JANUARY 7 2013
Deus ex machina; pecunia ex machina.
A peculiar title: all Latin. If you look a little closer you’ll recognize a few words, such as deus – god – and ex- from or out of- and machina, our word for machine. Pecunia may not be so familiar. It simply means money. Pecunia ex machina, means something like an ATM Automatic Teller Machine, but for banks only: free money, but not really. More about that later.
First about the Deus ex machina.
It literally means God out of the machine. It comes from ancient drama where sometimes a god was needed, so the actors had a god figure suspended above their heads and some stage hand would lower it whenever a god was called for. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian, put to death by Hitler weeks before World War II ended, used Deus ex Machina, as an example of the sort of god that is needed only when special circumstances require his presence, which actually is the way Christianity in general uses God. When all goes well, we can do without him, but when sickness strikes or death or unemployment, we want God there to heal our cancers or avoid death or get us a job. For the rest, we don’t need him.
Bonhoeffer, while in prison in 1944, waiting to be hanged, writes that usually ‘ religion’ offers only an escapist flight from the real world, and has pushed God to the boundaries of faith, available on call to answer prayers of deliverance and of favour. That sort of act is always partial, while ‘faith’ is something whole, involving all of human life. Jesus calls a person not to a bit of religion, but to life and that to the full.
The famous Dr. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare expert bar none, writes in his “the American Religion” that America is very religious, but of a sort that has ceased to be Christian. His central point is that Gnosticism rules the church, evident in the belief that upon death we go to heaven, discarding the earth is useless and even evil. That’s why the ‘religious right’ doesn’t care for the environment, including Stephen Harper, Canada’s benevolent dictator- Prime Minister. I remember Billy Graham being interviewed on CNN – when I still had television – and a man by the name of King asked him: “where will you go when you die?” Billy’s answer was “Jesus will take me by the hand and bring me to God,” in spite of Paul writing that God lives in inapproachable light, that nobody can see him and nobody has seen him. Apparently the most celebrated “Christian” in the world, is so caught up in the gnostic heresy, separating earth from heaven, that he reads the bible totally with unchristian eyes. Bonhoeffer calls such a belief ‘pious Christian secularism.’ Bonhoeffer also writes; “This is not the godlessness of atheism or cultural bolshevism, but Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the earth.” He says that God, the human race and the earth are one. If we renounce the earth – by living recklessly with God’s beloved earth- then we cease to be Christian. After all the most famous text in the bible is John 3: 16, “God so loved the cosmos, our earth, that he allowed his son to be put to death as ransom for gaining the earth back from the Satan who had acquired it through our sinful action.” Don’t fall for Deus ex Machina.
Pecunia ex machina.
A similar thing is happening with money. It used to be that money had an intrinsic value, was backed up by gold or some other value, such as barter, by which articles of identical value are exchanged. I remember my paternal grandfather, a grocer, making the rounds with his horse and buggy to my maternal grandparents, farmers, and bartering eggs for sugar and coffee and tea. Believe me: that will happen again. In Greece where there is a shortage of Euros, barter is now normal.
Just as God is created ‘ex machina’, so money today too is created out of nothing. This is called ‘quantitative easing’ or simply “QE”. The Washington-based Federal Reserve Bank headed by Ben Bernanke creates money “ex nihilo” out of nothing, as if he were God, $85 billion each month, until unemployment is down to 6.5%. And where do these trillions of dollars go? They go to the bankers who were responsible for the shortfall.
In the Matthew 18 Jesus tells a parable about a man who owed the king 10,000 talents – something like $500 billion. After much pleading the king forgives him this debt, but – here I quote the Bible –“But when the servant went out, he met a man who owed him 100 denarii – perhaps a small mortgage – and refused to hear his pleading and threw him in prison.” When the king heard how ungrateful this banker had been, he reneged on wiping out his $500 billion, and he got prison too.
This biblical parable is coming true today: the government gives the banks Trillions of dollars and the banks refuse to forgive the millions of ‘under water’ mortgages. There nobody goes to prison, reason why this is going to backfire on the financial institutions. Believe me. This ‘pecunia ex machina’ will end badly as it did in the Jesus’ parable.
Our debt levels, especially in the US, Europe and Japan, are higher than they’ve been at any point in human history. All we’ve done now for the last decade is trust a band of bankers and shady officials to fix the problems they themselves caused in the first place: appointing foxes to guard the chicken coop.
Trusting a ‘deus ex machina’ leads to a false religion. Putting our trust in pecunia ex machina’ reflects the false foundation of our economic life.
A true God requires total devotion, all the time. True money must be backed by genuine collateral. Both deus ex machina and pecunia ex machina are based on false assumptions and signal the end of much of what we call organized religion and capitalistic society.
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