The Little Red Blog

Saturday Lecture: Taming Leviathan?

{The late James C. Scott was best known for his 1998 book, ‘Seeing Like a State,’ in which he critiqued the ‘top-down,’ ‘rational management’ approach that characterizes the modern state. He argued for the preservation and cultivation of local and regional differences; for distributed, rather than centralized, authority; and for the importance of what Kirkpatrick Sale called the “human scale” in our economic, social, political, and cultural arrangements. All of this, of course, echoed Edmund Burke’s emphasis on the ‘little platoons’ of society, the mediating institutions (church, guild, union, civic associations, etc.) to which individuals are personally attached, in which they can directly participate, and upon whose help and support they can rely.}    

James C. Scott (from Two Cheers for Anarchism):

Huge disparities in wealth, property, and status make a mockery of freedom. The consolidation of wealth and power over the past forty years in the United States, mimicked more recently in many states in the Global South following neoliberal policies, has created a situation that the anarchists foresaw. Cumulative inequalities in access to political influence via sheer economic muscle, huge (state-like) oligopolies, media control, campaign contributions, the shaping of legislation (right down to designated loopholes), redistricting, access to legal knowledge, and the like have allowed elections and legislation to serve largely to amplify existing inequalities. It is hard to see any plausible way in which such self-reinforcing inequalities could be reduced through existing institutions, in particular since even the recent and severe capitalist crisis beginning in 2008 failed to produce anything like Roosevelt’s New Deal. Democratic institutions have, to a great extent, become commodities themselves, offered up for auction to the highest bidder.

The market measures influence in dollars, while a democracy, in principle, measures votes. In practice, at some level of inequality, the dollars infect and overwhelm the votes. Reasonable people can disagree about the levels of inequality that a democracy can tolerate without becoming an utter charade. My judgment is that we have been in the “charade zone” for quite some time. What is clear to anyone except a market fundamentalist (the sort who would ethically condone a citizen’s selling himself—voluntarily, of course—as a chattel slave) is that democracy is a cruel hoax without relative equality.

This, of course, is the great dilemma for an anarchist. If relative equality is a necessary condition of mutuality and freedom, how can it be guaranteed except through the state? Both theoretically and practically, the abolition of the state is not an option. We are stuck, alas, with Leviathan, though not at all for the reasons Hobbes had supposed, and the challenge is to tame it. That challenge may well be beyond our reach.

Forms of informal cooperation, coordination, and action that embody mutuality without hierarchy are the quotidian experience of most people. Only occasionally do they embody implicit or explicit opposition to state law and institutions. Most villages and neighborhoods function precisely because of the informal, transient networks of coordination that do not require formal organization, let alone hierarchy. In other words, the experience of anarchistic mutuality is ubiquitous. As Colin Ward notes, “Far from being a speculative vision of a future society, it is a description of a mode of human experience of everyday life, which operates side-by-side with, and in spite of, the dominant authoritarian trends of our society.”

The question is whether the existence, power, and reach of the state over the past several centuries have sapped the independent, self-organizing power of individuals and small communities. So many functions that were once accomplished by mutuality among equals and informal coordination are now state organized or state supervised. As Proudhon, anticipating Foucault, famously put it,

“To be ruled is to be kept an eye on, inspected, spied on, regulated, indoctrinated, sermonized, listed and checked off, estimated, appraised, censured, ordered about by creatures without knowledge and without virtues. To be ruled is at every operation, transaction, movement, to be noted, registered, counted, priced, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected.”

To what extent has the hegemony of the state and of formal, hierarchical organizations undermined the capacity for and the practice of mutuality and cooperation that have historically created order without the state? To what degree have the growing reach of the state and the assumptions behind action in a liberal economy actually produced the asocial egoists that Hobbes thought Leviathan was designed to tame? One could argue that the formal order of the liberal state depends fundamentally on a social capital of habits of mutuality and cooperation that antedate it, which it cannot create and which, in fact, it undermines. The state, arguably, destroys the natural initiative and responsibility that arises from voluntary cooperation. Further, the neoliberal celebration of the individual maximizer over society, of individual freehold property over common property, of the treatment of land (nature) and labor (human work life) as market commodities, and of monetary commensuration in, say, cost-benefit analysis (e.g., shadow pricing for the value of a sunset or an endangered view) all encourage habits of social calculation that smack of social Darwinism.

Two centuries of a strong state and liberal economies may have socialized us so that we have largely lost the habits of mutuality and are in danger now of becoming precisely the dangerous predators that Hobbes thought populated the state of nature. Leviathan may have given birth to its own justification.

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Two Cheers for Anarchism | The Anarchist Library

James C. Scott - Wikipedia

 

Saturday Lecture: The Worm in the Bud

“The disappearance of evil as a concept is one of the most extraordinary features of modern society.” (Alan Macfarlane)

“Money changes everything.” (From the eponymous song written by Tom Gray)

Alan Macfarlane (from The Culture of Capitalism):

Traditionally, the essence of evil lies in a combination of several features. First, it is shadowy, mysterious, covert, hidden, not fully understood, hence the association with night, darkness, black, secrecy. Secondly, it is an active, aggressive force. Evil tries to destroy the integrity, the happiness, and the welfare of ‘normal’ society. It is aggressively, if insidiously, undermining, the worm in the bud. Witches are evil because they attack society, causing illness and death. These attacks are not justified; either they are motive-less or the motives are perverted. God or the ancestors are not evil when they afflict man, for their ends are good: to improve the afflicted. They correct mankind as a loving father corrects a child. Evil is an inversion of good; the moral standards of society are turned upside down. Thus, when havoc falls out of a clear sky and strikes down an individual or a society, evil is at work.

The moral economy of peasant societies included the economy of evil. Life and happiness were thought to be constantly threatened, by women (witches), by death, by secret evil, by diffuse and invisible powers. There was a never-ending war, both within the individual and against external dark forces. In Catholic, Muslim, Hindu, and Confucian societies, a great amount of energy was spent in trying to hold back and defeat evil through the use of that ‘magic’ that is built into practical religion.

An archetypical example of such a world can be seen in much of continental Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout Catholic Europe, the Holy Office of the Inquisition set up an elaborate machine for seeking out and destroying evil. There was believed to be a vast conspiracy of Evil abroad: relapsed Jews, gypsies, freemasons, witches, Lutherans—all were sought out as agents of Evil, which was then purged from them by fire and the rack. The Devil was alive and well and hovered over much of Europe; few doubted the daily reality of Evil, the Evil One, and of evil beings. There was a Holy War for four centuries.

Contrast this with the world of industrial capitalism in the later twentieth century. Though ‘evil’ titillates in the films, television, science-fiction, and children’s stories, in ordinary life the concept and the reality have largely been banished. Most people live in a one-dimensional world that has expelled Satan, witches, the Evil Eye, and fairies. The supernatural dimension is dead, except as fantasy. How has evil, even temporarily, been banished?

Both the answer and the problem are encapsulated in St. Paul’s warning that ‘The love of money is the root of all evil.’ This dismissal of avarice is one of the central pillars of the Judeo-Christian tradition upon which western civilization is based. Yet it could also be argued that the love of money—the famous propensity to trade, barter, and accumulate—is an equally important part of this civilization. Adam Smith most famously exposed this foundation of modern society, a feature without which capitalist societies would immediately collapse. Modern economies are built on a propensity that is, in the ethical terms laid down by Christian theology, evil. The foundations are laid on individual acquisitiveness, the love of money, and the pursuit of profit. Good and evil are mixed in the roots of modern society.

Money, and all it symbolizes, is the root of all evil in an even deeper sense. It subtly and insidiously eliminates the very concept of evil, or, rather, it makes it impossible to discriminate between good and evil. Money—which is a shorthand way of saying capitalistic relations, market values, trade and exchange—ushers in a world of moral confusion. Money disrupts the moral as well as the economic world. Money complicates the moral order, turning what was formerly black and white into greyness. Money, markets, and market capitalism eliminate absolute moralities. As Georg Simmel wrote:

‘By being the equivalent to manifold things in one and the same way, money becomes the most frightful leveler; it expresses all qualitative differences of things in terms of ‘How much?’ Money becomes the common denominator of all values, it hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific gravity in the moving stream of the economy.’

It became clear that what was considered to be the root of all evil was also the root of all that was good—the marketing, bargaining principle of Adam Smith. This paradox was so horrifying in its implications that, when it was pointed out, there was fierce condemnation. Out of vice and evil came forth wealth and goodness; evil lay at the heart of good in a capitalist society. Private vice, passions, and interests merged into public good.   

[All this] represented the culmination of a trend towards ethical relativism which argued (from growing evidence) that every civilization had its own appropriate moral system. Pascal had summarized this view in the seventeenth century: ‘We hardly know of anything just or unjust which does not change its character with a change of climate. Three degrees of polar elevation overturn the whole system of jurisprudence. A meridian determines what is truth. There is not a single law that is universal.’

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Alan Macfarlane - Wikipedia

Economy Collapses Under Weight of New Jobs!

{Is it just a coincidence that "new jobs" rhymes with "Lou Dobbs"? I think not.}

CNN: US markets fall on shockingly strong US jobs report

Oh no—too many people is getting hired and has jobs! CNN analyzes the disastrous developments: The US economy added 336,000 jobs in September, significantly more than Wall Street economists expected. The unemployment rate remained at 3.8%. Economists had predicted the US added just 170,000 jobs last month and thought the unemployment rate would inch back down to 3.7%. While that strong report is better for the economy than August's tepid figures, it's not exactly the cooling labor market Fed Chair Jerome Powell is looking for to keep inflation in check.

US stocks tumbled Friday after the report was released, with the Dow falling more than 200 points before paring some of those losses.

This is why economics is known as "the dismal science": what appears to most of us to be good news turns out to be, for economists, shockingly bad. "The job market remains too hot for comfort," they explain; "today’s report indicates the economy is almost too hot to handle."

Should we not, then, blame our economic travails, such as they are, on the hallowed "job creators"? Why do they keep creating jobs at a time when the economy is already up to its ears with them? Thanks to them, "The Federal Reserve has a complicated situation on its hands." That cannot be good!  "Fed officials have said they want to see the job market cool off to ensure that inflation is on track to reach the central bank's 2% target." On the other hand, "The recent sell-off in government bonds means that the US financial system will become more burdensome for American families and businesses." And that, believe it or not, is the good news, because "The bond-market rout could cool the economy enough for the Fed to hold interest rates steady."

Drat that darn Bidenomics! It’s turned out to be a bunch of malarkey. We were much better off when no one was working but prices were lower—right? Why do people even want to work, anyway, when they could get on the entitlement gravy train and make out like veritable bandits? Yet they keep taking jobs—inconceivable! Are they trying to tank the stock market (again)? Jobs, jobs, everywhere, and investors are turning to drink. Didn't Joe Manchin warn us that if working people get money, they are likely to fritter it away on food, clothing, and shelter--or worse, on their children!

It's simple Economics 101: people earning money causes prices to rise, because the Invisible Hand has so decreed. You want to fight inflation? Then stop with all the jobs and the working, okay? Uncle Sam wants you to be unemployed, and so do the geniuses on Wall Street and at the Federal Reserve.

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Jobs report shock: American economy added a stunning 336,000 jobs in September (cnn.com)

"We're doomed!" Americans react with shock and panic to horrifically good jobs report...

The Great Refusal: Usury, Purgatory, and the Rise of Mammon

{Returning to our theme of the Great Refusal, we consider how Christianity’s original refusal to embrace Mammon gave way, after a thousand years or so, to a reluctant acceptance of Mammon’s role in this worldly vale. From there, it was but a short step to full-on worship of the god; it is no trivial thing that U.S. currency now bears the motto, ‘In God We Trust’.}

“Christianity had traditionally placed God in opposition to money.” (Jacques Le Goff)

According to historian Jacques Le Goff, “Usury was one of the major issues of the thirteenth century. The sudden eruption and spread of the monetary economy threatened old Christian values. The great controversy surrounding usury constitutes what might be called ‘the labor pains of capitalism’.”

The Church’s strictures against money and profit, however inconsistently followed and however fitfully enforced, endured for over a millennium. As Jesus had made clear to his followers, the possession of money might make one’s mortal life more comfortable, but the pursuit of it, and the burden of it, endangered one’s immortal soul.  

Salvation of the soul, of course, was the entire purpose of life, according to Christianity; everything else was secondary at best and sinful at worst. Jacques Le Goff cites Karl Polanyi, “The facts of the [medieval] economy were originally embedded in situations that were not in themselves of an economic nature, neither the ends nor the means being primarily material.”

Le Goff and Polanyi agree that the medieval economy (12^th and 13^th centuries) was embedded in a culture for which economic gain was not primary. Modern culture, on the other hand, is embedded in the economy, the growth of which has become our primary pursuit. And whereas “Medieval Christians formed a fraternity in which the poor, above all, had special rights,” anyone suggesting this today (“the preferential option for the poor”) is immediately castigated as a Marxist.

The rehabilitation of Mammon depended first on getting rid of restrictions on usury—that is, lending money at interest or charging interest to those buying on credit. Jesus had not expressed much concern for profitable lending: “If you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what merit is there in it for you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. Love your enemy and do good; lend, without expecting to be repaid in full.” That cavalier attitude was fortified in the early Middle Ages by “the Church’s fear that society would be disrupted by the proliferation of usurious practices.” That fear would prove to be prophetic.

For centuries, then, usury was condemned as a form of sloth, one of the seven deadly sins. Man was supposed to live by the sweat of his brow, not by the magical properties of moneylending. Le Goff offers numerous quotations from medieval Christian authorities about the evils of usury. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “Money was invented chiefly for exchanges to be made, so the prime and proper use of money is its use and disbursement in the way of ordinary transactions.” St. Bonaventure declared, “Money is intrinsically unproductive.”  Money is infertile; it cannot reproduce itself nor bear fruit. Pope Leo said bluntly that “Usurious profit from money is the death of the soul.” ¹

Usury was also condemned as the sin of “cupidity” (greed) and as a crime against justice, as Le Goff explains: “A preoccupation with justice became a dominant idea in the economic domain, which was steeped in religious ideology and ethics. The ‘just price’ and the ‘just wage’ were the fundamental themes for economic activity and for the marketplace then beginning to take shape. Even though the ‘just price’ was, to be accurate, merely the market price, demand for justice was present. Usury was seen as a sin against the ‘just price,’ a sin against nature.”

Price gouging and windfall profits, even when not expressly prohibited, were subject to social censure and to the loss of civic reputation.

Where there is a will, however, there is a way; and the will to put money to work—that is, to earn interest from it and to employ it as investment capital—became more and more insistent as the medieval economy grew. Since strictures against usury kept Christians out of the moneylending business, Jews were enlisted to provide the necessary financial service; and, as moneylending became associated with Jews, a new anti-Semitic libel (“Shylock”) was added to the ancient blood libel (“Christ-killer”). Jacques Le Goff acknowledges, “The parallel censure of Judaism and usury contributed to fueling nascent anti-Semitism and to blackening further the image of the usurer, who was now seen as more or less indistinguishable from the Jew.”

Medieval Christians believed they were struggling upwards on a ladder towards heaven; bags of money or loads of material possessions were seen as impediments to that advancement. ² We moderns instead ascend a ladder of success that leads to worldly wealth and possibly to worldly acclaim. Our progress is visible, measurable, tangible, and accomplished here on earth; Christians in the Middle Ages could only hope and pray for their spiritual progress, entrusting themselves to the Church and to God’s mercy for eternal salvation in the world to come.

Concluded Le Goff:

The usurer was the precursor of capitalism, an economic system that, despite its injustices and failings, is part of the West’s trajectory of progress. But from traditional points of view, the usurer was a man in disgrace. The early Middle Ages had disapproved or looked down upon many trades and professions, forbidding them first to clerics and then, in many cases, to laymen, or in any case denouncing them as pathways to sin. Appearing most often on this index were innkeepers, butchers, acrobats, actors, magicians, alchemists, physicians, surgeons, soldiers, pimps, prostitutes, notaries, and wholesale merchants; and also fullers, weavers, harness makers, pastry cooks, shoemakers, gardeners, painters, barbers, bailiffs, constables, customs collectors, moneychangers, tailors, perfumers, tripe sellers, millers, and so forth.

Aside from assigning contaminating monetary transactions to perfidious Jews, how did Christians break free of the anti-Mammon trap? According to Jacques Le Goff, it was the invention of Purgatory that set Christians free to engage in usury while retaining hope for Heaven. “Purgatory was just one of the complicitous winks that Christianity sent the usurer’s way during the 13^th century, but it was the only one that gave him assurance of Paradise. Purgatory was hope, the hope (and soon the quasi-certainty) of being saved, of a man’s being able to have both his money, here below, and his life, his eternal life beyond the grave.”

It was not the earthly consequences of the Church’s condemnation of usury that had restrained Christians, on the threshold of capitalism; it was the agonizing fear of Hell. The hope of escaping Hell, thanks to Purgatory, permitted the usurer to propel the economy and society of the thirteenth century toward capitalism. ³

Necessity is widely credited with being the mother of invention; it appears it was also the mother of Purgatory, whose role in setting the stage for Modernity is rarely acknowledged.   

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Jacques Le Goff quotations are from his Your Money or Your Life and his The Birth of Purgatory. For more on his life and work: Jacques Le Goff - Wikipedia

¹ Edward Abbey, on the other hand, claimed that “Sentiment without action is the death of the soul.” I assume that he and Pope Leo I are debating the issue in the afterlife.

² “I don’t know, but I’ve been told / it’s hard to run with a weight of gold.” (The next line of the song is “On the other hand I’ve often heard it said / it’s just as hard with a weight of lead.”)

³ Following the invention of Purgatory, the Church also discovered the utility of “papal indulgences,” that is, reduction of purgatorial sentences in exchange for (what else?) money. In fairness, indulgences could be earned by other means as well, such as going on pilgrimages or participating in crusades against infidels; in the long run, however, it was easier and more common just to buy them. In the even longer run, of course, papal indulgences helped to shatter Catholic Christendom and to bring Europe’s medieval era to a close.

Saturday Lecture: The Divine Power of Money

Karl Marx:

The distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternization of impossibilities – the divine power of money – lies in its character as man’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind.

That which is for me through the medium of money – that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy) – that becomes me, I myself, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. If I possess money, money’s properties are my properties, its powers are my powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore, I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness – its deterrent power – is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet; therefore, I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honored, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things; how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has power over the clever not more clever than the clever? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary?

If I long for a particular dish or want to take the mail-coach because I am not strong enough to go by foot, money fetches me the dish and the mail-coach: that is, it converts my wishes from something in the realm of imagination, translates them from their meditated, imagined or desired existence into their sensuous, actual existence – from imagination to life, from imagined being into real being. In effecting this mediation, money is the truly creative power.

No doubt demands also exist for him who has no money, but his demands are mere things of the imagination without effect or existence for a third party; therefore, they remain unreal and objectless. The difference between effective demand based on money and ineffective demand based on my need, my passion, my wish, etc., is the difference between being and thinking, between that which exists within me merely as an idea and the idea which exists as a real object outside of me. If I have no money for travel, I have no need – that is, no real and practical need – to travel. If I have the vocation for study but no money for it, I have no vocation for study – that is, no effective, no true vocation. On the other hand, if I have really no vocation for study but have the will and the money for it, I have an effective vocation for it. 

Money, as the external, universal medium and faculty for turning an image into reality and reality into a mere image, transforms the real essential powers of man and nature into what are merely abstract notions and tormenting chimeras, just as it transforms real shortcomings and chimeras (which are impotent and exist only in the imagination of the individual) into real powers and faculties. In the light of this characteristic alone, money is thus the general distorting of individualities which turns them into their opposite and confers contradictory attributes upon their attributes.

Money, then, appears as this distorting power both against the individual and against the bonds of society which claim to be entities in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence, and intelligence into idiocy. Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and confuses all things, it is therefore the general confounding and confusing of all things – the world upside-down – the confounding and confusing of all natural and human qualities.

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Karl Marx was a 19th-century German vaudeville performer, equally adept at slapstick, pantomime, and acerbic one-liners (e.g., "A specter is haunting Europe."). He is best remembered as the grandfather of the legendary Groucho, Harpo, and Chico Marx, who were known collectively as the "Lenin Sisters".    Karl Marx - Wikipedia

"It's mine, I tell you! It's all mine!"

The Great Refusal: "Acres of Diamonds"

{The Good News of the Christian gospel got even better in late 19th- and early 20^th-century America, when Russell Conwell, a Baptist minister who founded Temple University, put the Lord’s stamp of approval on the getting and spending of money. Pastor Conwell delivered his “Acres of Diamonds” lecture to audiences across the country, setting at ease the consciences of the wealthy and of those with aspirations to wealth; his Christianity could have been labeled “the preferential option for the rich.” Conwell’s lecture qualifies as a “Great Refusal” in that, despite being a minister, Conwell refused to take the Christian gospels seriously.}

(Note: In the following excerpt, I have taken the liberty of appending my own commentaries and scriptural paraphrases.)

Russell Conwell, from “Acres of Diamonds”:

I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich. How many of my pious brethren say to me, ‘“‘Do you, a Christian minister, spend your time going up and down the country advising young people to get rich, to get money?” ‘‘Yes, of course I do.” They say, ‘‘Isn’t that awful! Why don’t you preach the gospel instead of preaching about man’s making money?” ‘‘Because to make money honestly is to preach the gospel.”’ That is the reason. The men who get rich may be the most honest men you find in the community.

The LORD has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives, sight to the blind, and reassurance to those who do His work by piling up treasure on earth.

‘‘Oh,” but says some young man here tonight, “I have been told all my life that if a person has money he is very dishonest and dishonorable and mean and contemptible.” My friend, that is the reason why you have none, because you have that idea of people. The foundation of your faith is altogether false. Let me say here clearly, and say it briefly, though subject to discussion which I have not time for here, ninety-eight out of one hundred of the rich men of America are honest. That is why they are rich. That is why they are trusted with money. That is why they carry on great enterprises and find plenty of people to work with them. It is because they are honest men.

We know they are Christians because ninety-eight percent of them are honest and can be trusted with money.

My friend, you take and drive me out into the suburbs of Philadelphia and introduce me to the people who own their homes around this great city, those beautiful homes with gardens and flowers, those magnificent homes so lovely in their art, and I will introduce you to the very best people in character as well as in enterprise in our city, and you know I will. A man is not really a true man until he owns his own home, and they that own their homes are made more honorable and honest and pure, and true and economical and careful, by owning the home.

Blessed are the homeowners, for they are truly men; and blessed are the magnificent homes, with their gardens and flowers and art, for they are sources of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

For a man to have money, even in large sums, is not an inconsistent thing. We preach against covetousness, and you know we do, in the pulpit, and oftentimes preach against it so long and use the terms about ‘‘filthy lucre”’ so extremely that Christians get the idea that when we stand in the pulpit we believe it is wicked for any man to have money—until the collection-basket goes around, and then we almost swear at the people because they don’t give more money. Oh, the inconsistency of such doctrines as that!

Thou hypocrite, denouncing money in one breath yet filling baskets with it the next! You are whitewashed bank vaults, pristine on the outside but filled with Mammon on the inside, not that there is anything wrong with that.

Money is power, and you ought to be reasonably ambitious to have it. You ought because you can do more good with it than you could without it. Money printed your Bible, money builds your churches, money sends your missionaries, and money pays your preachers, and you would not have many of them, either, if you did not pay them.  The man who gets the largest salary can do the most good with the power that is furnished to him, if his spirit be right to use it for what it is given to him.

Man does not live by spirit alone, but by the power of money too. All things are possible for Mammon. Mammon is my shepherd; I shall not want.

You ought to have money, and if you can honestly attain unto riches, it is your Christian and godly duty to do so. It is an awful mistake to think you must be awfully poor in order to be pious. Some men say, “‘Don’t you sympathize with the poor people?’’ Of course I do; I sympathize with the poor, but the number of poor who are to be sympathized with is very small. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins, to help him when God would still continue a just punishment, is to do wrong, and we do that more than we help those who are deserving. While we should sympathize with God’s poor—that is, those who cannot help themselves— let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings, or by the shortcomings of someone else.

Blessed are some of the poor, for they deserve sympathy, but most of them get what they deserve.

A gentleman gets up back there, and says, “Don’t you think there are some things in this world that are better than money?” I do, but I am talking about money now. Of course, there are some things higher than money, some things higher and grander than gold. Love is the grandest thing on God’s earth, but fortunate the lover who has plenty of money. Money is power, money is force, money will do good as well as harm. In the hands of good men and women it could accomplish, and it has accomplished, good. I heard a man get up in a prayer-meeting in our city and thank the Lord he was ‘‘one of God’s poor.” Well, I wonder what his wife thinks about that? She earns all the money that comes into that house, and he smokes a part of that on the veranda. I don’t want to see any more of the Lord’s poor of that kind, and I don’t believe the Lord does.

Thou shalt not smoke on the veranda unless thou hast money to burn.

Thus endeth the sermon.

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Russell Conwell - Wikipedia

Another Pleasant Valley Thursday

{Greed, gender, dystopian gloom, and hopeful pessimism: bring it on!}

At Current Affairs, which he founded and which he edits, Nathan J. Robinson debunks the idea that either the Invisible Hand of the Market, the Law of Supply and Demand, or any other impersonal economic force drives capitalism; capitalism is fueled by greed. As Robinson explains:

We must reject the idea coming from many wealthy people that, as Jag Bhalla puts it, “unbridled greed is just simple human nature.” (Bhalla says we have accepted a “greedocracy.”) We ought to acknowledge the simple fact that those who try to get more than they need to live a life of basic comfort, have accumulated their luxuries because they have deprived others along the way. This has been done by choice. Everyone could have had plenty, because there is plenty to go around, but decisions are made every day that prevent this outcome. Nobody makes the capitalist maximize profits, or pay their workers less than they pay themselves, and “the market made me do it” is an excuse that should make socialists highly dubious. It is crucial for socialists to understand that human beings are not mere billiard balls whose moral choices are dictated by the systems we are in. We have agency, and that agency confers responsibility. There are no excuses for enriching one’s self and exploiting others.

Is Capitalism Built on Greed? ❧ Current Affairs

In “Why Is the Right So Horrified by Drag Queens?” Nathan Robinson also weighs in on the latest moral panic on the Right. “Pedophiles” and “groomers” are the insults du jour, and conservatives are horrified that children are exposed to “men in thongs,” which leads one to assume that conservatives believe children should not be allowed to go to a public beach. Robinson observes:

It is very interesting that the Right, strict defenders of parental rights when it comes to preventing children from exposure to critical race theory, suddenly starts talking about using criminal law and taking people’s children away if parents take their kids to a drag show. Here we see something fundamental about right-wing politics exposed: it is not actually, despite the endless use of the word “freedom,” about freedom at all. It is about freedom within a very narrowly prescribed range. The moment men start wearing women’s clothes and dancing, we must cover the children’s eyes in case they get infected with unconventional notions about gender roles.

One is tempted to ask, what are these people so afraid of? The obvious answer is, everyone and everything that is not like them.

Why Is the Right So Horrified By Drag Queens? ❧ Current Affairs

At Aeon, Audrey Borowski discusses a modern social philosopher so obscure that even I had not heard of him. Gunther Anders (1902--1992), Borowski informs us, was “a German philosopher and essayist of Jewish descent, whose work bears testimony to some of the 20th century’s major disasters and their effect on the intellectual landscape of the time. Anders set out to theorize those disasters and the impact of technology on modernity and the human condition, in particular technology’s gradual domination over all aspects of human activity – the commodification, dehumanization and even derealization of the world that had resulted from that domination.”

In the shadow of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Anders—like his friend Theodor Adorno—grew ever more skeptical of the Enlightenment and the belief in “progress” that it spawned. His view, as Borowski explains, was that “Much of the recent technological takeover of our lives has been underpinned by the myth that it was synonymous with emancipation and progress – a conceit it was suspect to challenge even while that very imperative further contributed to the growth of inequalities, the destruction of nature and the waste of resources. ‘The real terrorists’ in this regard are the so-called experts in charge who were as ignorant as us but ‘who continuously frighten our common world with the threat of destruction.’ Rather than ‘enlightening’ man, the progress of technology had ended up further anchoring his obsolescence and placing him outside of history.”

Those who find this perspective too gloomy can be cheered by the fact that hardly any of Anders’ writings, including his two-volume The Obsolescence of Humankind, are available in English. Those who find Anders’ view of modernity thought-provoking can thank Audrey Borowski for calling the man to our attention.

Günther Anders, a forgotten prophet for the 21st century? | Aeon Essays

At Aeon, Mara van der Lugt considers the eternal question: Is life’s glass half-empty or half-full? Which is to say, ought we to side with pessimists or with optimists? “Just as the pessimists believe that optimists are deceived in their insistence on the goods of life, so too the optimists think the pessimists’ eyes are skewed towards the bad: each side accuses the other of not having the right vision. The question thus becomes: what is the right vision?”

In her entertaining and wide-ranging essay (from Voltaire to Greta Thunberg), van der Lugt rejects both sunny optimism and gloomy pessimism in favor of a third stance which she calls “hopeful pessimism,” of which she finds Thunberg an exemplar:

If there is hope, it’s a dark, bleak hope, full of rage and grief and pain for what is being lost – but infused also with insistence, perdurance, determination. It is clear that this activist, at least, will continue to strive even if her efforts are doomed to fail. This is not optimism: if anything, it is a hopeful pessimism, and I believe it has every right to be called a virtue in our age.

Hopeful pessimism breaks through the rusted dichotomy of optimism vs pessimism. It is this attitude, this perspective that is exemplified in Thunberg and other figures who by their example give an affirmative answer to the question posed by Paul Kingsnorth: ‘Is it possible to see the future as dark and darkening further; to reject false hope and desperate pseudo-optimism without collapsing into despair?’

In short, the philosopher we need today is Yogi Berra, who famously said “It ain’t over till it’s over.” He is also reputed to have said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” which applies perfectly to our contemporary American predicament.

In these dark times, the virtue we need is hopeful pessimism | Aeon Essays

Wednesday with Pascal: A Utopian Design

{Having previously featured an economic critique of the Old Testament prophets (who allegedly helped ruin the economy of biblical Israel by their calls for redistribution of wealth), Pascal the Russian blue cat (with a dollop of Jewish ancestry) here presents a strikingly different analysis by the late, esteemed Jacob Neusner, unofficially the world’s most prolific author (900 books written or edited).}

“When we examine the political economics of the Mishnah,” wrote Jacob Neusner (in The Economics of the Mishnah), “we gain a clearer picture of the power of economics to serve in the expression and detailed exposition of a utopian design for society.” ¹ We have, in that sentence alone, a significant departure from the numbers-crunching perspective of Professor Morris Silver (Prophets and Markets). Professor Silver examined Old Testament “social justice” prophets in the context of a market economy and found them wanting; Jacob Neusner, however, believed that ancient Israel’s economy was part and parcel of a larger social vision, one he deemed to have been “utopian”. 

The nature of this utopian vision was clear, wrote Neusner:

“In point after point in their system, the framers of the Mishnah declare one conviction. It is that the Israelite world—Jews in Palestine/Israelites in the land of Israel—forms a world unto itself, a world of enduring stasis, in which no significant change will disturb the stable society.”

A static utopia implies, of course, a state of perfection, from which any change can only be for the worse. “This [temporal] world order,” Neusner explained, “attains that enduring, indeed eternal, stasis because it serves to complement and complete that other world order, the one in heaven. In the complementarity and wholeness attained through the union of two opposites—heaven and earth—on the sacred time of the Sabbath and in festivals, creation is renewed; on that account, creation in all its completeness and perfection once more provokes in God the benediction and sanctification of the creator such as the original excellence of creation had elicited.”

Israel was to be a holy people, not necessarily an economic powerhouse. That “fundamental conviction,” Neusner continued, “emphasized the true, intrinsic worth and value of things, the perfect balance in transactions, so that each party to an exchange gets worth equivalent to what he gives, and both parties emerge precisely at the same level of worth as at the outset. The perfection of the steady-state economy is only way in which the systemic principle is expressed in the details of everyday exchange.” Market transactions were not to enable one party to benefit at the expense of the other, and they were conducted under the same protective canopy of justice and equality under which YHWH had placed Israel.

Moreover, wrote Neusner, “The Israelite government was supposed to preserve that state of perfection which society everywhere attains and expresses in economic and other material transactions. The purpose of civil penalties was to restore the injured party to his prior condition, so far as this is possible, rather than merely to penalize the aggressor.” Justice was primarily restorative rather than punitive—at least in the vision of the Mishnah. ²   

In market economies (like ours), there is no such thing as “intrinsic value”; the value of any item is determined by what consumers will pay for it. In the society of the Mishnah, however, “true value means that a given object has an intrinsic worth which, in the course of a transaction, must be paid. Usury (the charging of interest) was treated as fraud, as the violation of true value. Usury means profit; any pretense that money increases or has become ‘more’ than what it was violates the conception of true value.” If I borrow an old hammer from my neighbor, I should not owe him an entire set of brand-new tools in return. According to Neusner, “Even when real estate was divided, it had to be done with full attention to the rights of all concerned, so that one party did not gain at the expense of another.”

Neusner frankly acknowledged what critics would surely leap to point out: “The economics of the Mishnah is not an economics at all. Rather, in the Mishnah’s system, economics is embedded in an encompassing structure to which economic considerations are subordinated. Economics can emerge as an autonomous and governing theory only when disembedded from politics and society. Economic institutions, such as the market, the wage system, a theory of private ownership, and the like, in no way could have served the system of the Mishnah because the system builders viewed nothing in its own terms but saw all things in the framework of the social system they proposed to construct.” ³    

The lesson here is not simply that Professor Morris Silver erred in criticizing Amos, Isaiah, Hosea, and other prophets of YHWH, all of whom were less interested in Israel’s Gross Domestic Product than in its practice of justice, mercy, and compassion. The lesson is that part of what ails the modern West is that we have allowed economics to be divorced from any larger social vision, utopian or otherwise; we have made profit an end unto itself rather than a means towards achieving a more perfect social order. There is no doubt that the all-but-unrestrained pursuit of profit has led to prosperity—but what is our affluence for? What is our economy for? If we’re so rich, why aren’t we happy?

Economics, wrote Jacob Neusner, is widely considered to be “the theory of rational action with regard to scarcity”. Fair enough, but perhaps we ought to consider what kinds of “scarcity” require our action. We can hardly claim to be suffering from a scarcity of “things”—possessions, objects, stuff. On the other hand, it is not difficult to see that there exists a dire scarcity of justice, mercy, compassion, neighborly love, and so on. To quote Richard Thompson: “Some of the people are poor in the purse, / they don’t have the cash at the ready; / and some of the people are crippled and lame, / they can’t seem to stand true and steady. / Some of the people are poor in the head, / like the simpleton fools that you see; / but most of the people are poor in the heart, / and it’s the worst kind of poor, the worst kind of poor you can be.”

An economics of money alone misses the mark; the scarcest resources of all are the very things money can’t buy.

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Jacob Neusner - Wikipedia

Jacob Neusner bibliography - Wikipedia

¹ The Mishnah is, in Neusner’s words, “the initial statement of the Judaism of the dual Torah”.  The older Torah was the written law given to Moses on Sinai; it was then augmented over the centuries by the oral laws and interpretations developed by Jewish rabbis and scholars.  Mishnah - Wikipedia

² This is neither the time nor the place to argue whether God’s treatment of sinful mankind, as recorded in Genesis, met the standards of the Mishnah. YHWH was the God of Israel; he was powerful in the extreme, but no one said he was perfect.

³ One should add, “according to the instructions they believed they had received from YHWH.”

Wednesday with Pascal: Prophets and Loss

{Pascal was sniffing around a stack of books on “Christus Victor” theology when he found an unexpected, albeit unrelated, treasure. He shares his reaction to it here, at some length.}

“They do not know how to do right,” declares the LORD, “who store up in their fortresses what they have plundered and looted. Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” (Book of Amos)

When it comes to theology and scriptural exegesis: Lord, I do love a crank, an eccentric, a lone voice crying in the wilderness. And while it may be impertinent of me to describe as a “crank” a man so credentialed and distinguished as Professor Morris Silver, allow me to present my evidence. ¹

In 1983, Morris Silver published Prophets and Markets: The Political Economy of Ancient Israel. The book was neither a best-seller nor a critical favorite, though even reviewers who opposed Silver’s thesis acknowledged his indefatigable multi-discipline research into his subject. “Silver's book will be useful to many because of the wealth of material he has collected,” one reviewer grudgingly conceded; another praised Silver’s “meticulousness and logic,” calling the book “a vivid example of how powerful the tenets of economic behavior can be in ordering even limited evidence.” A study of ancient Israel’s political economy might stir mild academic interest and/or disagreement, but it does not seem to be the stuff of major controversy.

Until, that is, you look at Silver’s main thesis:

The writing prophets of the eighth-seventh centuries—Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, Zephaniah, and Ezekiel—succeeded in committing the rulers of Israel and Judah to welfarist reforms. With the support of the state’s armed might they unleashed a “prophetic revolution.” The ill-conceived policies severely damaged the economy and morale. Traditional historiography holds that Israel and Judah fell because the prophetic counsel was ignored. In fact, whatever its presumed moral virtue, the advice of the classical prophets was destructive from the standpoint of economic affluence and political strength. In the end, the prophets did not succeed in transforming the Israelite. Since they understood neither the man nor Israelite society, they succeeded only in making the former miserable while destroying the latter.

If you wonder why economics is sometimes called “the dismal science,” consider Morris Silver’s audacity in besmirching the reputation of the hallowed Old Testament prophets; consider how, as an economist, Profess Silver blithely dismissed the “presumed moral virtue” of the prophets’ declarations, as though calls to moral betterment were a mere distraction from the business of piling up treasure on earth.

Mustering economic and archaeological data I am not qualified to assess, Silver concluded that “By the beginning of the eighth century BCE, Israel and Judah [were experiencing] a glittering era of prosperity and power.” Why, then, did buzzkills like Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah choose that time to denounce the nation in the name of (and at the command of) its God? What is so wrong with prosperity and power, even if somewhat unequally distributed? According to an earlier book by Silver (Affluence, Altruism, and Atrophy: The Decline of Welfare States), “Altruism or the taste for helping others is one of the ‘higher needs’ described by the psychologist Abraham H. Maslow. [Research and behavioral evidence] suggest that affluence increases the demand for altruistic consumption, which often takes the form of state actions to improve the lot of the poor.” ²

By “altruistic consumption,” Silver meant “indulging in the senseless luxury of trying to help others”. In other words, the prophets were “social reformers,” over-educated and out-of-touch elites who, consumed by guilt over their own privileged lives and/or worried about potential social unrest (which they helped to stoke), demanded that the state implement policies to achieve “social justice”.

Is any of this beginning to sound familiar? Writing in the early Eighties, Silver was, for all intents and purposes, composing a revisionist gospel of Reaganomics. He accused ancient Israel’s elite of “talking to itself” through the medium of prophecy. “The struggle for social justice [in ancient Israel],” wrote Silver, was an effort by “the wealthy, both royal and non-royal, with the guidance of the prophets, to employ state power to nullify the laws of economics and society. These well-meaning but uncomprehending efforts backfired disastrously.” ³

As Jesus said, “The poor will always be with you, so why bother?” In Silver’s analysis, the prophets—reformers brimming with misplaced compassion and wielding well-intentioned blueprints for social reconstruction (“fundamental transformation,” as it were)—were the bane of Israel and the proximate cause of its downfall. ⁴ Barry Bandstra and John Lunn summarized Silver’s charge: “The governments of Israel and Judah responded to the calls of the prophets for land reform and other measures to aid the poor, and the reforms weakened the economies of the two nations, ultimately leading to Israel’s defeat by the Assyrians and Judah’s defeat by the Babylonians.”

“Silver’s hypothesis,” Bandstra and Lunn went on to say, “questions the use of the Old Testament prophets in evaluating modern societies. Following the ideas of Amos or Isaiah would harm rather than help the poor. Silver’s analysis upends the views of most Christians about the prophets,” they concluded. But maybe those views deserve to be upended, based as they are on flawed economic reasoning and on false assumptions about human nature? Incentives matter: give a man a fish, as Paul Ryan would tell you, and he’ll stay in his hammock all day long.

In the opinion of Morris Silver, to take at face value what the Old Testament prophets had to say about Israel’s economy and society would be “like writing a history of the US economy relying solely on the opinions of Ralph Nader.” Moreover, “From the perspective of the prophets (and of many modern social reformers), any economic transaction between a rich person and a poor person [qualified as] robbery, whether it was legal and uncoerced or not.” To hear the likes of Amos and Micah tell it, there is such a thing as systemic injustice, what we might call society’s “preferential option for the rich”. Professor Silver will have none of that. The Old Testament prophets, by preaching a God of social justice rather than cultic or national solidarity, actively sought to undermine both those latter elements; “the ordinary Israelite could not be converted to a new religion of social justice and social reform until he had been robbed of the peace of mind and the sense of belonging provided by the ancient religion.”

Silver did not hesitate to draw the obvious comparison: “The Israelite society portrayed by Amos and his successors suffers terribly from severe oppression of the poor, injustice, commercial dishonesty, and official corruption, all of which are linked to the lifestyle of a well-to-do middle class. The central image is one that is familiar to modern Americans, namely the blight of poverty amid affluence. There can be no doubt,” Silver wrote, “that the prophets were social reformers. For them, social injustice is neither private nor inevitable; it can and must be eliminated by a resolute act of social will. And the will—that is, the necessary force—is to be supplied by the state.”

In case the reader has not yet gotten the message, Professor Silver spells it out: “Modern liberalism is the closest contemporary analog to the program of the prophets. Motivated by idealism or personal ambition, [liberals] seek, with the support of the affluent, to commit the rulers to programs of social amelioration and regeneration.” He allows that “the prophets were authoritarians, not social democrats. For them, extremism in defense of social justice is the supreme virtue, while the passive acceptance of injustice is a vice. At times the prophets seem to play the role of revolutionaries and their oracles have the ring of sedition.” Nonetheless, the parallels with liberals today are clear.

Even apart from its contemporary political implications, Silver’s analysis did not persuade most reviewers. “Not being a biblical scholar,” wrote one, “Silver makes many mistakes, and his lack of training in biblical studies [inevitably results in] a lack of method.” Bandstra and Lunn accused Silver of “misusing the models he employs to draw unwarranted conclusions” and to “claim ‘facts’ that are not in evidence in either the Scriptures or the archaeological record.” 

Morris Silver had anticipated criticisms, especially those which would dismiss his work as “a conservative polemic against liberal social reformers.” He lamented that “modern liberal-minded attitudes,” along with “presumptions of a Marxist-Leninist character,” had led to inaccurate (or meretricious) assessments of ancient Israel’s economic conditions. His research led Silver to insist that “there is no reason to believe that the [Israelite] poor became poorer”; rather, “there is abundant reason to conclude that an appreciable number of Israelite citizens became men of means during the eighth and seventh centuries BCE.” A rising tide lifts all arks!

Silver’s thesis, of course, hinged in part on the claim that the prophets had significant influence and that their social critiques were translated into government policy. Again, Bandstra and Lunn: “The evidence from Hebrew scriptures does not provide an answer to whether Israel or Judah engaged in land reform and other welfarist actions.” For that matter, they add, “Although the biblical evidence is not straightforward, Silver utilizes the most skeptical school of thought regarding the scriptures’ reliability.” Not to overstate the obvious: “Silver’s characterization of the prophets is not typical for biblical scholars.” Silver himself, in a 1995 publication, described his proposition as ‘startling,’ which did not mean he intended to retract it.

Reading through the work of both Silver and his critics, one is amazed at the amount of dogged research that goes into this level of scholarship. Interpreting ancient documents written in archaic languages, correlating them with other contemporaneous materials, sifting through archaeological finds, and trying to piece together fragments of a culture distant from us in so many ways: all that is an extraordinary undertaking. No wonder scholars disagree—there is so much to disagree about, and so many ways to disagree about it.

That said, and given my own modern liberal-minded bias, I would like simply to conclude that Morris Silver was wrong about ancient Israel and about the Old Testament prophets; but I have, if I am being honest, no grounds for doing so. Silver’s thesis goes against the grain and against everything I have ever read or heard about Amos, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Micah, and the other prophets; their words continue to inspire and to echo through the millennia, and I for one would rather not think of them as the mistaken proclamations of economically illiterate bleeding-heart reformers.

After all, man does not live by the “laws of economics” alone, but by the sharing of both bread and sorrow, of weal and of woe. Morris Silver’s market-based critique of prophetic calls for social justice may be economically defensible, but it will not get an “Amen” from me; as for me and my house, we will take our business elsewhere.

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Prophets and Markets: The Political Economy of Ancient Israel. By Morris Silver.

Prophets and Markets: The Political Economy of Ancient Israel | Morris Silver - Academia.edu

Markets and Prophets: An Examination of the Silver Hypothesis* | Barry Bandstra - Academia.edu

¹ Morris Silver is Professor Emeritus of Economics at City College of New York. A member of the American Economics Association and a veteran of the U.S. military, Silver holds a Doctorate in Philosophy from Columbia University.

² According to Doug Bandstra and John Lunn, Silver argues that “Political altruism tends to become perverse, weakening the economy and the society, in part because it is based on a taste for ‘doing good’ even when the results may not be good. Silver adds, ‘Altruism becomes dangerous because of the range of policy options available, the kinds of options selected, and above all the massive scale and persistence with which the attempt to improve society is carried through.’” As Silver explained the evidence, the prophets’ calls for economic justice were “perverse” and even harmful to the very people whose cause they claimed to champion.

³ Writing in 1983, Silver could have been providing a template for future works by the likes of Charles Murray (Losing Ground) and Marvin Olasky (The Tragedy of American Compassion). While the Invisible Hand of the Market is adept at turning self-interest into social gains, it seems to be all thumbs when it comes to spinning the straw of compassion into the gold of prosperity (see my forthcoming monograph, “The Rumpelstiltskin Economy”.) In fairness, the Invisible Hand is, after all, only a hand; maybe we need to give it an Invisible Heart?  

⁴ This is entirely irrelevant, but the online dictionary (“Oxford Languages”), while defining “bane” as “a cause of great distress or annoyance,” employs the following example: “The bane of the decorator is the long, narrow hall.” I must admit that, of all the baneful things in the world, that one would never have occurred to me. 

Thus says a voice in my head to which no one else is privy:

"Thou shalt not bite the hand that feeds thee, nor kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Neither is there such a thing as a free lunch. Those who do not work shall not eat." 

 

 

The Shylock Syndrome

{Apropos of nothing in particular: In what can only be described as a shocking revelation, it turns out the whole “Jews-as-greedy-moneylenders” stereotype—what we might call “the Shylock Syndrome”—started because of medieval Christian prohibitions against usury. As commerce required loans and extensions of credit, it seemed only logical for Christian authorities to delegate such sinful financial transactions to Jews, who were going to Hell anyway for having killed Jesus. Besides which, Jewish farmland was frequently seized by Christians, and Jewish laborers were barred from membership in Christian guilds; so what could a poor Jew do, when not sacrificing Christian babies, except take over the European banking system?}

Jerry Muller’s The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought focuses not so much on the development of market capitalism as on the gradual changes in Western attitudes towards commerce and towards the values associated with it. Medieval Europe inherited the earliest Christian theologians’ denunciations of wealth; Mammon was a rival god, and the influence of money was not to be trusted. That traditional antipathy— expressed legally by, most famously, the prohibition of usury (charging interest on loans)—became hard to maintain when material want began to give way to a modicum of prosperity and when scarcity gave way to the first inklings of abundance.

As Muller documents, the need to accommodate the growth of commerce led to further demonization of the already maligned European Jews:

New agricultural surpluses made greater commerce possible, and hence made the economic function of lending money more important. A mortal sin of theology became a mortal necessity of commercial life. ‘Those who engage in usury go to hell; those who fail to engage in usury fall into poverty,’ wrote a 14^th-century Italian commentator. One method by which the Church resolved this dilemma, beginning in the twelfth century, was to prevent the evil of Christian usury by allowing Jews to engage in that forbidden activity. Jews were not subject to the prohibitions of [Church] law, and they were condemned to damnation in any case because of their repudiation of Christ. Pope Nicholas V, for example, preferred ‘that this people [the Jews] should perpetrate usury than that Christians engage in it with one another.’   

The results were good for commerce but predictably catastrophic for the Jews:

Thus began an association of moneymaking with the Jews, an association that would further taint attitudes towards commerce among Christians. In early medieval iconography, money was often associated with excrement and portrayed as filthy and disgusting; Jews themselves were often depicted as foul-smelling. Pictorial representations of avarice often bore standard attributes of Jews.

Even the saintliest of Christians were susceptible to anti-Jewish stereotyping and bigotry:

St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the leader of the Cistercian monastic order, chastised Christian moneylenders as ‘baptized Jews’. In order to protect Christian moneylenders who provided them with funds, the kings of France and England created the legal fiction that these moneylenders (both lay and clerical) were to be considered Jews for legal purposes and thus subject exclusively to royal authority. The symbolic identification of the forms of capitalism as ‘Jewish’ would have a long life.

The European Jews, of course, had no say in any of this:

The Jews of Europe, who had once earned their living from farming and handicrafts, were transformed by the thirteenth century into an increasingly mercantile population with an emphasis on the lending of money. A series of factors pushed Jews into the money trade and made it comparatively attractive to them. Jews were forced out of landowning by a Church concerned to collect ecclesiastical tithes on land, which might no longer be paid if the land fell into Jewish hands. The growth of guilds in the later Middle Ages pushed Jews out of crafts by exclusionary policies that restricted membership to Christians. Since Jewish settlements were made insecure by their dependence on the toleration of Christian nobles and monarchs, Jews were attracted to movable property, especially precious metals and gems, which could be easily concealed and transported.

There were compensations, however, such as having more time to study Torah:

Jews were also drawn to commerce as an indirect result of their religious beliefs, which put a premium on devotion to the study of Torah. Earning one’s living through commerce left more time for such valued pursuits than did an agricultural or an artisanal livelihood. Moreover, because Jews were scattered across Europe and Asia but shared a legal code and a language of discourse (Hebrew), they were positioned to act as traders over wide areas. ¹

Jewish moneylenders performed a necessary function, only to be resented and castigated for it. The high interest rates they charged—exorbitant rates, by our standards—reflected both “the scarcity of capital in the medieval economy and the high risks incurred by moneylenders, whose loans were often canceled under public pressure and whose assets were frequently confiscated.”  As Muller notes, “The special role of Jews as moneylenders made Jews both indispensable to the political authorities, which tolerated and protected them, and odious to parts of the Christian population,” ² which persecuted and marginalized them, with the occasional full-scale pogrom whenever civic tensions required an outlet or whenever natural misfortunes (fire, flood, famine, plague) demanded a scapegoat.

History is instructive, if not edifying. In any honest telling, modern prosperity was built on the backs of slaves, conscripted laborers, indigenous peoples, and despised minorities (including women), all of whom died for our comfort if not for our sins. Sometimes I wonder how any of us sleep at night.          

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¹ And thus to be objects of enmity wherever they went and to be vilified as “rootless cosmopolitans”.

² By “parts of the Christian population,” Muller presumably means “almost the entirety of the Christian population”.