Tibetan monastery. After the monastery was dismantled by the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution, it stayed in a devotee’s house for a few decades and then found its way to the open market. Carl wanted an “authentic” image rather than one made in a factory, one that was made for a spiritual purpose rather than just to sell to tourists.

According to the vendor, the image was crafted by an artisan over sixty years ago. If this is accurate, it would have sat in limbo when completed alongside the other bronze buddhas in the studio with scarves wrapped around their eyes. When they were installed in a temple, a monk would have performed a consecration ceremony that has been going on since before the common era in which the Buddha is invited to take up residence in the image. In the final stage of the ritual, the scarf is removed and the eyes are painted in. Then the Buddha can look out at the devotees who come and prostrate themselves before it, praying for a better rebirth in the next lifetime, alleviation of sickness, or success on exams.

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Carl’s buddha now finds its home in the basement at the Unitarian Church, where it is kept most of the time in a dark cabinet. On Wednesday evenings, Elaine brings it out, sets it on a makeshift altar and lights a stick of incense before it.

A few in the sangha admit that they think there may be a special quality to items that have had intimate interaction with advanced practitioners—a kind of spiritual “energy.” But no one in the group thinks that bowing before it will give them karmic merit, success in business ventures, material prosperity, or a better rebirth. They are happy that it is old and consecrated, but they don’t believe that the Buddha dwells in the statue. Its eyes are as blind as metal deep in the cold earth.

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The image’s status in Clifton, therefore, is somewhat demoted from the one it enjoyed in Lhasa. Before we invite Max Weber in to declare it disenchanted, though, let us note the new kinds of enchantment it picks up in its new home at the far lower elevations of the Midwestern prairie. The biblical prohibition against idolatry, and its cousin, the scientific naturalist prohibition against naively attributing conscious life to an inanimate collection of atoms and molecules, demarcate certain limitations to this sangha’s reverence toward any statue. But there are deep currents of western culture that predispose these modern Buddhists toward disillusionment with the promises of modernity, its technology, its factories and corporations that promise to manufacture happiness for the masses. An old bronze statue from Tibet embodies the imagined antithesis of the failed promises of techno-rational-consumerist modernity. Tibet, in fact, has held such a place in the western imagination for well over a century—the last bastion of pre-modern wisdom, isolated beyond the Himalayas, its society devoted to spiritual wisdom that some even today hope will save modern humanity from itself. Coming from the land of the snows gives it the charisma of the mysterious, the lost, the authentic. And authenticity, as Walter Benjamin noted, is only possible after it has been replaced by the regime of mechanically produced commodities (after which, it is itself offered as a commodity).

The charisma of the lost Other of modernity only goes so far, though. The Clifton Sangha, after all, is an educated bunch. Of the fifteen, four are college professors (two in the sciences), three are engineers, and all but two have college degrees. Most are not content with dreamy, New Age longing. And some are a bit uncomfortable bowing to a statue. But they have agreed to continue the practice, insisting to anyone who asks that this is not idolatry and that the image is entirely symbolic. This object is ultimately a piece of metal, like any other. Nevertheless, for them it has its own kind of enchantment because it silently speaks of the possibility that beneath or within atoms and molecules—and especially within the mind itself—there is a cosmic spirit, a consciousness infusing the whole of things that connects everything with everything else, a vast interconnected network of life that weaves everything together into unity and harmony, over-riding the countless fragmentations and contradictions of the modern world. Buddha-nature, says 13th century Zen master Dogen Zenji, is neither east nor west, north or south. It pervades everything—is everything.

One bit of matter is, therefore, as good as any other for representing this cosmic truth. Thus, Elaine says, we choose a bit that represents someone seeing into that truth—the Buddha sitting under the tree of enlightenment. Spirituality in this sense does not oppose materiality—it encompasses everything—but it disposes of local gods, gods of a particular culture, place, and time. The Buddha can be in everything but not one particular thing.

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When the Taliban blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan, one of the sangha members insists, Buddhists weren’t bothered at all. “They’re just pieces of stone,” he says with a shrug.

A few weeks later in my Buddhism class, I discuss the image of the Buddha and its role in various Buddhist traditions. At one point I pull a small Buddha statue out of a bag and begin to place it on the table, but it slips a bit and almost falls over, clunking heavily onto the surface. The young Thai women in the front row gasps in distress.

…form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form…

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When Carl went to Tibet, he couldn’t help feel somewhat disappointed at the amount of ritual, liturgy, image-worship, and “superstitious” practices that he witnessed. He saw no one meditating. The reverence they seemed to show for the large buddha statues in the temples disconcerted him. Many Tibetans, he concluded, practice a kind of “cultural” Buddhism. It’s just a part of their culture, so they do it. Spirituality, as Elaine, Carl, and many other Western Buddhists understand it, transcends “culture.” It is the encounter with the universal. This puts them in an ambivalent relationship to even Buddhist culture.

Many western practitioners in the twentieth century have understood Buddhism as a matter of transcending cultural conditioning. Alan Watts insisted on a distinction between the “acquired self” and “your genuine, deepest self, not the self which depends on family and conditioning, on learning and experience, or any kind of artifice” but on Buddha-nature itself—the “original face” of the famous Zen koan. For Watts, Zen requires a person to realize that the “ego, the self which he has believed himself to be, is nothing but a pattern of habits or artificial reaction.” As Buddhism has been enfolded into western spirituality, it has often operated on some version of the idea, derived largely from Romanticism and modernism, that:

within each human being there is an individuality lying in potentiality, which seeks an occasion for realization but is held in the toils of the rules, beliefs, and roles which society imposes . . . that the real state of the self is very different from the acquired baggage which institutions like families, schools, and universities impose. To be “true to oneself” means . . . discovering what is contained in the uncontaminated self, the self which has been freed from the encumbrance of accumulated knowledge, norms, and ideals handed down by previous generations.

The East Asian conception of Buddha-nature—all-pervasive and embedded in each individual—is drawn magnetically to this indigenous western notion of transcendent selfhood, sometimes intertwining indistinguishably with it. Buddhist societies in East Asia, however, have generally been decidedly non-individualistic, seeing individual selfhood as deeply embedded in and dependent on social relations. Freedom from conditioning doesn’t mean freedom from society and its influences but from past karma. Universality doesn’t always override particularity.

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The Buddha statue of the Clifton sangha, therefore, displays the antinomies of its new function in its new home. It is an undeniably cultural product of another culture, deployed to symbolize the transcendence of one’s own culture toward a universal spirituality that overcomes, yet includes, all cultures.

The space for this particular articulation of Buddhism is created by specific cultural currents in the modern West: Romantics, Idealists, Transcendentalists, and their mid-twentieth-century counter-cultural successors, all of whom emphasize exploration of the deep interior of the mind, God as an all-encompassing spirit in nature, spontaneity, creativity, and suspicion of mechanized reproduction; Protestant Christianity, which eschews idolatry, privileges texts, looks askance at priesthoods and hierarchies; Enlightenment rationalism, which promises insight into the nature of things through careful observation and thought; psychology, which encourages introspection and exploration of the mind; and global capitalism, which allows for the flow of commodities newly valued in the West, like our Buddha image, by those who can afford them.

Thus Buddhism takes on yet another incarnation, blending with the indigenous cultures of the West, the United States, the Midwest, and Clifton. Even here, though, it turns out to be one incarnation among many. For our Buddha image unexpectedly finds its own kin scattered about—down the street in a temple where Vietnamese immigrants and their children bow and pray for good grades; in the backyard garden of a house in the suburbs; on a poster on the wall of a head shop downtown. The buddhas proliferate, mingle with the local gods, invite reverent or suspicious gazes, and take unexpected places on shelves, altars, and nooks throughout North America.