If there is one political reality to be learned from
the past three decades it is that public perception shapes real-life
outcomes. A frightening change during this period has been a war on the
wealthy conducted in response to the public perception that somehow the
rich got that way by stealing from the poor. This perception includes
the notion that wealth-producing activities are faintly unseemly and
that economic activity causes rather than cures poverty. There is a way
to restore the prestige of business success that requires a return to
tradition. In order to examine it we must first analyze the nature of
money.
Decades before our computer-controlled virtual
laboratories," Einstein created his famous "thought experiments." They
allowed him to solve problems for which actual laboratory experiments
would have proven too expensive, if not impossible, to conduct. Rather
than measuring gravity in an elevator dropping down a three-mile
elevator shaft, the great physicist showed that we can just as well, and
a lot more safely, analyze the situation from the comfort of our desks.
In the social sciences, too, we can make excellent use
of thought experiments. Let us conduct a thought experiment to see if we
can understand the origins of our own calendar. The protocol proceeds as
follows. We deposit a young boy and girl on an otherwise-deserted
tropical island. Taking care that they have enough to eat, we set up
concealed surveillance equipment and observe their development.
After a century or two, they will have increased their
numbers substantially. By now a full-fledged society, they remain
oblivious of any other people or any human history. However, they will
certainly notice periodicity in the heavens, eventually developing a
calendar. After further centuries of experience, they will most likely
discover that the solar year contains 365¼ days, in the same way that
prolonged scrutiny of the skies will eventually yield them a lunar month
of about 30 days.
However it is highly unlikely that they will adopt a
seven-day week. Not only is there no visible astronomic seven-day cycle,
but seven does not divide evenly into 365, or into 30, which makes it an
illogical choice. They would most likely establish a five-day week, as
this would make each year a calendar replica of the preceding one.
Why, then, do we have something as confusing and
artificial as a seven-day week when switching it to five would make so
much sense? Only because we retain a primeval, collective memory: that
long ago, God initiated a seven-day cycle as a kind of divine circadian
rhythm. It is hard otherwise to account for the wide acceptance of the
seven-day week.
As the seven-day week is the product of a collective
memory of a religious tradition, so too is money. While our clandestine
survey will reveal the islanders bartering with one another, it is less
certain that they will make the leap of assigning value to disks of
metal. That, in all probability, would not happen on our island, as
indeed it failed to happen in many parts of the real world. Most
populations that were isolated from Bible-based religious tradition
failed to make the leap from barter to coins and capital.
Where the Bible served as the earliest source of
wisdom, people understood the role of gold and silver. They learned how
greatly to expand trade-and therefore wealth - by employing precious
metals as an exchange medium. They understood the role of private
property and the role of the law in protecting that property. Naturally,
these peoples enjoyed a gigantic head start over those who had to
discover this all by trial and error.
The Faith Habit
There was another reason why those Western
civilizations based on the Bible flourished economically. The individual
character traits that Judeo-Christian thought promoted are the very
qualities that best prepare people for effective roles in commerce. One
of the most important of these is the faith habit. This accustoms people
to the real world, wherein almost every worthwhile venture requires one
to make a major commitment without assurance of success. For example,
couples must marry without the help of a crystal ball that would predict
all the ups and downs of their life ahead. Farmers plant and await crops
that may or may not ripen. And, of course, investments of capital always
involve risk.
In fact, the very act of accepting metal disks or even
pieces of paper, in exchange for a day of backbreaking labor, requires
enormous faith. To understand the true dimensions of that faith, observe
how things change in its absence. When investors lose faith in markets,
when depositors lose faith in banks, when citizens lose faith in the
currency, disaster strikes.
As long as the faith habit is intact, however, people
will accept payment for their goods and services. They do so out of
faith that when they require some commodity, a vendor will, in turn,
accept their little metal disks or scraps of paper. As long as the
future remains uncertain, people who maintain Bible-inspired faith have
a great advantage whether as spouses, farmers, or investors.
Judeo-Christian thought nurtures another personality
trait which well serves those who practice capitalism: deferment of
gratification. A religious outlook helps to promote saving rather than
impulse spending. It also inculcates in people the idea that there is
merit in doing the right thing for its own sake, rather than for reward.
This too is a valuable mindset for the ambitious entrepreneur who must
focus on filling a need rather than on other people's purses. Everybody
wants money; but those who pursue it directly instead of seeking a
niche, usually fail. The most conspicuous commercial successes are won
by those who find a way to serve other people, or provide them with
things they want.
Religious teachings that emphasize the virtue of
charity, would thus fit well into business school curricula. Charity
helps to loosen the tight grip many of us have on our funds. No miser
ever made a great investor. Religion encourages people to raise
families, the best incubators of capitalism. There, the young future
business professional learns the value of labor and its specialization.
From wise and responsible parents, he learns virtually all the skills
necessary for a first job. Finally, religion's emphasis on family helps
an economy because few great commercial enterprises are built in one
generation. It is children that fuel a man's ambition to drive himself
beyond the needs of his own lifetime.
For these reasons, the world still awaits a society
that has embraced atheism and also operates a successful free market.
That this has not happened is no coincidence, but rather a consequence
of the spiritual nature of money.
The Spiritual Nature of Money
Let us further analyze the spiritual nature of money.
All human activities can be located somewhere on the spectrum that is
anchored at one end by spirituality and at the other, by physicality.
Praying is near the spiritual end; reading and writing, composing music
and making tools are its neighbors. As the source of both great sensual
pleasure and also of all new life, sex might be somewhere near
mid-spectrum, while eating and excreting belong over toward the physical
end.
One way of identifying a spiritual act is by
determining whether a chimpanzee would understand it. This is because
God endowed man with His spirit and so distinguished between man and
chimpanzee. When I return home from work and slump into a comfortable
armchair, a primate could undoubtedly sympathize. As I move to the
dinner table and begin eating, he certainly understands. When I open a
newspaper, however, and hold it motionless before my face, he becomes
quite confused.
This test suggests that a business transaction is more
spiritual than physical. A chimpanzee would not have the slightest idea
of what is transpiring between proprietor and customer at the counter of
a store. Economic exchange takes place only after two thinking human
beings will it. The process is spiritual.
Human beings are always slightly uneasy about pursuits
that have no spiritual overtones at all. When necessary, we superimpose
spirituality precisely to avoid being exclusively physical and thus
uncomfortably animal-like. We apply ceremony and ritual to those of our
actions that are also animalistic. Only people read a book or listen to
music; hence these activities require no associated ritual. On the other
hand, all living creatures eat, engage in sexual activity, give birth,
and die. If we do not confer a uniquely human ritual upon these
functions, we reduce the distinction between ourselves and the animal
kingdom. Therefore, we celebrate the birth of a child, often by a naming
ceremony; no animal does that. Even if our hands are quite clean, we
wash them before eating rather than after, like a cat. We prefer to
serve food in dishes on a tablecloth rather than straight out of the
can, although the physical, nutritional qualities have not been
enhanced. We even say a grace or a benediction. After encountering an
attractive potential partner, people do not proceed directly to physical
intimacy. An engagement announcement followed by a marriage ceremony
serves to accentuate that all-important distinction; no animal announces
its intention to mate and then defers gratification for three months
while it calmly prepares its wedding and future home.
The more physical the activity, the more awkwardness
and subconscious embarrassment surround it. Photographer Richard Avedon
shattered a barrier by capturing images of people as they ate. Frozen in
the act of chewing, humans resemble apes rather than angels. Our
mothers, themselves raised in America's Judeo-Christian tradition,
taught us never to eat in public. Similarly we express a normal and
healthy reticence about bathroom activities. On the other hand, as
purely spiritual occupations, reading and art evoke no discomfort.
Likewise, buying and selling should evoke no psychic
discomfort. Economic activity is another way in which we satisfyingly
distance ourselves from the animal kingdom and justify our humanity.
This helps to explain why the most secular elements in America commonly
lead assaults on the free market. Those who have rejected religion are
eager to find other outlets for their moral expression. There is no
better way than to exhibit a revulsion for ethical capitalism. Today we
hear people referring to the eighties as a period of moral depravity.
Being unaware of the spiritual nature of money and wealth creation,
these individuals consider the miracle of economic enterprise to be the
human equivalent of dogs fighting over a bone.
The Origins of Man
The great historic clash between socialism and the
traditional wisdom of the West is really just a reflection of a far more
fundamental disagreement. This is over the question of the origin of
Man. This is not a question that needs to be debated in churches and
divinity schools as much as it is a question that needs to be settled in
corporate board rooms and business schools. Either God created us, or we
evolved from primeval protein sludge, passing through a primate-like
phase on the way. No one has yet proposed a third alternative.
If we accept the Godless alternative, then indeed we do
not differ in kind from monkeys or other animals, only in degree. We are
less facile in speed, strength, and hearing than some animals but we
think and speak a little better. Animals do not create wealth, they
merely seize the commodities they need and people obviously do the same.
They may employ more sophisticated methods like bonds, debentures, and
other tools of trade, but it is seizing nonetheless. Clearly, morally
sensitive people must decry this activity. Sure enough, American
politics and academia long dominated by those hostile to a traditional
view, echo this approach. Those that most strongly advance evolution as
the one and only approach to studying the question of our origins are
also those that most strongly oppose the free market.
On the other hand, if God created us and touched us
with His abilities, then we are qualitatively different from animals.
Our ability to speak and to create is unique. Therefore, animals plunder
but people profit; the creation of wealth is an expression of our godly
origins. This view of Man's origins helps to subdue the feelings of
guilt often brought on by success. Frequently those with little
religious faith who enjoy sudden success, such as Hollywood celebrities
for instance, develop an almost irrational dedication to socialist
causes. The idea that we are descended from angels rather than ascended
from apes has undoubtedly played a role in one of the most magnificent
consequences on history: American ethical capitalism.
Revealing his own brand of genius in Paradise Lost,
John Milton etched the Bible's centrality in man's literary
consciousness. He showed how the opening chapters of the Bible focus on
the eternal tug-of-war for man's soul between the angels and the apes.
There is a Titanic struggle between the Divine aspirations of a person's
nobility and his basest indulgences. Whom would Adam obey, God or the
serpent personification of the animal kingdom? After thousands of years
of human history, the lingering memory of that tussle still resonates in
the human soul. All heirs to the Judeo-Christian tradition feel the need
to distinguish themselves from animals and to unequivocally demonstrate
who won that Eden conflict. Seizing another's property by force is
animalistic and a victory for the serpent, purchasing it voluntarily for
the price set by the seller finds favor in God's eyes. A store or market
is one of the few places in which people interact voluntarily leaving
each party happier than he was before. No wonder then that God smiles
upon the marketplace. Freedom from tyranny is a necessary precondition
for both worship and trade.
It is therefore not surprising that economics used to
be a field of study that belonged with religion and theology. Adam Smith
as well as many other eighteenth-century economists were religious
philosophers before they were economists. Smith wrote Theory of Moral
Sentiments before he wrote Wealth of Nations. When the great
universities moved the study of economics from their religion
departments to their science departments they were actually driving a
wedge between capitalism and the moral arguments and spiritual
dimensions that underpin its validity. After all, whether a man
dissipates his money frivolously or invests it wisely and whether or not
he will bend rules to earn it depend mostly on his character and on his
moral makeup. No wonder that the science that seeks to predict these
things, economics, is known as the dismal science. Money is spiritual
and how men relate to it depends mostly on the state of their spirit.
Faith is the fuel that drives both commerce and religion.
God and the Marketplace
Establishing that a close relationship exists between
God and the marketplace helps us in three crucial areas. Firstly it
helps to explain why atheism and business are not natural allies. One
would have supposed that a philosophy of secular humanism, recognizing
no authority and sanctioning all behavior would be naturally drawn to
the world of money and power. One would have expected the political Left
to excuse what it calls the "greed" of capitalism and to recognize it as
nothing other than Darwinian law applied to the life of modern man. Yet,
this is not possible; something as truly spiritual as commerce simply
cannot coexist with socialism. The atheist himself recognizes that to be
true to his credo, he must reject the free market because of its
Godliness.
Secondly, it helps us integrate our careers into our
lives instead of regarding those daily eight or ten hours as a
distasteful and isolated part of life.
Finally, recognizing the congruence between work and
spiritual reality, the business professional is all the better able to
sell himself and his product. His work is creative and therefore a
legitimate way of emulating God and His infinite creativity. Anyone with
a sneaking conviction that socialism has a point, that Man and his
abilities are finite as is the economic pie and that he who brings that
pie to market and slices it for customers exploits both the baker and
the public, is forever handicapped as a businessman. Nobody throws
himself wholeheartedly into an endeavor he secretly considers demeaning
and unworthy. The difference between the animal instinct of a squirrel
gathering nuts and the inherent nobility of a human being earning a
living becomes clear when you perceive economic enterprise in its
correct position, at the spiritual end of the spectrum.
Failure to grasp the interdependency between a people's
morality and their economy can levy a high cost. People often lose sight
of how a statist government and its confiscatory tax policies will force
increasingly desperate citizens to become petty felons as they struggle
futilely to preserve the fruit of their labors. As people inevitably
begin to cut corners, they lose some of their moral self-esteem, thereby
lowering the trigger threshold of their internal moral alarms. This
corrosive effect ripples out to every comer of the population.
Americans are just beginning to sense that many of the
social pathologies that have made life more dangerous and squalid over
the past three decades have their roots in the uprooting of religion
from public life. We should also realize that the furious secularization
that has wreaked havoc on our schools and families has not left our
economy immune. It does not require a very elaborate thought experiment
to demonstrate how much our economy would be boosted by restoring a
traditional view of money. We need only contemplate why so many people
glorify art and music and why they treat galleries and concert halls
with an almost religious fervor. They do so out of a deep human need to
devote at least part of their existence to activities which uplift. Art
and music elevate because they are God-given and therefore unique to
humans.
America's wealth-producing institutions ought to arouse
the same feelings of respect and awe, for precisely the same reasons. By
joining the frantic rush to abandon every vestige of our religious
tradition, we free market enthusiasts have unwittingly contributed to
the sabotaging of our prosperity. Our thought experiment will show that
once our business infrastructure enjoys similar social esteem to that of
the art establishment which it so generously underwrites, there will be
at least one very valuable outcome. Politicians will tremble in fear
before venturing an assault on that fountainhead of prosperity that for
so long has been American business.
At the time of the original publication, Rabbi Daniel
Lapin, was president of Toward Tradition in Seattle, and served the
Pacific Jewish Center. He was a senior fellow at the Claremont
Institute and at the Jewish Policy Center in Washington, D. C.
Reprinted with permission from The
Freeman, a publication of the Foundation for Economic Education, Inc.,
July 1994, Vol. 44, No.7.
Yourname@libertyhaven.com
