Our Roots and Economy

Our civilization’s roots are in Greece, Rome and Palestine. The major root stock is of Jewish origin, and of its offspring Christianity. The cross-fertilization of Biblical ethics, Roman law and Greek philosophy has determined our social goals.

Even our economic life was stimulated by religious ideas. “Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism” makes this point. He notes that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after the Reformation, certain nations developed more rapidly than others. They were the nations in which John Calvin’s theology was dominant. Calvin laid down a basic dogma: God had chosen, before the beginning of the world, those who would go to heaven and those who would go to hell. Nothing one could do for good or evil could change his fate. How did anyone know where he would go? The answer was easy. If God prospered you, you were saved; if he did not prosper you, you were damned. Everyone wanted to be saved and set out to prosper. The commercial revolution of the seventeenth century and the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century flowered. In France, which had been a commercial rival of England and Holland, a Church oriented government slaughtered and expelled the Calvinistic Huguenots. After that France’s commercial power declined.

Adam Smith studied the pattern of events and wrote his “Wealth of Nations”. He theorized that the free market place was the key to economic progress and laid down a set of principles as economic law, as immutable as the law of Medes and the Persians. Karl Marx went a step further and declared that all human actions were determined by economic factors. Marx was a Communist, but non-communists seemingly endorsed his premise. In college I was taught that enlightened self-interest was the ultimate control of human behavior. A whole school of philosophy grew up, glorifying selfishness. Ayn Rand was its guru. Unfortunately self-interest is rarely enlightened, and degenerates into cunning greed. The ultimate extreme is a statement by a few conservatives politicos that, “Some people may have to go hungry to improve the economy.”

The economy is not sacred. Useful it may be, but not holy. People are sacred.

The whole idea of human rights has its origins in the Biblical record. Nathan stands before David and Elijah stands before Ahab to pronounce doom upon them because they have murdered humble men in order to get their victims’ property. In the Great Books seminar, the first unit of study combined the story of Naboth’s vineyard and our own Declaration of Independence. The spiritual kinship is unmistakable. The prophets of Israel, with increasingly incisive insight, expand the range of human rights. Societies, governments and systems exist only to meet the needs of persons, - of all persons. Jesus capped it in the story of the last judgment. Even the poorest, the weakest and the least is a child of God.