“In Saint Petersburg?” she prompts.
“Yes.” He takes a drink of wine, and clears his throat. “What made you choose your thesis subject?” he asks. A smile, but still: the clear feeling of steering her away. He has European table manners, she realizes. Fork in his left hand, knife in his right. It makes the way she shifts her cutlery between hands feel clumsy, American, young.
“I wanted to learn more about how we internalize capitalism,” she says, allowing the shift in topic. “Protestantism was crucial for that, how it elevated labor.”
“And what have you found?”
“Well, it makes capitalism intimate for us, those religious roots.”
“How so?”
“I mean, when we think work gives us purpose and meaning, it drives us in a way that money alone never would. Capital and labor dictate our lives, become the ways we understand ourselves as valuable.”
“Do you not find purpose in your work, Lili?”
“I do, but it’s tricky. Think about how completely and utterly accepted it is, that we should find work we don’t just endure, butlove—nobody questions that!”
“Is a moral culture that drives us to excel such a bad thing?”
“No, but it’s an individualizing culture. Individualizing and alienating. It’s all on the lone individual to make money, make meaning, stay alive, never fall.”
Aleksandr raises an eyebrow. “And you propose what, exactly, instead? People should have everything handed to them?”
Lili makes an irritated sound. “Don’t sound so disgusted—of course not. Obviously, hard work is sometimes necessary, but we narrate it as this grand undertaking of self-actualization. That whole understanding idolizes individual agency, ignores systemic factors—laissez-faire economics, neoliberalism, ideologies that’d grind us to dirt if it meant squeezing out more profit.”
“Poor Protestants. You’re laying all of this at their feet?”
“Don’t be reductive,” Lili counters. “Weber blamed them first.”
“I hardly think he blamed them—”
“Without Luther’s vocational calling, we wouldn’t have the idea of work today as a greater purpose.”
“You’re reading Fromm, I assume?”
Lili frowns. She has a well-referenced copy ofEscape from Freedomon his dining table. “Yes,” she replies, cautious.
“You’re familiar, then, with his thoughts on an idea’s breadth of influence?”
“Yes—he thinks the influence of an idea depends on how deeply it answers our already established needs.”
“Exactly. Only if the idea answers powerful, preexisting psychological needs will it become a potent historical force, I believe was his phrase.”
“Your point?”
“You’re very set on examining consequences, rather than roots. I’m curious about what needs are being answered by this Protestant work ethic, now apparent capitalist engine of misery. That step between work as a means of confirming predestination and work as a means of secular self-actualization—there’s space there. Perhaps meeting similar needs, but not quite.”
Lili considers him. It’s a thoughtful, even nuanced take; disarming, too—how he doesn’t purport to have an answer immediately, but rather points to a question, then leaves it open for her.
“What do you think?” she asks, finally.
Aleksandr shrugs. “Fromm would say it comes down to a need for freedom or a need for belonging. A contortion to deal with the anxiety of isolation.”
Lili is about to probe further—that’s not his opinion, it’s a reference to outside thought—but their waiters return, then. Solicitous and attentive, they clear the plates, inquiring after their meal, refilling their glasses, setting down the next course.
“What about you?” Lili asks, once the staff retreat. She dips her spoon into the consommé. It’s strawberry and tomato, a disorienting combination of sweet and savory. It’s delicious. “Why finance, why all of this?”
“Ah, likely my lack of any real morals,” Aleksandr says, grinning. “A convenient fit.”
