Monday Economics and the Grave-Digger Thesis

Another Monday morning has dawned in the Pacific Northwest.  Yesterday was a blessed day.  Blessed, but I have to admit tiring!  I am thinking about several different issues right now, but I am not ready to share what I am writing.  Thus, I will borrow from others and comment on their thoughts.  

This morning I would like to focus again on Os Guinness' book The Call.  Toward the middle of the book, he is discussing the spiritual component of money.  He begins the chapter with a startlingly accurate assessment of what happened in the West with our financial crisis of the past couple of years.  As he writes,

"The decisive question for the West is its capacity to direct and discipline capitalism with an ethic strong enough to do so.  I myself don't believe the West can do it."  When the Singapore economist I mentioned in chapter 7 delivered that blunt assessment a few years ago, a shiver of excitement ran through the room.  There were no academic ifs, ands and buts, here was a plain-speaking, "one-handed" economist who would have delighted Harry Truman.

Such a challenges makes many Westerners uncomfortable.  Yet another tiresome assault on our materialism?  But the unease is odd because the criticism is not new, and it is Christian in origin.  It forms the so-called gravedigger thesis, the notion that capitalism may undermine itself by its very success.  This idea got a bad name because of its association with Karl Marx- "What the bourgeoisie produces above all is its own gravediggers."  But in Christian history it was a key part of Puritan analysis before Marx picked it up.  In eighteenth-century America, for example, Cotton Mather warned that unless there was vigilance, a sense of calling would bring forth prosperity, only to result in prosperity's destroying the sense of calling.

The Call, 134.

What I find most profound about these paragraphs and the statement made by the economist from Singapore is its keen foresight.  This book was written in 1998!  Ten years later, we witness a financial meltdown brought about by unfettered greed (called capitalistic speculation) made by banks and supported by governments that argue they are "too big to fail."  How could this happen?

When the making of money becomes the most important issue, some people and groups of people will always go too far.  We live in a fallen world.  If lying, deceit, and improper means will help one find "security" in money, fallen people without a sense of God's all-seeing eye will do anything secure more money!

How do we deal with this tendency?  Well there are two options.  First, we empower the government to "crack-down" on these low-down scoundrels.  We create more and different laws to "regulate" business.  This is the path the West is now trying.

I am afraid it will not work!  Those making the laws are fallen individuals who are deeply influenced by fallen individuals.  Thus, the law have too many loop-holes and other means of being deprived of their power.  All we have done is move the power from the market to the government.  What guarantee is there that the government is not equally corrupt?

Furthermore, does the law really have power to change the human heart?  Does not the law and its demands often inflame deeper disobedience?  If the heart of the people is not changed, all the law will do is influence smart folks to pursue dishonest or immoral gain in different ways.

This leads to the second option for how to deal with undisciplined capitalism.  The second option is a great and pervasive revival of true spirituality.  While in a fallen world there are always those who reject God's judgment on sin and pursue dishonest gain, we need a greater heart understanding of right and wrong.  Until we get such heart change, we will be digging our cultural grave deeper and deeper.

We have lost our sense of right and wrong.  All that is left is individual pursuit of whatever happiness they desire.  As we take away a divine frame of reference, we are left with nothing but individual complete liberty or might-makes-right government action as our guides.  Both of these sources of meaning and direction are short-sight, radically selfish, and lacking the power to promote true love of others over self. 

In other words, the economist is correct about the West.  Unfortunately, he is wrong when he affirms that the Asian way is beyond the lure of capitalism.  As he states,

"What we in Singapore want," he said, "is the modern world, not the West.  We want the Asian way, not the American way.  We want to follow Confucius, not Christ."  Continuing, he explained, "Having given rise to the modern world, the Jewish and Christian faiths have now been reduced to ruins by the modern world."  Asian countries, he concluded, should take a different path.  They should pursue the best opportunities of modern capitalism, industrialized technology, and telecommunications within the setting of their own beliefs and cultures.

Quoted in The Call, 58.

I fear that the Asian way of following Confucius will also fall prey to secularism within a generation. I know they are guided by a deeper sense of family honor than the West.  How long will it take before family honor is associated with financial "security and affluence"?

The problem with the love of money is the human heart.  Individual hearts must be transformed to find security and meaning in Christ.  Money is a shallow idol.  It is never enough.  It is a demanding task-master that is never satisfied!  

As the West and increasingly the East is seduced by security apart from God's presence and relationship, both will grow increasingly corrupt, selfish, and power-hungry.  What is needed is a world-wide revival of true faith!  Lord, have mercy upon us.