Two of my readers sent me an article, published last week in
De Groene Amsterdammer a Dutch periodical in print since 1877.
Frank Mulder, a writer-journalist was the author.
I found the article of such value that I have, to the best of my ability, translated it, also, of course, because it fits in with my views on both religion and economics.
Since the Dutch version is more than 3500 words, I will present it in two parts.
Money is our God.
Part One.
Summary:
Capitalism is more than a model. It is a religion according to a growing number of independent thinkers. “Is it possible that theology can teach something to economists?” asks Frank Mulder.
Here it is:
I am looking for Mammon! Theologians: take note!
Haven’t you heard of that crazy human who, for all to see in pure daylight, grabbed a gold bar, carried it onto the trading floor and kept on yelling “I am looking for Mammon! I am looking for Mammon!”
Never heard it before? It’s Nietzsche’s famous parable about the fool who declares that God is dead. However “Being dead”, according to the explanation of the scientist Phillip Goodchild, “now means that this time it’s money’s turn to die.”
Why? Picture the stock market today. Because there are so many floor traders who don’t believe in Mammon they started to ridicule the man. Some wondered whether “He has been bought out”, another person suggested “Perhaps he went bankrupt”; somebody else asked. “Maybe he left for China, where people don’t pay capital gains tax.”
While all these money-men crowd around the besotted man and poke fun at him the fellow jumps up and down, looks straight at them and, totally bewildered, yells: “Where did Mammon go? I know what happened! We killed him – you and I! We all are his murderers! And how did we do that? How were we able to rob the world of her treasures? Who pushed the delete button to wipe out those crazy calculations? What’s going to happen now that we have exposed all our possessions to all possible risks? Where in heaven’s name are we going? Are we gambling it all on the throw of the dice? Are we venturing into the Great Unknown, into the Infinite Nothingness?”
Comments Philip Goodchild: “Yes, the god of money is dead and we have killed him,” in his essay on the debt crisis. He wrote this in a periodical not read by economists but by theologians. So theologians take note! That is not a random event because, according to Goodchild, economics belongs to the realm of theology. Economics also has everything to do with crisis and redemption, with promise and debt. Therefore economics is a power worth listening to because we cannot exist without it. And that means that it resembles a god. That’s why, in order to analyze this, we must involve theology.
Here is another voice
In a restaurant in Prague we find Tom?š Sedl?cek busy drinking a ginger lemonade. The 36 year old economist with Attention Deficit Hyper Activity symptoms races through life as a writer, producer, university lecturer, advisor to the Prime Minister and chief macro-economist with the Czech bank CSOB.
He caused quite a furor at home and abroad with his book The Economy of Good and Evil. In it he borrows, seemingly at random, those economical and theological snippets he finds interesting.
Economics is more than mathematical formulas, asserts Sedl?cek.
Economists often act as if markets are rational, as if suspended above us there is some sort of intelligence making sure that the outcome is rational. But that is a myth, just as the homo economicus, always on the alert to maximize utility, is a myth. “Mathematical models are beautiful but they exist only in our imagination” so says Sedl?cek. “People often say that they work in theory but not in real life. Actually the opposite is true. It functions well in real life, but it is difficult to reconcile this with our theories: that’s why we wrap them in all sorts of concoctions: myths in other words. “Nothing wrong with that” says Sedl?cek, “as long as we realize that they are pure inventions, but, of course, contemporary economy never admits that. Let’s face it: it also takes place in many other sciences. Before you criticize our models, they say, come and study with us for five years: only then can you grasp our methods of validation. Well, that was precisely the way the monks in the Middle Ages reasoned. In my opinion they exactly resemble each other. In those days, monks studied, wearing black clothes; now these people are dressed in white.”
Economists presume that the economy is like a machine, something easy to grasp. “But no, that’s not the case at all. The economy is not something tangible. It cannot exist without the state. It is not a machine: the economy has a soul, so to say.”
Sedl?cek wants to know how that soul comes into being. “It’s a matter of ethics, a product of our culture, the end result of age-long discussions about good and evil. It goes back all the way to ancient Greek wisdom, to the Judeo-Christian theology. Without that heritage our economy would have never assumed its current form.” Only when we recognize this basis, according to this Czech citizen, is it possible to reveal the myths and the religious background of the modern economy.
Goodchild and Sedl?cek are only two persons out of a growing body of people who look at the economy with theological eyes.
Take money. Money cannot possibly be reduced to a material phenomenon. Here’s an experiment: place a Hundred Dollar Bill on the table during a meeting. Every few seconds our eyes focus on that piece of paper. It exercises a power by its very presence, independent of time and context. It possesses magic. Theologians call that spirituality. Two Thousand years ago Jesus spoke words which were difficult to digest for his followers: “You cannot serve two masters. You cannot serve God and the Mammon.” The Mammon – a word that carries with it the meaning of money, of security, of authority – strives to attain divine status. Indeed, it is an idol, an idol of the unjust sort, says Jesus, an idol who blinds people.
How is that possible? How can money cause visionary distortion? In other words, how can money impose its own value system? That becomes plain when we observe the two functions which form the basis of money, so say the money experts. In the first place money is a means of exchange. We trade, exchanging goods for money, because in that way we can create more prosperity. That makes money the great symbol of mutuality, of reciprocity. By means of money we are able to suppress evil and scarcity. Our society which cannot function without money, substitutes traditional values, such as benevolence, with this win-win standard, while traditional vices, say envy and greed, are more and more regarded as positive.
Money can also be used as a means to add and subtract. In that way too money can influence our outlook on the world. It’s impossible for money to express everything in dollars and cents. Take love for instance or nature, or community feeling. Basically money is only concerned with tangible items, it’s purely utilitarian. It cannot possibly measure pain and enjoyment, yet even there, money structures society.
Our economic system uses money as the preeminent building block to structure Capitalism. This allows money to have an even greater impact on society. Money does not only colour our values, it also needs our trust, so says Simon Critchley, a British philosopher. In a telephonic interview he explains: “We cannot regard the economy merely as a tool because it is much more than that. Capitalism is an ideology. We regard ourselves too modern to have superstitions, but capitalism is a faith structure, and the crisis in our economy is a crisis of faith. It was for valid reasons that the Romans, at times, featured the goddess Fides – Faith – on their coins. Money is based on faith.”
Critchley – himself an atheist – acknowledges that money tends to assume a dominating position, something in line with what Jesus suggests. Critchley states: “We assume that we are taken in by the goods we buy, but that is not true. It’s money that we worship. Financial markets bank on that. That’s the reason why our entire economic order acquires a religious structure. It’s strange that we hardly give that a thought.”
Although Capitalism has a religious structure this does not mean that it has a religious dogma. All it has is a religious worship structure. Already in 1921 the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamins wrote this in his essay Kapitalismus als Religion (capitalism as religion). Willem Schinkel, sociologist and philosopher, explains what he meant with that. “Capitalism is the worship of debt. That concerns all of us because we all have debt. The word ‘credit’ has as root the Latin verb ‘credo’ which means ‘I believe.’ In Christianity there is the concept of redemption but in the Capitalist type of religion the debt is never repaid. Debt is the basic ingredient. We have to go into debt in order to maintain consumption. In short: debt rules, and because we are part and parcel of this structure, it is difficult to offer criticism.”
Just as in the ancient religions, so too capitalism has its own fetishisms with their peculiar features. Schinkel again: “Just as animistic shamans promote fetishes in the form of images, the credit agencies capture the chaotic financial world out there by means of easy to understand graphics and tables. These acquire authority, a spiritual weight that supersedes the tangible.”
Look at the current Greece situation where the credit agencies devalued its financial situation, blindly following the computer systems, and so brought an entire continent to the brink of bankruptcy. Or look how the Central Bankers, the High Priests of the Capitalist Religion, with a single out of place word are able to cause currencies to tumble.
This comparison with the priests of primitive cultures has already years ago been made by Bob Goudzwaard, economics professor emeritus of the (Amsterdam) Free University, a person who has never been afraid for a bit of theology. According to Goudzwaard all modern ideologies contain at a certain moment traces of theology, including Capitalism, of course. According to him this has to do with a primitive mechanism, that is to say the reversal of goal and means. As individual or as society we pursue legitimate goals, so he explains in his book Hope in Troubled Times (Wegen van Hoop in tijden van Crisis). “We pursue Prosperity or Peace. But when these goals are threatened, we grab every possible means or instrument to get to these goals regardless of the cost. Take economic expansion, a means that in 1957 in the Treaty of Rome is mentioned by name as the necessary road to Prosperity and Peace. A later further development was the deregulation of financial markets. After that the ‘Lisbon’ requirement expressed it even more concretely by mentioning annual three percent economic growth. Everybody, from government minister to banker, claims of course that: “Growth as such is not the goal: our real aim is prosperity and peace for the sake of national wellbeing. But, yes, growth it is the necessary tool.”
According to Goudzwaard this sort of reasoning makes us directly dependent on these provisions. What is really happening is that we put blinkers on, narrowing our vision, which religion tends to do. Goudzwaard asserts that the same thing happened in primitive cultures. People, in times of national distress, ceded part of their authority to what they perceived as higher powers, their idols. Consequently this led to actual worship, complete with certain norms and values. Even human sacrifices were made.
This same assimilation of values Goudzwaard also notices in the modern economy but then on a more rational and systematic level and therefore much more pervasive. “That’s why it has become a virtue in the name of dynamism to break up functioning businesses and sell them piecemeal,” according to Goudzwaard in an interview prior to the credit crisis.
Next week: How do we get rid of the devil?
P.S. Readers of this blog come from more than 25 countries. The largest block of visitors comes from the USA. The second largest group is from CHINA.
Commercial:
Day Without End
Paperback, 152 Pages
God is nothing without his creation, is nothing without His earth, is nothing without the human race. We too, we are nothing without God. God needs the earth to show who He is and what the meaning of his creation is. We can only prove that we love God when we show love for his creation, while God’s love is evident in our love for fellow humans. Day Without End shows that we have learned our lesson, that we, with God’s law written on our hearts, are finally ready to live in God’s creation, to explore his infinite Body, in the way it was originally intended. Of course, to accurately visualize a renewed earth under a renewed heaven is impossible. Yet if we don’t think about the Hereafter, we cannot have one, because it’s exactly there where we all will have our final destination. In the mystery of God becoming a human being, it is evident that this earth and not heaven is God’s permanent dwelling place.
To purchase this book contact bert@hielema.ca