Rocky Cape Christian Community

Harsh reality in Latin America -- wealth in the hands of a few, the rest (a fast-growing majority) struggling to get it.

 
If you had the chance, what would you tell the world's poor? Or its rich?
 
What, in a nutshell, is the root of the world's problem with unequal distribution of its resources today? Or isn't that a problem? Does God want it that way, perhaps?
 
Before you say too much, you had better listen to the man who had the chance to speak on this subject, who took it, and who changed the world. Perhaps he -- Adam Smith from Scotland -- has already changed you!  
 
Born into a wealthy home in Kirkcaldy, an Edinburgh suburb, Adam Smith grew up with nothing to worry about except that someone might take his money. Totally unlike the young riff-raff on the other side of town -- illiterate, fighting, stealing, struggling every day to eat enough to survive -- Adam knew nothing but pleasure, privilege and power. Even when he got kidnapped at four years of age, his father managed to employ a troop of armed men to rescue him.
 
With the firm belief that wealth fixes everything and nothing is more important than getting rich (an idea his Protestant parents already held but wouldn't have known just how to express), Adam entered Glasgow University when he turned fourteen. From there he progressed quickly to Oxford in England, where he read and learned much, and where he began to work out a brilliant new philosophy on riches and poverty -- the philosophy about which he later wrote a world-famous book.
 
Apart from the Bible, nothing may have affected more people than Adam Smith's work: "An Inquiry into the nature and causes of the Wealth of Nations," published in London in 1776. For, built into the foundation of Western Society (beginning with America and the British Empire, but spreading quickly into Protestant Germany and republican France) it became the logic and cornerstone of Western Capitalism.
 
Already as a young man, Adam felt in heart that something was wrong with the historic teaching of Jesus and the church. Drastically wrong -- at least as Christians had always explained it. Surely Jesus and the Apostles couldn't have been so naive as to think negatively about wealth, or to infer that the private accumulation of wealth was evil. Surely, the world would come to ruin if guided by such unnatural, unproductive, principles!
 
For hours in his hall at Balliol College (Oxford) Adam read everything he could find on the subject. Of particular fascination to him were the ideas of the philosopher David Hume -- that is, until college authorities learned of it, and took his book away (the writings of atheists not yet allowed on Oxford premises.) Adam kept on studying and thinking, nevertheless, until the picture became clear in his mind.
 
In the beginning, Adam realised, all people had lived as hunters and gatherers, taking what they could off the land. In that state -- the primitive state -- no one claimed "private property" and they shared all things in common. In Adam's time (the mid-1700s) that was still true of primitive tribes throughout North and South America, in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands.
 
But, with enlightenment and education, Adam saw that all people eventually rise out of their primitive state. They learn how to grow crops and raise animals for their own use. Producing more than what they need, they learn how to swap and trade. Out of this grow agricultural and pastoral economies, where some boundaries and rights get established. As in Abraham and Lot's time, shepherds at least need to know where each one has the right to graze, and who takes water from where. And the Midianites had to keep their grazing animals out of the Israelites' fields.
 
Then, out of this second stage of development, Adam saw a third stage coming. Talented and enlightened men learn how to use agricultural products, flocks, and land to build "estates" or properties for themselves. They need the help of many people to run these estates and everyone lives from them -- as in the "Feudal System" or the so-called "manors" that in Adam's day still existed in some parts of Europe.
 
But the end result, the crown and triumph of this long process of civilisation, Adam came to believe, was where everyone had property, "private property," of his own, where money became the standard means of exchange, and where men and women could freely exercise their inborn urge to acquire wealth and be happy. This, for Adam, was "heaven" -- heaven on earth -- the final stage in the development of the human race.     
 
In his book "The Wealth of the Nations" Adam explained how this final stage would come to pass and how it would redeem the world. Human greed, he believed, is the basic and natural human tendency. Look at babies -- they are born greedy! And if left to themselves they will exercise their greed in hundreds of ways long before they can even walk or talk.
 
Instead of trying to curb or kill this inborn tendency, Adam believed, we need to learn how to use it for good. Frustrated greed is the cause of all conflict and evil in the world. But cultivated and educated greed is the world's salvation -- the "invisible hand" that guides greedy men to "advance the interests of society as a whole."
 
How does this work?
 
The first principle of greed is that it has no limit. Greedy men just get greedier and greedier, no matter how much they have or get. That is the driving force of the human race. Greed is energy, and energy and power are good.
 
The second principle of greed is that it always involves others. Greedy men, in order to get more and more for themselves, must use others to accomplish it. As long they don't have personal assets they must work for others. But once they get on top they either force or hire others to work for them, tilling fields, building houses and barns, putting up factories, buying, selling, trading, or inventing goods to increase their own wealth. Greed creates industry and industry is good.
 
The third principle of greed is that it serves as its own regulator. Every man's greed helps to check and balance the greed of everyone around him. If all men and women are allowed to scramble for the top with the same inborn urge to get wealthy and happy, they all keep one another from too much success.
 
The longer Adam thought about his "greed principles" the more sense they made. And the better he could see why Jesus and the Church had so miserably failed to fix the world.
 
The church by discouraging wealth had put a damper on industry. It had made people lazy and careless, instead of thrifty and concerned.
 
Then, once the vast majority of people were lazy and careless, the church had showered them with charity instead of prodding them with incentives to get ahead. That had turned people into beggars and bums. Rather than giving people fish, Adam believed, one must teach them how to fish.
 
The worst thing Adam saw in the church was that by discouraging private wealth, and through teaching people to give money instead of getting it, Christians stood in the way of fair distribution of wealth -- accomplishing the exact opposite of what they had set out to do. No one needed to tell Adam how church communities (monasteries and convents) had grown filthy rich at the common people's expense, while Rome (Vatican City) overflowed with gold and jewels, supplied by tithes and offerings of the poor.
 
The Church (the Christian religion as he knew it), Adam decided, was a flop and the time had come for change. Fortunately for him, he was not the only person to have reached that conclusion. In France he met a man called Voltaire. In England and Scotland he met a whole movement of merchants, adventurers, lawyers, scholars, and financiers only too eager to hear him and put his revolutionary principles to work. The atheist, David Hume, became his close personal friend and admirer, as did the Americans, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, the industrialist James Watt (the steam engine man), Samuel Johnson, the first Baron von Rothschild, and a host of other thinkers and statesmen of his day.
 
On the eve of the Industrial Revolution, the "Age of the Enlightenment," and of the great American and French revolutions, the world stood read ready for change as never before. European ships carried new ideas and commerce around the world. New nations everywhere, from Brazil and South Africa to Australia and the Orient, entered the scene. And to men with "good business sense" in every one of them, nothing looked more reasonable than a cash economy (a system where wealth was kept in money rather than in lands and assets), the "Protestant Work Ethic" (the belief that to gain wealth was the sign of God's favour), and Adam Smith's principles of "World Capitalism" (enabling everyone to have and use private property for their own advancement).
 
Every British country, along with nearly every new republic around the world, brought its laws in line with capitalist principles -- the newly discovered "law of nature," as some called it, believing that the "sacred right to private property" was as much as a part of universal order as the laws of inertia and gravity. All one needed to do, these enlightened economists reasoned, was to provide the guidelines by which men could exercise their greed in a safe, legally acceptable, and beneficial way.
 
It did not take long, after capitalism overtook most of the world, for rampant consumerism to follow. To get rich, Adam Smith had predicted, greedy men would employ more and more people, building bigger and better factories, producing more and more stuff. Then, the more wages they would pay, the more money their workers would have to buy more things. That, in turn, would make them happier and cause them to work even harder to get more.  
 
Adam Smith believed more money, more stuff and more happiness would result in better health care that would allow people to live longer and raise healthier families -- providing ever more capable workers to produce wealth and goods. Healthier people would learn more and invent more things. Instead of languishing in isolated rural areas, everyone would gather in fast-growing cities where life would get better and easier, with more time for pleasure, better working conditions, more entertainment all the time. (Every greedy employer would try to improve his workplace and pay higher wages to compete with other greedy employers around him.) All human beings, according to Adam's plan, would eventually live in a heaven of their own creation -- the heaven of unbounded materialist prosperity.
 
God, help us!
 
Should Adam Smith take a shopping tour in Melbourne or Sydney, or any large Western city, today, he might well think all his theories have worked, all his prophecies fulfilled. And to a degree he would be right.  
 
World Capitalism has worked exactly this well. The Christian Science Monitor has just put out a fascinating series of articles on the "conquest of world poverty."
 
Along with nationalism, militarism and party politics, the world is using the capitalist system to "fix the world" today. The world's people, as they now exist, could hardly be anything other than ungodly capitalists. Without the spirit of Jesus in their hearts, as long as the "natural law" of greed controls every move they make, there would be no point in trying to make them live any other way. Look at what happened to the Soviet Union and China.  
 
But shall Jesus' followers flow along with the tide? Shall we turn the Gospel of the Kingdom end for end: Live for what we can get, use others for our own good, strive to be first, to win, to come out on top, in every situation? All of us, whether we like it or not, are benefitting from the world's capitalist system, one way or another. But shall the Church turn capitalist in order to help people?
 
Adam Smith was a keen thinker, the "father of modern economics," a truly great man in the eyes of the world. But he taught the exact opposite of (written in Latin as "anti") Christ: Getting instead of giving, greed instead of compassion, power instead of peace.  
 
John the Baptist, forerunner of Christ, told people with two coats to give one away. Adam Smith, forerunner of Anti-Christ, told people with one coat to get another.
 
Could we turn "coat," in this instance, to "car," or "house," or "farm"?
 
Christ or Anti-Christ, you decide which one to obey.  
 
Peter
 
Rocky Cape Christian Community
19509 Bass Highway
Detention River, Tasmania 7321
Australia
www.thecommonlife.com.au