After all I have said already, it seems strange for me to lash out against the critics of capitalism, with whom I presumably have so much in common. But this entry is a kind of intellectual exercise, in which I would be playing an advocatus diaboli. For instance, my aversion to ‘usury’ is well known, to which my earlier entry Christian Usury Of The Elect convincingly testifies. Yet, I am posing a curious intellectual challenge here, inviting as my principal witness for the defense of… usury… the Biblical passage from Luke 19:11-27. It would have been very convenient for me for the sake of ideological consistency not to post this entry at all, especially because this particular passage is one of the strangest in the New Testament, but, in all honesty, I could not choose such a cop-out here, as controversy and occasional inconsistency are the vital elements of honest philosophizing, whereas convenience, single-mindedness and preconceived agenda are anathema to it.
Most people who analyze this parable try to get to its hidden meaning and are customarily perplexed by its elusiveness. My approach is however completely different. After all, this is not my Religion section, but my section on Economics. Let us therefore focus not on the religious message, but on the choice of the example which Jesus is giving. Paradoxically, the first practitioner of Christian Communism draws here from what is unmistakably capitalist practice, and with even stranger ethical implications.
While purely financial manipulation is both morally and economically indefensible, in the negative effect it produces on the welfare of its own society, the same apparently cannot be said about the practices of trading and profitable investment. In other words, all that is capitalism is by no means bad. (As long as one does not push the will to profit too far into the domain of [positive] ethical valuation, I am sorely tempted to add, but, astonishingly, this most predictable conclusion is far from being made in Jesus’ parable below.)
While prioritizing personal profit at the expense of all other considerations becomes, ipso facto, an ethical issue, and all manifestations of greed must be emphatically condemned, the practice of profit-making, trade, and credit, that is, lending money for profit, is not to be considered unethical, or morally wrong as such. An even more surprising action on Jesus’ part is His nonjudgmental attitude toward the ugly concept of “usury,” which has earned for itself such a bad reputation that very few capitalist apologists would dare to defend it. I must point out right away that the word “usury” is used here in the least offensive, virtually obsolete sense, but such use only adds spice to an already controversial exposition.
Now, here is of course the pinnacle of Christian authority and the ultimate source of Christian ethics, that is, Jesus Himself, in the parable of ten pounds, as told in Luke 19:11-27, in the King James Version.
Without presenting the whole text of this well-familiar parable, here it is in a much-shortened form, focusing exclusively on the economic aspect of the parable, which interests me the most in this entry. Meanwhile, the full text is fascinating and frankly incomprehensible to me in its entirety, and I urge my readers to open the Bible and read this parable in toto, for their own fascination and “confusement”:
“A certain nobleman [going] into a far country… called his ten servants, and delivered them ten pounds, and said unto them, Occupy [meaning, take it and use it] till I come... [When he returned,] he commanded these servants to be called… that he might know how much every man had gained by trading. [Observe the use of words gained (meaning, profited) and trading. Both these words unmistakably bear the stamp of Jesus’ acceptance, if not approval.]
“Then came the first, saying, Lord, thy pound hath gained ten pounds. [The master then responds with a Well done, gives his servant authority over ten cities (as a measure of his capability as a manager), and adds one extra bonus: the one pound he has retrieved from the third, failed servant.]
“And the second came, saying, Lord, thy pound hath gained five pounds. [The master now gives this servant five cities, still a reward, but in proportion to his diminished capacity to maximize his profits, and no extra bonus at that.]
“And another came, saying, Lord, behold, here is thy pound, which I have kept laid up in a napkin… [And now the master is angry and replies,] Wherefore then gavest not thou my money into the bank, that at my coming I might have required my own with usury?" [And then of course he punishes the servant.]
...I don’t know about you, but I very much doubt that it is even possible, under normal circumstances, to make a tenfold profit on your pound without cheating or deceiving anyone, yet here is just one such profit-maker, whom Jesus sets up as an example to be emulated!
One may still argue, of course, that the parable is only a metaphor, and that in its retelling I have omitted the important fact that the third servant feared and hated his master, to the point of insulting him in their fateful confrontation: “For I feared thee because thou art an austere man: thou takest up what thou layedst not down, and reapest that thou didst not sow.” (This actually reads like a bitter condemnation of capitalism, coming, ironically, from the least commended and appreciated character of Jesus’ parable.)
Yet, I insist, in my reading of the parable (and everything that Jesus says has a momentous point in itself, prominently including his choice of words and metaphors) I sense no condemnation weighing down these controversial words trading and usury, which does not suddenly make them incontrovertibly moral, but at least leaves them ethically neutral. Jesus obviously takes an example from “Caesar’s world,” and not from “God’s world,” yet, I repeat, the fact that he uses it neutrally, without an explicit condemnation, shows us an implicit acceptance of this practice in the world at large.
Ironically, there is a lot to be said about the usage of the word “usury.” According to Webster’s Dictionary, usury means (1) “the act or practice of lending money at a rate of interest that is excessive or unlawfully high,” or (2) “an excessive or unlawfully high rate or amount of interest.” Neither meaning should be applicable to the situation in the parable, as the master obviously refers not to the act or practice of usury, in the sense of “lending money at a rate of interest that is excessive or unlawfully high,” but only to giving the money to the bank or to an enterprising borrower for a return “with usury,” which brings us to yet a third meaning of this word, marked by Webster’s as obsolete: (3) “interest paid on a loan. [Obs.]”
It is one thing, of course, to have a personal dislike for things like trading and banking, but in our moral evaluation of these practices, the best course to take, for those of us who profess to be Christians, is to seek the only authoritative answer in the Word of God, which is the Christian Bible. My reading of the Biblical passage above, as I have stated already, leaves me somewhat baffled, yet confirms my separate thought that the technicalities of standard capitalist practices are not subject to moral valuation. It is only their blatant misuse or excessive preoccupation with maximizing personal profit at the expense of other human beings, which opens us (but not the practices of trading, investment, and credit themselves!) to the charges of immorality and wickedness, and condemns the perpetrators to perdition.
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