Ethics

References ‘How we came to be living this way’ in Singer, P. (1997). How Are We to Live' Ethics in an Age of Self-interest. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House. 65-98 How we came to be living this way A perverse instinct In America in the eighties, the ethos of money-making reached a new historical high point, both in the amounts of money that were made in a very short time, and in the openness with which the goal of money-making was pursued. Such a society does not develop from nothing in a decade. Its foundations had been carefully laid over centuries. If we are to understand what went wrong in the eighties, and what the broader lessons of that decade are for the pursuit of the good life, we need to be aware of these foundations. The ideas that grew to dominate life in the United States have now spread to influence, to a greater or lesser degree, all of the developed world. They beckon onwards what we call the ‘developing’ world as well. The most celebrated essay on the origins of the capitalist mind-and still one of the most illuminating- is Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in 1904. Weber, a German sociologist, had read widely about Western and Easter religious, ethical and economic life, ancient as well as modern. He found something unique about the spirit of capitalism. Not that it was unusually greedy-on the contrary, wrote Weber, ‘the greed of the Chinese Mandarin, the old Roman aristocrat, or the modern peasant, can stand up to any comparison’. What is distinctive about capitalism is the idea of acquisition for its own sake as an ethically sanctioned way of life. Before the modern era, money and possessions were valued only for what one could do with them. At a minimum level money and possessions meant that one could afford food, shelter and clothing; at a level of greater abundance, money and possessions signified a grand estate, servants, lavish entertainment, travel, perhaps also the ability to attract lovers or gain political power. In the capitalist era money is valued for its own sake, not just for what it can buy. At the higher levels of income, the natural order of things goes into reverse: instead of money being valued for the things it buys, things become valuable for the amount of money they cost. Van Gogh’s Irises would have been much less interesting to the wealthy Australian Alan Bound if he could have bought it for half a million dollars. The fact that he had to pay nearly a hundred times that figure made Irises the most expensive painting in the world, and owning the most expensive painting in the world was what Bond, who knows very little about art, wanted when he was at the height of his success. (Now, being bankrupt, Bond might settle for less.) For capitalist man, the sole purpose of one’s life’s work is, in Weber’s words, ‘to sink into the grave weighed down with a great material load of money and goods’. We do not acquire goods in order to live, instead we live in order to acquire goods. Ivan Boesky had a T-shirt on which was printed: ‘He who owns the most when he dies, wins’. That neatly sums up the attitude that Weber has in mind. In a pre=capitalist society, Weber says, to get this the wrong way round, making acquisition for its own sake the goal, would be unworthy and contemptible, ‘the product of a perverse instinct’. What changes did the development of capitalism make in our values and goals, in our conception of what it is to make a success of our lives' To appreciate the differences capitalism has made to our attitude to acquisition and money-making we need t go back to the roots of Western ideas. Aristotle on the art of making money The origins of Western ways of thinking are to be found in two places: in ancient Greece, and in the Judeo-Christian tradition. If we turn first to Greece, we find a vigorous philosophical debate about the real nature of the good life; but none of the leading philosophers taking part in this debate see success in terms of the acquisition of money or material goods. When Plato, in The Republic, sketched an ideal community, he made it consist of three classes, in which only the lowest class-the farmers and artisans-would work for profit and accumulate property. The rulers and guardians were not even to own their own homes, but were to live communally. Free of the corrupting effect of money, they would be better able to rule wisely and justly. This utopian proposal bore no relationship to Athenian civic life. The philosophy of Aristotle was more in tune with human beings as they were in his times, and still are today. Under Plato’s idea of common ownership, Aristotle objected, people will not share equally in the work that needs to be done. Those who work hard will resent others who ‘labour little and receive or consume much’. He also recognised the pleasures of ownership, and considered them legitimate, for ‘the love of self is a feeling implanted by nature and not given in vain, although selfishness is rightly censured; this, however, is not the mere love of self, but the lover of self in excess, like the miser’s love of money… Consistently with this distinction between legitimate love of self and selfishness, Aristotle distinguished ‘the natural art of acquisition’ from an excessive desire for money. The natural art of acquisition is a form of ‘household management’, that is, providing the household with the means for life. To this Aristotle fixes no definite limit, but implies that we can develop a sense of what is proper for the needs of the household. Money-making can be a means to the end of providing the household with what it needs, but because it is only a means to an end, it is limited by the nature of the end itself. With this proper form of money-making Aristotle contrasts a different kind of behaviour: …some persons are led to believe that making money is the object of household management, and the whole idea of their lives is that they ought either to increase their money without limit, or at any rate not to lose it…some men turn every quality or art into a means of making money; this they conceive to be the end, and to the promotion of the end all things must contribute. Such people, Aristotle says, have mistaken the means for the end. They believe that money is wealth. To show that this cannot be correct, Aristotle points to the fable of King Midas, who greedily wished that everything he touched should turn to gold, and starved when food turned to gold in his mouth. How can something be wealth, Aristotle asks rhetorically, if you can have it in super-abundance, and yet perish from hunger' For Aristotle, to acquire goods to meet one’s needs is natural, and thus ‘the art of making money out of fruits and animals is always natural’; but to acquire money for its own sake is unnatural and erroneous. Trading as a business or means of making money Aristotle thought to be unnatural, and ‘justly censured’ because it is ‘a mode by which men gain from one another’. Another way of putting this would be to say: when we grow crops or raise animals we make our gain from nature, adding to the store of goods available for human beings; whereas when we buy a product and resell it for more than we paid for it, we have not added to the value of the product. We make our gain from others, who are prepared to buy our goods at more than we paid for them. Aristotle added that the most hated sort of trade is earning money from lending money, for this Makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural use of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest…Wherefore of all modes of making money this is the most unnatural. This idea came to be known as Aristotle’s doctrine of the sterility of money. For animals and plants to increase is natural, and for us to make use of this is also natural. But money is sterile, and to make money from its increase is unnatural. Can a merchant be pleasing to God' When we turn to the other major source of Western ideas, the Jewish and Christian tradition, we find that the ancient Hebrew Scriptures also condemn charging interest on loans, but they put forward, in this respect as in many others, a tribal ethic, suited to a small group of people living amidst other groups. Thus in Deuteronomy we read: Thou shalt not lend money upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of anyting that is lent upon usury: unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury. When, much later, Christianity arose among the Jewish people, it proposed a universal ethic. Everyone knows that Jesus urged us to love our enemies; less well known today is the fact that he also told us to stop charging them interest: But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest. This injunction against seeking interest from anyone is consistent with Jesus’s attitude to money-making in general, most famously illustrated by his casting out of the temple of Jerusalem not only the money-changers but ‘all of them that sold and bought in the temple’. In doing so he said to those he was evicting that the temple should be a house of prayer ‘but ye have made it a den of thieves’. Did he mean that to profit from trade is a form of theft' Jesus’s attitude to earthly riches is equally well known, thanks to his response to the rich man who asked him what he had to do in order to inherit eternal life. Although the man had, from his youth, observed all the commandments, Jesus told him that this was not enough: ‘One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor,and thou shalt have treasure in heaven’. And when the disciples were astonished at this, he said to them: ‘Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. In keeping with these teachings, the early Christian communities appear to have held what little property they had in common. The teachings of the Church Fathers were consistent with this. The giving of alms to the poor was not a matter of mercy, but of justice, for the earth was seen as belonging to all people, and no-one had a right to more than he or she needed. The fact that the apostle Matthew, who had been a money-changer, did not return to his former trade after the resurrection of Jesus, whereas Peter the fisherman did, was noticed by Gregory, who in a memorable passage said that just as there are menial tasks that soil the body, like cleaning sewers, so there are others that stain the soul, and money-changing is one of them. Not surprisingly, then, the Christian tradition was unfriendly to money-making. In the fifth century, Pope Leo the Great wrote to the bishop of Narbonne that it is difficult to avoid sin in the course of buying and selling; this statement was quoted over and over again, and became part of canon law, the law of the Church. So did anther oft-quoted dictum: ‘Seldom or never can a man who is a merchant be pleasing to God’. In the early twelfth century Honorius of Autun wrote a theological dialogue in which a disciple asks the master about the prospects of salvation for those living in various ways. When asked about the chances for merchants, the master says that they have only a slight chance of being saved, because virtually everything they have they get by fraud, lies and selfish desire for gain. Those who till the soil, on the other hand, have a much better chance of being saved, because they live simply and feed the people of God by the sweat of their brows. As commerce developed in Christian Europe, the sin of usury received repeated condemnation. In introducing his scholarly study of the debate over usury in the Catholic Church, John Noonan points out that from our present perspective …we find it impossible to imagine that usury could once have been defined as ‘profit on a loan’, that the vice of usury could have implicated every part of Western society, and that concern with his culpability of it could have plagued every European businessman and landowner. Yet so it was, for at least five centuries. In 1139 the Lateran Council condemned usury-by which it meant charging interest on money lent, no matter how moderate the rate might be-as ‘ignominious’. Forty years later another Lateran Council decided that usurers were to be excommunicated, denied Christian burial, and their gifts or offerings refused. By this time the definition of usury had been broadened to include charging a higher price to those who bought on credit than to those who paid cash. The Council of Vienne in 1311 extended excommunication to anyone who authorised or protected usury, including princes who protected usurers (many princes were prepared to pay interest if they needed money to wage a war, and they would then protect the money-lenders). The prohibition on usury also gave a fatal impetus to anti-Semitism: because Christians could not be money-lenders, this became a Jewish role; and the hatred felt for usury fuelled existing prejudices against the already despised ‘killers of Christ’. Some of the grounds for the condemnation of usury make an intriguing contrast with our present ways of thinking. One medieval theologian, Thomas of Chobham, found usury objectionable because the usurer wants to make a profit without any work at all and even while sleeping, which is against the teaching of the Lord: ‘You will earn your bread by the seat of your brow.’ Moreover, Thomas added, the usurer sells nothing that actually belongs to himself: he sells only time, which belongs to God. This made the usurer a robber, and indeed usury was often classified as a form of robbery or theft. But it was also frequently compared with prostitution, another occupation that was both well known and shameful. Thomas found the comparison unfair to the prostitute: she at least worked for her money, even if the work was ignominious. As if all this was not enough, another text points out that while the peasant lets his cattle rest on Sundays, the usurer does not let his money, which is his cattle, respect the day of rest. Tales of the wretched deaths of usurers were among the most popular themes for preachers during this period. So was what happened to the usurers beyond the grave. Bernard of Siena wrote this portrayal of the usurer on the Day of Judgement: All the saints and all the angels of paradise then cry out against him, saying, ‘To hell, to hell, to hell’. Also the heavens with their stars cry out, saying, ‘To the fire, to the fire, to the fire’. The planets also clamour: ‘To the depths, to the depths, to the depths’. Usury was linked with avarice. For the first Christian millennium, on most of the innumerable occasions on which some religious teacher thought it desirable to warn the faithful against falling into vice, it was pride, the vice of the aristocracy, that headed the list of vices. As commerce increased, however, the emphasis shifted. Avarice, the vice of the bourgeoisie, joined pride at the head of the lists. In 1043 Peter Damian stated unequivocally that avarice is the root of all evil, and advised the monk seeking to live a Christian life that ‘Christ and money do not go well together’. John of Salisbury wrote that there is no vice worse than avarice, and Bernard said simply that an avaricious man ‘is like hell’. Sculptors and painters, reflecting this current of opinion, personified avarice in their works and delighted in showing its punishment. Avarice was often a small crouching figure, mouth open, clutching moneybags; but it could also be a fat monster stooped down by the weight of a bag of money around the neck. In a sculpted relief on a church near Parma, such a figure is shown being punished. In addition to the money bag around the neck, a devil presses down the weight of a treasure chest that avarice carries on his back; for good measure, another devil yanks out his teeth with pincers. The porch of the monastic church of Moissac portrays the story told in Luke’s gospel, of Lazarus and the rich man. At the top, the rich man is enjoying a sumptuous banquet while Lazarus, poor and sick, lies on the ground outside. The rich man’s dogs lick his sores. But later Lazarus is nestled in the bosom of Abraham, while the rich man, no dead, is tormented by demons. Not only usury and avarice, but money itself came into bad odour=quite literally. A priest in Brittany was accused not only of stealing coins from his own collection money, but of smearing excrement on a cross. The bizarre second charge can only have arisen from some symbolic association between money and shit. That this association existed is confirmed by the practice, evident around the end of the thirteenth century, of illustrating manuscripts in the margins with pictures of humans (and also apes) defecating coins. The Judeo-Christian tradition received an infusion of new ideas in the thirteenth century, when the medieval scholastics rediscovered Aristotle. For many centuries, only his writings on logic had been known in Europe; now his Ethics and his Politics, preserved by Arabic scholars, were read, discussed, and incorporated in treatises on a wide range of ethical and social questions. Thomas Aquinas made it his life’s work to blend the views of Aristotle-whom he referred to simply as ‘The Philosopher’, as if there were no other philosopher worth discussing-with Christian teachings. In the area of economics, that was not difficult to do. When the scholastics read Aristotle they found that his view of the central issue of charging interest on loans was entirely in keeping with the prevailing view of the Church on usury. Aquinas also readily accepted Aristotle’s view of the limits to natural, rational and justifiable acquisition. This led him to a view that is a strikingly at odds with the generally accepted view of Aquinas as a staunch pillar of the prevailing order in a highly conservative Church. For Aquinas holds that there are some tings that we may acquire to satisfy our needs, and other things that, if we acquire and retain them, are surplus. In discussing the duty of giving alms he explains this concept as follows: On the part of the giver, it must be noted that he should give of his surplus, according to Luke xi.41: ‘That which remaineth, give alms’…since it is not possible for one individual to relieve the needs of all, we are not bound to relieve all who are in need, but only those who could not be succoured if we did not succour them. For in such cases the words of Ambrose apply, ‘Feed him that dies of hunger: if thou hast not fed him, thou hast slain him’. This is a radical doctrine; but there is more to come. Aquinas also poses the question: ‘Whether it is lawful to steal through stress of need'’ in answering, he draws from the natural law view of property an implication that is downright revolutionary: …whatever certain people have in superabundance is due, by natural law, to the purpose of succouring the poor. For this reason Ambrose says, and his words are embodied in the Decretals: ‘ It is the hungry man’s bread that you withhold, the naked man’s cloak that you store away, the money that you bury in the earth is the price of the poor man’s ransom and freedom’. Since, however, there are many who are in need, while it is impossible for all to be succoured by means of the same thing, each one is entrusted with the stewardship of his own things, so that out of them he may come to the aid of those who are in need. Nevertheless, if the need be so manifest and urgent that it is evident that the present need must be remedied by whatever means be at hand (for instance when a person is in some imminent danger and there is no other possible remedy), then it is lawful for a man to succour his own need by means of another’s property, by taking it either openly or secretly; not is this, properly speaking, theft or robbery…In a case of a like need a man may also take secretly another’s property in order to succour his neighbour in need. Property, in other words, has its limits. The institution of private property has a purpose, and if some own so much that they exceed the purpose of the institution, what they have in excess is a surplus for those who do not have enough. There is no just title to retain surplus wealth when others are in dire need. Those in danger of starvation, or those who are coming to their aid, are entitled to take from those with surplus wealth. Since the Christian use of the term ‘neighbour’ knows no geographical boundaries, we may take from the wealthy to help those suffering from famine anywhere in the world. To do so is neither theft nor robbery, because I am taking something that belongs, by natural law, to those in need rather than to those who already have more than enough. So from ancient Greece through the earliest Christian times until the end of the middle ages-in other words, for more than three-quarters of the history of Western civilisation-money-making in general was often under a stigma, and the use of money to make more money was particularly severely condemned. Yet the use of money to make more money is essential to capitalism, the form of economy that has dominated the Western world for the past two centuries at least, and is now without serious rival anywhere in the world. With the growth and eventual triumph of capitalism has come a very different attitude to money and acquisition. Luther’s calling and Calvin’s grace The increasing influence of the commercial class in medieval Europe put the traditional Christian view of money-making under increasing pressure; but it was the coming of the Protestant religion that blew the old view apart. Martin Luther saw the priesthood as corrupt, self-serving, and a barrier between the believer the God. This led him to reject the division of the Christian community into two castes, the priests (including by this term everyone in holy orders from the Pope down to the lowliest monk or nun) and the ordinary lay believers. Buttressing this division in Catholic Christianity was the notion that those in holy orders had a ‘calling’, merchants and peasants no less than religious leaders, and to succeed in our calling is a religious duty. Accordingly, it was necessary to abandon completely the old idea that to be a merchant is inherently discreditable and makes it difficult to be saved. No doubt abandoning this view also served the Protestant rebels very well. To resist the power of the established Church, they needed the support of the rising middle class, whose wealth and economic power were at that time in inverse proportion to the esteem they were granted by the Church. Of all the leaders of the Reformation, John Calvin went furthest in revising the traditional religious attitudes to the business classes. A distinctive (and repugnant) element of his theology is the doctrine of predestination according to which salvation cannot be earned by good deeds or even by a morally faultless life, but must be bestowed by divine grace-the ‘amazing grace’ of the song that is so popular with American congregations. For anyone who took the prospect of hellfire seriously, doubts about whether one did not did not have grace were a source of deep and enduring anxiety. This is the back-ground for the most salient fact about Calvin’s view of wealth: he saw worldly success as a mark of grace. Calvinists, then, reversed the previous Christian view: wealth, far from imperilling one’s chances of salvation, was a sign of salvation, and the m ore wealth one had, the more unmistakable the sign. Nor did Calvinists need to fear that in using money to make money, they were violating natural law. Sweeping aside the writings of scores of saints, popes and scholastics, Calvin ridiculed Aristotle’s doctrine that money is intended to be merely a means of exchange, and that it is therefore unnatural to use it in order to earn more money. A child can see, Calvin tells us, that money locked in a box is sterile. But those who borrow money do not do so in order to leave in idle. For example, if money buys a field, then money bears more money. Merchants borrow to increase their stock of goods, and for them money can, quite properly, be as fruitful as any other kind of goods. On this, of course, Calvin was quite right, the decline of the feudal economy, the rise of the towns, the greater freedom of craft workers and merchants to buy and sell where they chose, all contributed to a more complex economy in which money, in the form of capital, was an essential tool for earning one’s livelihood. So it was entirely reasonable to suggest that the doctrine prohibiting usury should be modified to take account of the growing use of money as capital. Equally convincing was Calvin’s scornful dismissal of the casuistry of the scholastics, who had by his time developed many exceptions to the rule against usury. The ingenuity of these commercial devices remained without parallel until the rise of tax-minimising accounting methods in the modern era. The exceptions to the laws against usury effectively allowed bankers to profit from lending money while pretending that they were doing something quite different. This, Calvin pointed out, is a trick that will not deceive God. But is usury truly sinful' Calvin went back to the Golden Rule: usury is sinful only if it hurts one’s neighbour. And when does usury hurt one’s neighbour' One should not, Calvin preached, expect a parson to know all the details of business. Let each believer’s conscience be his guide. Perhaps Calvin was here a little naïve about the nature of business and the efficacy of conscience, untutored by any specific principles, when it is up against the drive for profit; or possibly he was primarily interested in gaining the support of the business community for his teachings. In practice, as far as charging interest was concerned, ‘Let each believer’s conscience be his guide’ meant: anything goes. Luther’s idea of an earthly calling and Calvin’s view of worldly wealth spread rapidly in Protestant nations, and nowhere more rapidly than in England, under Queen Elizabeth I and her successors. During the late sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century, many English clergymen published works in which they assured their readers ‘that one served God by labouring ceaselessly in an earthly calling’. When, in this period of intellectual and religious ferment the Pilgrim Fathers and other Puritan settlers left England for the New World, they took Protestant, and especially Calvinist, doctrines with them. Andre Siegfried, a French observer of American life, has noted the striking contrast between the Catholic and Calvinist ways of thinking about worldly wealth, and the impact of the latter on attitudes to wealth: Calvin…united religion and daily life for the first time since the days of the ancients, for, according to his creed, the better the faithful performed their daily task, the more they worked for the glory of God. Though the Catholic Church has always allied itself to riches, it has never held up wealth as a symbol of godliness, believing that the poor man retain his nobility of soul, and possibly be even nearer to God. The Puritan on the contrary regards his wealth as an honour, and when he hoards up his profits, he says smugly that Providence has been kind. In his eyes and in the eyes of his neighbours, his riches become the visible sign of divine approbation, and in the end he cannot tell when he is acting from a sense of duty, and when from self-interest. In fact he has no wish to make any distinction, for he is accustomed to regard as a duty everything that is most useful to his own advancement. As a result of this more or less deliberate lack of psychological penetration, he does not even rise to the level of a hypocrite. The religious and the secular converge Since the Puritans in America had a new community to build, they embraced with great enthusiasm the idea that work is a divine calling and wealth a mark of grace. Cotton Mather, the most influential of the New England preachers, told his congregation that a Christian should ‘glorify God by doing of good for others and getting of good for himself’. William Penn, the founder of Quaker Pennsylvania, taught that wealth is a visible sign that one is living ‘in the Light’. Of course, for both Mather and Penn, this worldly calling was only one side of life; it had to be balanced with a proper spiritual life in order to please God. It was, however, the blessing of the life of acquisition that left the more lasting mark on American society. For this perhaps Benjamin Franklin bears some responsibility. Although Franklin habitually singed himself ‘Benjamin Franklin, Printer’, today his name stands for many things: writer, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, statesman, and member of the American Constitutional Convention. To many of his eighteenth-century contemporaries, however, Franklin was best known as a self-made man, ‘the supreme symbol of the poor boy who made good’ and as the publisher of an almanac that purported to be the work of a farmer of modest means known as Poor Richard. In his autobiography, Franklin tells us that, in order to make the almanac more entertaining and useful, he ‘filled all the little spaces that occurred between the remarkable days in the calendar with proverbial sentences, chiefly such as inculcated industry and frugality…’ The almanac became an annual bestseller, bringing both fame and fortune to the young Franklin. In 1757 Franklin marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first almanac by weaving many of the maxims together and publishing them in the form of a speed was a smash hit, being reprinted at least 145 times in seven different languages before the end of the eighteenth century. Moreover, this popularity endured: in the nineteenth century Nathaniel Hawthorne called the now=deceased Franklin ‘the counsellor and household friend of almost every family in America’; and towards the end of that century one scholar calculated that The Way to Wealth had been printed and translated more often than any other work by an American. Included in The Way to Wealth were such aphorisms as: Plough deep, while sluggards sleep A fat kitchen makes a lean Will Fools make Feasts, and wise Men eat them Get what you can, and what you get hold Tis the Stone that will turn all your Lead into Gold This attitude to thrift, to hard work, and to the importance of acquiring and keeping wealth is also represented in another of Franklin’s writings, his Advice to a Young Tradesman. Max Weber quotes at length from this work, which he regards as displaying the spirit of capitalism ‘in almost classical purity’. What follows is not the entire passage Weber quotes, but enough to give the flavour: Remember that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle, one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings besides… In short, the Way to Wealth, if you desire it, is as plain as the Way to Market. It depends chiefly on two Words, INDUSTRY and FRUGSLITY; i.e. Waste neither Time nor Money, but make the best Use of both. He that gets all he can honestly, and saes all he gets (necessary Expenses excepted) will certainly become RICH… Weber thought that an attitude like Franklin’s would have been considered, both in ancient times and in the middle ages, ‘the lowest form of avarice’. He accuses Franklin of putting forward the view that we should live in order to acquire more. This accurately characterises the passage Weber quotes, but it is unfair to Franklin, who was neither Father Abraham nor Poor Richard. The real Franklin founded or helped to found Philadelphia’s first college and first hospital as well as the American Philosophical Society and many other public projects. He retired from business at the age of forty-two, when he reckoned that the ‘sufficient tho’ moderate Fortune’ he had acquired was enough to provide him with ‘Leisure during the rest of my Life, for Philosophical Studies and Amusements’. Thus he showed in the most definite way possible that he was not interested in acquisition for its own sake. (He also showed himself far wiser than his counterparts in the 1980s, men like Boesky, Trump and Milken, who acquired fortunes that were more than ‘sufficient’ but could conceive of nothing more interesting to do than make still more money.) Franklin was actively involved in the play of ideas and politics of his time, at both a theoretical and a practical level. But this was not the message that he left to the great bulk of his contemporaries. Franklin’s significance in the development of modern American ways of thinking about money-making lies in the impetus he gave to a secular version of the Puritan idea of a calling. In his popular writings, industry and frugality were recommended, not as a way of honouring God and doing His will, but as the way to become rich. On both religious and secular grounds, nineteenth century America felt justified in fostering the view that attaining wealth is the proper goal of life. Peter Baida, author of the aptly titled Poor Richard’s Legacy, has seen America’s early fixation on wealth as the result of the break from Europe’s rigid class structures: ‘The idea that all men were created equal, and that all could be free to rise as high as their own efforts could lift them, stirred everyone it touched in the young nation. For white males, at least, no country in the world raised fewer barriers to success, and non came closer to realising the ideal of equal opportunity’. The secular goal of the pursuit of wealth popularised by Franklin was given an economic justification by Adam Smith, as we saw in the last chapter. American religious leaders continued to show that they were no less supportive of the money ethic than anyone else. In 1836 the Reverend Thomas P. Hunt published a book entitled The Book of Wealth; in Which It Is Proved from the Bible that It Is the Duty of Every Man to Become Rich. In Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine, in 1854, one writer argued that the Original Sin was a failure to attend to business: ‘Adam was created and placed in the Garden of Eden for business purposes; it would have been better for the race if he had attended closely to the occupation for which he was made’. And Thomas Parker, a Boston Unitarian clergyman, suggested canonising the businessman as ‘a moral educator, a church of Christ gone into business…Build him a shrine in Bank and Church, in the Market and the Exchange…No Saint stands higher than this Saint of Trade’. McGuffey’s Readers, probably read by at least half the school children of America during most of the nineteenth century, ‘assured them that making money was a moral duty sanctioned by divine decree’. By the beginning of the twentieth century, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. was justifying the size of the business he was about to inherit from his father in terms more suited to the modern scientific age: The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest…The American Beauty rose can be produced in the splendour and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God. Behind such thoughts lies Social Darwinism, the philosophical outlook associated with the English philosopher and social scientist Herbert Spencer. Darwin himself firmly disavowed any attempt to see a moral direction in the course of evolution, but Spencer developed a conception of social ethics that was modelled on evolution. The struggle for survival was, in his view, the chief cause of social progress. Hence it should be allowed to continue with an absolute minimum of state be allowed to continue with an absolute minimum of state interference. Great wealth was a reward for taking great risks, or great pains, and without it society would stagnate. Spencer’s philosophy was extraordinarily popular in America. One admirer, F.A.P. Barnard, described Spencer as ‘not only the profoundest thinker of our time, but the most capacious and most powerful intellect of all time. Such praise is so absurdly disproportionate to Spencer’s merits as a philosopher that it can only be explained by the superb fit between Spencer[‘s evolutionary ideas and the mood of America. At the time, the United States Supreme Court was using the Fourteenth Amendment-the amendment forbidding any state to ‘deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law’-to strike down attempts to regulate industry. Spencer appeared to provide a philosophical justification for opposing state interference with free enterprise, market forces, and the evolutionary struggle for survival. So often was Spencer invoked in this context that Mr Justice Holmes, one of the greatest of the Supreme Court judges, and himself an admirer of Spencer, was finally moved to his famous protest, in the midst of a legal judgment, that ‘the fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics. Spencer also attracted the enthusiastic support of one of America’s greatest industrialists: Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie was an unusual mixture: the son of a poor Scottish immigrant, he founded Carnegie Steel and became one of the world’s richest men. He saw it as his duty to give away, during his own lifetime and for the public good, much of what he earned, and advocated steeply progressive scales of death duties for the rich who did not do likewise. He nevertheless described himself, in his Autobiography, as a disciple of Spencer, and under Spencer’s influence wrote an essay that became known as his ‘Gospel of Wealth’, in which he lauded free competition: ‘while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department’. Like Adam Smith-though with more intermediate steps-he argued that the existence of the rich was good for the poor: The poor enjoy what the rich could not before afford…The labourer has now more comforts than the farmer had a few generations ago. The farmer has more luxuries than the landlord had, and is more richly clad and better housed. The landlord has books and pictures rarer, and appointments more artistic, than the King could then obtain…We must accept and welcome, therefore…the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of the few…they must accumulate wealth…Individualism, Private Property, the Law of Accumulation of Wealth, and the Law of Competition [are] the highest results of human experience…the best and most valuable of al that humanity has yet accomplished. Observers of America over a long period noted the importance placed on getting money as a distinctive feature of American culture. It was already evident in 1835 when Alexis de Tocqueville published Democracy in America, in which he observed: ‘I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men…’ and elsewhere in the same work he noted that ‘The love of wealth is therefore to be traced as either a principal or accessory motive, at the bottom of all that the Americans do…’ in a book on American culture published in 1855 the German writer Ferdinand Kurnberger made fun of Benjamin Franklin’s popular homilies. They represented, Kurnberger thought, a philosophy that makes ‘tallow out of cattle and money out of men’. In 1864 Thomas Nicholls wrote; ‘Nowhere is money sought so eagerly; nowhere is it so much valued…The real work of America is to make money for the sake of making it. it is an end, and not a means’. After extensive travels in the United States in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the Frenchman Andre Siegfried found America ‘a materialistic society, organised to produce things rather than people, with output set up as a god…In the light of the American contrast we see that material pursuits have not entirely absorbed the sol of Europe…’ Later the English political scientist Harold Laski asserted: ‘in no previous civilisation has the business man enjoyed either the power or the prestige that he possesses in the United States…The great businessman in the United States has an aristocratic status comparable to that of the landowner or the soldier or the priest in precapitalist Europe’. The English historian, R.H. Tawney, found a name for that type of society of which America has become the paradigm example: Such societies may be called Acquisitive Societies because their whole tendency and interest and preoccupation is to promote the acquisition of wealth. The appeal of this concept must be powerful, for it has laid the whole modern world under its spell…The secret of its triumph is obvious. It is an invitation to men to use the powers with which they have been endowed by nature or society, by skill or good fortune, without enquiring whether there is an principle by which their exercise should be limited…it offers unlimited scope for the acquisition of riches, and therefore gives free play to one of the most powerful of human instincts. America was, by the beginning of the twentieth century, clearly cast in this mould. Nowhere else in the world was the free market so clearly triumphant. Nowhere else had socialist or other left-wing ideas had so little effect. In Europe, and even in other countries of Anglo-Saxon descent like Australia, political parties of the left were either forming their first governments, or were at least strong enough to be a serious political threat to the conservative governing parties; but in the United States, the tag ‘socialist’ continued to be a term of abuse, and if taken seriously, a party to political suicide. When Friedrich Engels surveyed the American labour movement in 1887, he could find only one political party that he regarded as truly socialist. It was founded by German immigrants, and called the Socialist Labour Party; but the extent to which it was part of American life can best be gauged by the fact that Engels thought it necessary to recommend that if this party was to grow in numbers and influence, its members ‘must, above all things, learn English’. The consumer society This set of both religious and secular ideas about the importance of wealth formed the foundations for our modern conception of the Good Life. That conception took its present form in the United States in the 1950s. the productive capacity of United States industry had expanded to meet the needs of the victorious struggle against Nazism and Japanese imperialism; now the slack was taken up-in part-by the production of consumer goods. But there is no point in producing consumer goods unless people will buy them; and so people had to be persuaded that these goods were what they really wanted. Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders described the situation: By the mid-fifties American goods producers were achieving a fabulous output, and the output with automation promised to keep getting more fabulous. Since 1940, gross national product had soared more than 400 per cent; and man-hour productivity was doubling about every quarter century. One way of viewing this rich, full life the people were achieving was the glowing one that everyone could enjoy an every-higher standard of living. That view was thoroughly publicised. But there was another way of viewing it: that we must consumer more and more, whether we want to or not, for the good of our economy. The section of Packard’s book that really caused a stir were those in which he described how the then-booming advertising industry had begun to employ psychologists to study the hidden motivations that led consumers to purchase. Once these motivations had been found, the image of a product would be designed accordingly. So advertising began to play on our desire for status, our fears of falling behind our neighbours, and our worries about our body odour. Consider the American car industry during the fifties. Each year’s new model was bigger than the one before. All through the fifties and well into the sixties, American cars remained absurdly large, they were dangerous, they guzzled fuel as if it could never run out, they polluted the air, they were unreliable, and they handled poorly; yet they sold wonderfully well. Skilful advertising encouraged the idea that there was something shameful about driving a car more than two or three years old. After all, this year’s car was longer, or lower, or it had sprouted fins. Customers who bought new cars were buying status rather than improved transportation. Only when a crusading young lawyer called Ralph Nader began his relentless pursuit of General Motors over the ill-fated Corvair, which had an alarming tendency to flip over when going around bends, did safety become an issue. (Even then, Nader might never have got anywhere, had General Motors not made the fatal mistake of employing an attractive young woman to seduce him so as to get some dirt that could be used against him; a tactic that, when it was revealed, did not make the company look good.) Only when the oil-producing nations cut off America’s supply, in 1973, did fuel efficiency begin to matter. Only when the Japanese began selling large numbers of more reliable, better handing cars, did American manufacturers begin to concern themselves with those qualities. Even then, of course, status did not cease to be a factor in buying a car; it just became a tiny bit more subtle. A withered greening During the sixties, first the civil rights movement, then the opposition to the war in Vietnam, and finally the entire counterculture movement, made many young Americans ask questions about the kind of society in which they were living. Soon they were also asking questions about the future life that American society held out for them-and finding radically new answers. Charles Reich, a professor of law at Yale University, wrote a book at the end of the sixties called The Greening of America. It began with a prediction: There is a revolution coming…It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions and social structure are changing in consequence…This is the revolution of the new generation. There protest and rebellion, their culture, clothes, music, drugs, ways of thought and liberated life-style are not a passing fad or a form of dissent and refusal, nor are they in any sense irrational. The whole emerging pattern, from ideals to campus demonstrations to beads and bell-bottoms to the Woodstock festival, makes sense and is part of a consistent philosophy. It is both necessary and inevitable, and in time it will include not only youth, but all people in America. Reich didn’t explain how bell-bottoms were part of a consistent philosophy. Nor was he a success as a prophet. He wrote his book just as the counterculture of the sixties was peaking. For a few months the book was a hit, selling more than a million copes. Everyone was talking about it. then the vogue was interrupted by reality. By the time The Greening of America had reached the bookshops, the peace and love of Woodstock had already turned into the murderous violence of the rock festival at Altamont. When Richard Nixon won the 1972 presidential election by a landslide over the peace candidate George McGovern, the opening passage of The Greening of America was beginning to look like a joke in very poor taste. Unable to change the world, disillusioned radicals came to believe that they needed to change themselves first. It was, in a way, a logical progression, Peter Weiss’s much-acclaimed play (and later film) Marat/Sade had put the logic behind into the mouth of the Marquis de Sade. De Sade told the French Revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat where he had gone wrong: Marat These cells of the inner self Are worse than the deepest stone dungeon And as long as they are locked All your Revolution remains… Only a prison mutiny To be put down By corrupted fellow-prisoners So the revolutionaries turned inwards. In 1972 Michael Rossman, who had been with ‘the Movement’ since the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote: Forecast for the next five years: Consciousness will be the country’s quickest-flourishing growth industry. A kaleidoscope of mutant flowers will appear on every block. Too many people will take to the easy lotus, giving up the task of integrating what we have begun. A few months later one of the most dramatic of conversions showed that Rossman had not exaggerated. Rennie Davis was a leading, indeed near-legendary, anti-war activist and Movement organiser. He was one of the Chicago Eight, a group put on trial for their role in the anti-war protests at the 1968 Democratic Party convention. In 1973 Davis announced that he had received Knowledge from the fifteen-year-old guru Maharaj Ji, the ‘Perfect Master’ whose chubby, smiling image suddenly was everywhere, and whose devotees seemed to be in a permanent state of bliss. Two months after his conversion, Davis spoke in Berkeley’s Pauley Ballroom, where over the previous decade so many debates had taken place on the vital issues of Free Speech on the Berkeley campus, the war in Vietnam, and strategies for pursuing radical politics. Davis told the meeting that the Perfect Master ws going to bring perfection on earth right now, in three years-to America this year, then to China (where Chairman Mao, it was said, may already have received Knowledge from Maharaj Ji), and after that to the entire world. Rossman explains it as a flight from the painful reality of the disintegration of the Movement after the shock of the killing of student protesters at Kent State University: …by the time of Kent State, whatever organisational focus the Movement once had had fallen apart and the loose common myth that guided the investment of our energies in political change was dissolving…Yaga, encounter groups, life in the country, Dianetics, free schools, McGovernism, Jesus-a multitude of devotional ideologies appeared to sap the energies of political expression, lulling weary activists and hypnotising the young with blissful panaceas, away from dealing with an increasingly problematic social reality. Jerry Rubin, a former leader of the zany radical group known as Yippies, carried the trend to an extreme: In five years from 1971 to 1975 I directly experienced est, gestalt therapy, bioenergetics, rolfing, massage, jogging, health foods, tai chi, Esalen, hypnotism, modern dance, meditation, Silve Mind Control, Arica, acupuncture, sex therapy, Reichian therapy, and More House-a smorgasbord course in New Consciousness. The Movement had now become the ‘human potential movement’. The flood of people attempting to create a better society was sucked up into the sands of millions of individual attempts to create a better self. In the end, even Rubin tired of it. early in the eighties, to the delight of all those who had lacked his commitment in the first place, Rubin started work on Wall Street. It seemed to be the end of a cycle that had begun more than two decades previously: ‘From Freedom Train to Gravy Train’, one story was headed; or ‘From “J’accuse” to Jacuzzi’ as another writer put it. in going to Wall Street, of all places, Rubin showed himself, again, to be sensitive to the swings of fashion. For Wall Street was about to become the symbol of the eighties. Greed was about to reassert itself, and become good. The Reagan years: ‘Enrich thyself’ Here is Kitty Kelley’s description of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration celebrations: Hordes of Ronald Reagan’s wealthy supporters…displayed what was to become the hallmark of the Reagan era: bright, shiny, new, noisy wealth that is most often seen in long limousines, rustling furs, ornate gowns and jewels the size of cow pats. Their celebration continued during the four days and 103 parties of the inaugural. After the parties came the china. Although the White House contained 10,000 pieces of china when the Reagans moved in, Nancy Reagan decided to order 220 new place bowls, ramekins and more, with a 240carat gold seal in the middle of each plate. The acquisition of $209,508 worth of china for the White House might not have attracted much attention, had the First lady not announced it on the day that her husband released his administration’s decision that, as a cost-saving measure, ketchup would be counted as a vegetable in the federally subsidised school lunch program. Time, usually not great enemy of the rich, described the Reagan Administration as one ‘whose clarion call is: ‘Enrich thyself”’, and noted that Reagan made it clear that he regarded money as the mesure of achievement. Accordingly, he preferred the company of the wealthy. Among these was the multimillionaire businessman Justin Dart, a member of Reagan’s ‘kitchen cabinet’. Strictly speaking, it is Dart, rather than Ivan Boesky, who deserves the credit for kicking off the ‘greed is good’ theme that typified the eighties. Said Dart, in a 1982 interview in the Los Angeles Times: ‘Greed is involved in everything we do. I find no fault with that’. This was also the decade in which Christianity completed its long journey from a religion that despised material wealth to one that cherished it. L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Church of Scientology, once wrote that the quickest way to make a million in America is to start a new religion. But refurbishing a n old one seemed to do just as well. Jerry Falwell, then pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, and president of the pro-Reagan Moral Majority, wrote a pamphlet on the Christian foundations of capitalism, in which he reiterated the Calvinist theme that money is a sign of God’s grace. Perhaps for that reason, Falwell paid himself an annual salary of $100,000, in addition to the money he earned from perhaps a dozen speaking engagements a year at $5,000 each. Falwell was, however, a man of modest tastes by the standards of some of his rivals. In 1987, Time investigated the finances of the most successful American television evangelists of the decade. It found that the Louisiana preacher Jimmy Swaggart ran a ministry that was like a family business, with seventeen members of his family on the payroll. Jimmy and his wife borrowed $2 million from the ministry to build three luxurious homes, and drove two Lincoln Town Cars. Robert Schuller, who broadcast his Hour of Power every week from the $20 million Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, was paid $86,000 plus a tax-exempt housing allowance of $43,500; eight members of his family were on the payroll of Robert Schuller Ministries. Oral Roberts, another popular ‘televangelist’ had the use of two houses worth $2.9 million, and owned another worth over half a million. But if money was a sign of God’s grace, Jim Bakker was, until adultery with a secretary led to his downfall, the most bountifully blessed of them all. According to the Internal Revenue Service, Bakker earned $638,112 in 1983; he owned six luxurious homes and had bathroom tap plated with gold. The astonishing part of all this is that the more these purportedly Christian evangelists flaunted their wealth, the more Americans flocked to them. That, more than anything, indicates how far the American love affair with wealth and with wealthy celebrities had gone. Nor was this positive attitude to wealthy religious leaders limited to Christians. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the Indian guru whose followers were known as the Orange People after the colourful robes they wore, showed that religious leaders who drew on the traditions of the East could easily adapt to the America of the eighties. Rajneesh collected Rolls-Royces the way children collect Matchbox cars. In 1983, he had twenty-one; by December 1985, when Rajneesh had been deported and his property was being sold to pay off debts, there were ninety-three of them. Every aspect of culture joined in the chorus in praise of the pursuit of wealth. Madonna sang that she was just a ‘material girl’ and Cyndi Lauper had a hit with ‘Money Changes Everything’. If there was any satirical intent in either of these pop songs, it surely escaped many of those who danced to them. Even New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art became more innovative in raising money, sending a letter to corporations suggesting that art can be profitable: Learn how you can provide creative and cost-effective answers to your marketing objectives by identifying your corporate names with Vincent Van Gogh…Canaletto…Fragonard, Rembrandt or Goya… In the same year, the museum let it be known that it was for hire. For a fee of $30,000, one could throw a party in the Great Hall, or even in the lofty space surrounding the Temple of Dendur, which the Egyptian Government had shipped to America as a way of saying thanks to the Amercian people for their assistance in saving Abu Simbel from the waters of the Aswan Dam. Parties there became so common that one gossip columnist took to referring to the museum as ‘Club Met’. The weeding of Laura Steinberg, daughter of financier chief executive of CBS, was celebrated in the museum, which had been festooned with 50,000 French roses, gold-dipped magnolia leaves, a hand-painted dance floor, and a ten-feet-high wedding cake. The night’s festivities cost $3 million. For those who had ethical qualms about such expenditure while welfare programs were being cut, the wealthy supporters of Ronald Reagan had their answer in George Gilder’s much-acclaimed Wealth and Poverty. Gilder lauds the wealthy while arguing that welfare harms the poor. ‘In order to succeed’, Gilder wrote, ‘the poor need most of all the spur of their poverty’. In his preface, Gilder thanks David and Peggy Rockefeller for their generosity and faith in his work. In the body of his book, he repays their generosity by hailing the wealthy as the ‘greatest benefactors’ of society. In an updated version of Adam Smith’s ‘the humblest peasant lives better than a King in Africa’ argument, Gilder and other supporters of ‘Reaganomics’ asserted that the wealth made by the superrich in the eighties was bound to benefit the whole of society, and trickle down even to the poor. Not until Reagan had gone and the decade was over did detailed economic statistics explode this assumption. Using figures released by the Congressional Budget Office, Paul Krugman, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calculated that 60 percent of the growth in the average after-tax income of all American families between 1977 and 1989 went to the richest 1 percent of families. (These families had an average annual income of at least $310,000 a year, for a household of four.) Another 34 percent, leaving on ly 6 percent of the total growth in income to be divided between the remaining 80 percent of the population. Krugman’s calculations were challenged. Critics noted that tax rates had been lowered during the Reagan years; therefore, they said, the rich may have become more honest in reporting their income. That is possible, of course, but it hardly seems likely to account for more than a small portion of the increase, because the figures show that corporate salaries to chief executives-which cannot be concealed from the tax authorities-soared during the decade. Even among the critics, there is general agreement that the top 1 percent had done better during the 1980s than the rest of the nation, and that by the end of the decade, the 2.5 million Americans at the top of the income scale were taking in as much each year as the 100 million Americans at the bottom. This was not true of the beginning of the decade. The eighties were to be the decade in which greed overcame its unfortunate bad odour, and was openly rehabilitated as a civic virtue that made everyone better off. It didn’t turn out like that. By the early nineties, the giants of Wall Street-men like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken-had been sent to gaol. Donald Trump was selling off his assets and negotiating with his creditors to stay afloat. Alan Bond was bankrupt, Irises long sold. And then it became clear that the wealth of the rich remained concentrated among the rich, after all. Suddenly greed did not look so good. But the alternative ideals of Aristotle or the pre-reformation Church were now buried deep under centuries of teachings that tied the good life closely with wealth and acquisition. From where could an alternative ideal of the good life emerge'