Story and illustrations by Geoff Olson

A few years back, a teacher friend shared an anecdote about baseball player Jackie Robinson with his high school students. Signed in 1947 to the Brooklyn Dodgers, Robinson was caled one day for a meeting with the managers, who offered to increase his wage to what would then be considered astronomical levels. In my friend's telling of this tale, Robinson turned the offer down because he thought his performance didn’t yet warrant such a vast sum. My friend was alarmed by his students’ take on this; they didn’t regard Robinson as a hero for his stand, but a “chump.”
We have taught our children well. After decades of obsessing over the incomes of super athletes and other pop-culture celebrities - including corporate CEOs - money has become the arbiter of all that’s noble and worthy. Greed is seen as natural and true to the human competitive spirit.
It’s difficult to move “off the grid” in a culture of greed that is so total. You may not be a player on the stock market, but your pension fund probably is. In the US, a great many people are banking on the market for their retirement. In a recent New Yorker cartoon illustrating Dante’s guide into the underworld, Virgil points down to hell’s inner circle. The damned hurry across the streets, looking up with worried expressions at numbers playing across huge screens. Not surprisingly, hell resembles Times Square, with pedestrians watching the performance of Dow and Nasdaq. The cartoon perfectly captures the volatile nature of finance in a stock market untethered to anything so mundane as real profits and company assets. In the late nineties and into the 2000s, investors were - and are - caught up in a speculative bubble that has only recently showed itself for what it’s always been: a consensual hallucination. (Which is not the same as saying the financial market is unreal, only that the value of stocks and currencies are what we believe them to be, expressed through buy-and-sell.)
The nineties boom was largely a mirage, though certainly one with effects in the real world. It was fueled by a metaphysical belief in the power of money. According to mythologist Joseph Campbell, in medieval times the tallest buildings were the churches. By the nineteenth century, they were superceded by the seats of government. By the late twentieth century, the tallest structures on the horizon belonged to the houses of finance and commerce. This succession of pinnacles, from the Holy Roman Empire to the New World Disorder, perfectly captures the ability of money to mold the world to its purposes. From Chartres to the Sears Tower, we’ve always been rendering unto Caesar, just under different banners.
In its ability to transform itself across currencies, and finance anything from a trip to Disneyland to a voyage to the moon, money is rightly regarded as something magical: as powerful (and weightless) as sunlight in its capacity to make things grow, yet as unpredictable and dangerous as the weather. A common theme in Celtic fairy tales involves a villager who returns from fairyland with a sack of gold coins. In spite of the warning not to look into the sack before he arrives home, the visitor invariably takes a peek. The cash turns out to be coal - as deflated as the wheelbarrows full of Deutschmarks that German consumers pushed around after the collapse of the Weimar banking system.
A similar ambivalence about money is found in most of the world religions. In the Gospels, Jesus recognizes money as a competitive authority. In the words of writer James Buchan, he understood that “in embodying happiness and reward in tangible, earthly form, money is more impressively heaven than heaven.”
Aristotle, the Muslims and the medieval schoolmen were also deeply suspicious of money’s capacity to grow through interest. The birth of money from money was seen as unnatural because the offspring resembled the parent. This fiscal cloning was seen as an affront to the natural order. As a result, the practice of money lending was left to the Jews - along with a net surplus of suspicion and resentment.
In spite of the biblical injunction that “the desire for money is the root of all evil,” the Catholic church eventually made peace with money, and greed itself (You could buy your way into heaven, or even cover the passage of a dead relative who had sinned, by purchasing “indulgences” from clerics travelling door-to-door). It was money and credit, and the differing attitudes toward them, which fueled the great schisms of Calvinism and Lutheranism. In rejecting the greed of the Vatican, the Protestant movement endorsed the acquisition of money by the merchant class - as long as it was accomplished not in a spirit of greed, but for the glory of God.
In large part, this cultural endorsement powered mercantilism and its global explosion of western capital. But eventually, the Protestant angle on acquisitiveness was blown apart by money’s radioactive properties. Writes media critic Mark Dery: “The Protestant work ethic and Puritan abstemiousness that ensure a tractable, reliable workforce are at odds with the consumer economy, whose wheels are greased by instant gratification and the seductive promise of a return to carefree adolescent, even infantile pleasures.”
In the mad tilt-o-whirl of global investments and liquid capital we’re all riding on, the triumphs of the consumer economy are easily visible: cheap food, constant entertainment and affordable clothing. Harder to imagine is the final accounting - not from some accountancy firm, but rather history itself. The ecological fallout alone from greed has to be worked into the equations.
To classical economists, the environment is an “externality.” The same could be said of ethics, although British economist Maynard Keynes made a few token attempts to insert an ethical dimension into the political economy, by briefly but powerfully noting the corrosive forces of greed: “The love of money as a possession - as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyment and realities of life will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.”
For former Economist reporter James Buchan, attempting an ethical study of money that Keynes left unfinished, “money enters into the system of values, and then displaces all other values like the cuckoo the eggs in a nest.”
In his book Frozen Desire, Buchan sums up the dark side of what the desire for money has brought to civilization. “For some time, in many places, money was thought to be bad, but it is now thought, on the whole, to be good. That inversion is the greatest to have occurred in the moral sentiments of the West. Desires that resisted incorporation into money turned pale and lost their power to convince: disinterested friendship, love and philanthropy became as suspect as the goals of once passionate wishes, honour and salvation. Miserliness, which places potential above actual gratification, had once seemed the disease of money ... gradually, it lost its pathology and became the condition of moral health.”
Private virtues become public virtues, according to Buchan, “and the old private virtues - prudence, thrift, kindness - become public vices in the market economy.” For Buchan, this is the great sadness at the heart of our civilization, “by using money, we convert our world into it.” That includes community itself, in a culture “where all human relations are disrupted by money.”
In our times, greed has been spun so hard it flies right off the page. And now, with the no-longer shocking revelations of the cooked accounting methods of Fortune 500 companies and the understanding of the debt-creation mechanism of “perpetual war for perpetual peace,” the global market economy threatens to break apart like a mirage on a desert plain. Greed, the deadly spin, has got us here, and like the characters in The New Yorker cartoon, we watch the figures on the exchanges, nervously hoping money will continue to perform its miracle of endless replication.
For the system to work a little longer, there must be enough people who will continue to believe that 15 percent annual return is a portfolio’s due, in spite of living on a finite Earth that will not sustain such increases, and that anyone who turns his back on a sure-fire “growth opportunity” is some species of fool. Or worse, “a chump.”
Yet it’s difficult to imagine how any culture can survive for long with dangerously high levels of personal credit fueled by fractional reserve banking. For civilization itself to evolve further, the rejection of greed will have to run deep into planetary culture and may involve rejecting the very premises of capital itself, which empowers the few at the expense of the many. We are on the knife’s edge; having dreamed this rapacious world of greed into existence, we have to dream our way out again.