Speed Limits, by Mark C. Taylor

Fast food. Fast Internet. Fast lives. Western culture in the 21st century is marked by ever-increasing speed, and we undoubtedly feel the pain of our accelerating world. Sociologists and philosophers have been trying to provide an account of why life has come to move so fast. The last two decades of Internet culture is certainly a contributing factor, but to understand the speed of our age most clearly, we must go back much farther. George Ritzer’s seminal work The McDonaldization of Society is a profoundly helpful resource for the quest to understand fast culture, but the scope of its story is limited to the 20th century—and primarily the latter half of that century. In Mark C. Taylor’s Speed Limits, we have a different sort of cultural history of speed, one that goes back farther and examines the interwoven threads of religion, society, politics, art, and economics.

Taylor, professor of religion at Colum­bia University, engagingly tells the complex story of the acceleration of Western culture, mixing personal narrative with history and philosophy. Taylor begins with the Reformation, and specifically the reminder that it was not merely a religious revolution, but also an economic one. One of Luther’s main concerns, Taylor notes, was the sale of indulgences, which not only functioned in the “econ­omy of salvation,” but also funded the lavish worldly excesses of the Catholic hierarchy. By the late Middle Ages, Taylor emphasizes, the Catholic Church “could not survive without the income that the sale of indulgences provided.” Drawing on the work of the 14th-century philosopher William of Ockham, Luther argued that salvation no longer needed to be mediated through the hierarchy of the church and that individuals could interact with God directly.

Taylor observes that Luther’s theology served fundamentally to “privatize, deregulate and decentralize” the Chris­tian faith. This threefold move is familiar because of its resemblance to the economic movement that Milton Friedman and other free-market economists have called for in the last half century. John Calvin’s work also played what would prove to be a significant role in the acceleration. Taylor notes that it marked an economic shift within the Christian tradition, because Calvin was the first person within either Catholicism or Protestant­ism to argue that it was acceptable to lend money at interest as long as the interest rate was not excessive. Taylor highlights that this economic shift was an essential one in the prehistory of financial capitalism.