Calvin the Capitalist?

In his Calvin, Geneva, and the Reformation, Ronald Wallace shoots the tired old hypothesis full of holes.  After first surveying Calvin's teaching on usury, and pointing out just how restrictive his "permission" of it was, he tells us: 

"Though he believed in the necessity of some distinctions remaining, he believed that the appearance of extreme differences in wealth and poverty within a community was inexcusably evil.  His comment on Paul's ideal that 'through giving there should be equality' is illuminating.  'Equality', in Paul's mind, he thinks means a 'fair proportioning of our resources that we may, so far as funds allow, help those in difficulties that there may not be some in affluence and others in want'.  The vision given in Christ's parable of Lazarus in heaven lying at the bosom of Abraham implies that riches do not shut against any man the gate of the Kingdom of Heaven but that it is open alike to all who have either made a sober use of riches, or patiently endured the want of them. 

"Calvin believed that Christ's command to us to 'sell your possessions and give alms' might under certain circumstances demand the giving away of capital as well as current income.  It enjoined that 'we must not be satisfied with bestowing on the poor what we can easily spare, but that we must not refuse to part with our estates, if their revenue does not supply the wants of the poor.

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Gleaning from Richard Bauckham

Readers of my old blog may recall that around two years ago I was wrestling for several months with how to understand and apply the Old Testament economic laws--their relative moral and judicial significance, in particular.  Well, the conclusions that took me six months and research and writing to haltingly articulate, Richard Bauckham, with disarming surefootedness, manages to establish in five splendid sentences of his book The Bible in Politics (which, by the way, I cannot recommend highly enough, and hope to be blogging frequently about over the next week or two).  I here quote most of the fantastic paragraph in which these five sentences appear:

"The law, as we have seen, is concerned with broad principles of social morality and with illustrating their specific application.  The specific examples include both laws enforceable in the courts and moral exhortations.  Leviticus 19:9-10 [the law of gleaning] is not in the form of judicial lw and, we may guess, would not normally have been enforced in the courts.  But on the other hand, it would have been open to the elders in any particular local community to choose to enforce it with legal sanctions.  In any case it had the force of social custom, which in small, close-knit communities like those of ancient Israel can be very effective. In such a society, social disapproval, which itself is inseparable from shared religious beliefs, can be as important a sanction as legal punishment.  Thus to insist that these verses envisage private charity rather than state welfare--or vice versa--is to introduce anachronistic distinctions.  

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Wealth Inequality--A Moral Problem?

One of the more interesting chapters in Jay Richards's Money, Greed, and God is chapter 4, "If I Become Rich, Won't Someone Else Become Poor?"  This chapter brings us to the heart of the impasse between left and right, with the one side contending that "the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer" while the other insists that, on the contrary, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting richer too…just not as fast.  From a certain perspective, both claims are true.  Even the right, in its more honest moments, admits that income inequality is growing.  Which means that, in relative terms, the poor are growing poorer.  But is absolute poverty increasing?  The right denies it but of course, it depends where you are talking about--in sub-Saharan Africa, it is.  On the whole, my limited grasp of the statistics suggests that the right is correct, global absolute poverty is slowly declining.  

Now, from the right's standpoint, this means we do not have a moral problem--the rich are not getting rich at the poor's expense. (In fact, from the right's perspective, this would be true even if absolute poverty were increasing; so confident are they in the wealth-creating power of the market, that they would have to chalk this up exclusively to the failures of the poor or their governments).  Richards thinks that he has demonstrated another example of "zero-sum thinking," revealing the left's logical and moral idiocy.  If the poor are getting richer too, then why does it matter how fast the rich get richer?  It's not a moral issue.  

Here we find a clash of moral intuitions--Richards and his ilk honestly feel that there is no moral problem here, whereas others find a glaring injustice.  The source of it, I suggest, lies in different presuppositions about property.  

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Jacuzzis with Sound Systems (Good of Affluence #3)

With this post, we finally come to the heart of the matter.  Schneider's main point is not, it should be emphasized, to defend capitalism.  I've mentioned this, but it took me awhile, given my previous experience with Schneider, to appreciate that fact fully myself.  Schneider's goal is in one sense a much narrower one--his purpose is to argue that enormous private wealth is a good thing--and that it is a good thing to enjoy it privately, without feeling compelled to restrain one's consumption on ethical grounds, or to share with those who don't have enough.  Stated so concisely, that sounds pretty indefensible, but as a defense mechanism against legalistic guilt-manipulation, Schneider's argument is somewhat understandable.  

In any case, his is an argument about the ethical status of wealth--the end product--rather than of capitalism--the process whereby it comes about.  Capitalism is highly relevant to his argument, for at least three reasons: first, because since he believes affluence to be really great, and he believes capitalism to be the cause of this affluence, he believes capitalism to be really great; second, similarly, since he believes capitalism to be the main way in which people can become affluent, he is able to argue that yes, we should care about the poor, but the best way to help them is not by charity, but by fostering capitalism; third, as mentioned in the previous post, since he believes that capitalism represents a way of becoming rich without it making others poor in the process, then we don't need to be worried about the morality of where our wealth came from--we can simply accept the end product as an unqualified good.  The first is not important to his argument here, though of course, if he were writing a defense of capitalism as such, it would merit more attention.  The second is rather important, hence the frustrations about his vagueness that I voiced in the previous post; but as this theme is only an undercurrent until the epilogue, I will wait till then to discuss it.  The third is a very important assumption, for it is what justifies Schneider's decision to essentially narrow his attention to the morality of the end-product wealth.  If this assumption turns out to be too optimistic, then his whole argument could turn out to be a moot point--that is, one might retort, "Sure, in theory it might be fine for Americans to enjoy fantastic wealth, but since, as a matter of fact, they are guilty of long-term exploitation of other countries, they have an obligation to make restitution rather than simply revelling in their jacuzzis."  But, having noted this weakness (repeatedly), I will focus from here on on Schneider's narrower argument on its own terms.

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Making All Things New (Good of Affluence #2)

In his first chapter, Schneider sets out to explain why it is that modern capitalism is not in fact open to the kind of objections routinely leveled against it by modern theologians, and why modern affluence is a good thing, free from the condemnations that have been typical of the Christian ethical tradition.  Believe it or not, I actually have some positive things to say about Schneider's approach, and, to keep these reviews from having too negative a tone, I'm actually going to organize this post around three things that Schneider does right (under each, though, I will discuss the weaknesses and shortcomings that relate to each of these strengths).

First, briefly, the basic structure of the chapter: Schneider's main argument consists of claiming that modern capitalism represents a fundamentally new achievement in human history.  As something "new," he will suggest that older critiques of wealth and acquisition do not necessarily apply to capitalism anymore; as an "achievement," he will argue that, far from being critiqued, capitalism should be celebrated for the enormous good it has done in the world.  Then he will address moral critiques of capitalism--that it is founded on injustice--followed by spiritual objections--that it leads to materialistic vices.  All this being done in just the space of 27 pages, one should not expect him to do any of these things very thoroughly--the purpose is merely to clear the ground somewhat, attempting to establish a predisposition in favor of capitalism and affluence before embarking on his theological vindication.

Of course, this does pose rather a problem for the rest of his book.  For Schneider is honest enough to acknowledge that many of the objections he canvasses, if true, would thoroughly undermine his case and necessitate a very different evaluation of capitalism and affluence, and a very different use of the biblical material he is going to look at.  So to the extent that most of these objections are left relatively unaddressed, he embarks on the remaining seven chapters with a very shaky foundation indeed.  More on that below.

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