God is a Capitalist

by Roger McKinney

  I invite the reader’s attention to the great genius these lawgivers must have had: in flying in the face of all accepted custom, in confounding all the virtues, they showed the world their wisdom. Lycurgus, in combining larceny with the spirit of justice, the harshest slavery with extreme liberty, the most atrocious sentiments with the greatest moderation, gave stability to his city. He seemed to be depriving it of all its resources, arts, commerce, money, and defenses; there was ambition, but no hope of being better off; there were natural affections, and yet no man was either child or husband or father; even chastity was no longer regarded as respectable. This is the way that Sparta was led to grandeur and glory; but so infallible were its institutions that nothing was gained in winning battles against it if the victor did not succeed in depriving it of its polity.

  Those who would like to have similar institutions will set up a regime in which property is communally owned, as in Plato’s republic, and in which there will be the respect that he demanded for the gods and the separation of the natives from foreigners for the preservation of morality, with the state, not the citizens, engaging in commerce;...

  In short, all commerce was ignoble in the eyes of the Greeks. It would have required that a citizen render services to a slave, to a tenant, to a stranger, an idea repugnant to the spirit of Greek liberty. Hence, Plato wants the laws to punish any citizen who engages in commerce...

  Although equality of wealth is the very essence of the democratic state, it is, nevertheless, so difficult to establish that it is not always expedient to aim at extreme exactitude in this regard. It suffices to reduce and fix the differences within certain limits, after which it will be the function of particular laws to equalize, so to speak, the remaining inequalities by the taxes that they impose on the rich and the relief they grant to the poor.

  Rousseau sired five children and abandoned each to the “foundling hospital” so that he could pretend to regard himself as a member of Plato’s republic. He said he did not boast of the act out of compassion for their mother. He praised Sparta as well:

  What! Liberty can be preserved only if supported by slavery? The two extremes meet. Everything that is unnatural has its inconveniences, and civil society even more than anything else. There are unfortunate situations in which one man’s liberty can be preserved only at the expense of another’s, and where the citizen can be perfectly free only on condition that the slave be abjectly a slave. This was the case with Sparta. You nations of the modern world have no slaves, but you yourselves are slaves, etc.

  Bastiat condensed his survey of French intellectuals and their worship of classical civilizations to this:

  In citing the absurd and subversive doctrines of men like Fenelon, Rollin, Montesquieu, and Rousseau...what is false in their works is derived from their acceptance of the conventional view of classical antiquity, and what is true is derived from quit another source. My thesis is precisely that exclusive instruction in Greek and Latin literature makes all of us living contradictions. It turns us violently towards a past of which it glorifies even the worst horrors...

  As true followers of Plato, they openly preached common ownership of property and of women; and they did so, be it noted, by constantly invoking the examples and the precepts of the wonderful age of classical antiquity which everyone agrees is so admirable...

  ...What did Robespierre want? “To raise men to the level of republican virtue attained by the nations of antiquity.” What did Saint-Just want? “To offer us the happiness of Sparta and of Athens.” He wanted, besides, “all citizens to carry on their persons the dagger of Brutus.” What did the bloodthirsty Carrier want? “That every youth henceforth contemplate the fire of Scaevola, the hemlock of Socrates, the death of Cicero, and the sword of Cato.” What did Rabaut Saint-Etienne want? “That, following the example of the Cretans and the Spartans, the state take charge of every man from his cradle and even from his birth.” What did the section of the Quinze-Vingts want? “That a church be consecrated to liberty, by vestal virgins.”

  By the seventeenth century atheists and deists began to sense that religious tolerance would allow them to speak out and so they did. They discovered each other, formed societies and aggressively challenged all religious sects by denying the existence of the object of their hatred and their common enemy, God. The rise of modern science contributed to their boldness in that the success of the scientific method in helping mankind understand his natural world, and to a small degree control it, made it inevitable that someone would apply the same methods to the study of religion and humanity. Descartes provided the rationale without intending it.

  Most of the radical French philosophers of the eighteenth century, such as Denis Diderot (1713-1784), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) were deists instead of atheists. Voltaire (1694-1778) wrote a poem about his supreme being in 1768, which McGrath quoted:

  If the heavens, stripped of their noble imprint,

  Could ever cease to reveal Him,

  If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him,

  Whom the sage proclaims, and whom kings adore.

  Most people think the distinction between atheist and deist is important, but the products of the two were hard to distinguish because deists attacked the Bible and Christian theology that gave meaning to the word God. Voltaire referred to god as “Him” in his poem and uses capitalization and poetic sleight of hand to animate his god of reason. But without the content of the Christian God, Voltaire’s god became nothing but an abstract idea with no power or personality. As a result, the deist assault on institutions, human nature, sociology and economics differed little from that of the atheist. Deists were just sentimental atheists.

  Whereas the greatest scientist of all time, Isaac Newton (1642-1727) argued that the regular motions of the planets testified to their divine design and governance, atheists such as Paul-Henri-Dietrich d’Holbach (1723-1789) denied any reason to employ a god to explain the order of nature. Human imagination not science had invented God. Therefore the scientific method should lead to atheism. McGrath quoted another colorful person from the period, Baron Anacharsis Cloots who “debaptised” himself and wrote,

  We shall, in turn, see the heavenly royalty condemned by the revolutionary tribunal of victorious Reason; for the Truth, seated on the throne of Nature, is supremely intolerant. The star of the day [Reason] will make the meteors and all the flickering lights of the night [religion] disappear.

  Of course, he followed the example of Voltaire by capitalizing his deities in order to deceive the reader into imagining them as persons and therefore substitutes for a personal God, even though he would deny they were anything more than mere forces or ideas.

  Atheist and deist evangelists relied on the ancient question of evil to win converts: if God is good, why do pain and suffering exist? The question assumes that God controls people as marionettes and implies that evil exists because God is either evil or does not exist. And who wants to believe in an evil god? Of course, atheists and deists ignored the Biblical answer that God had created everything good, including humans, but gave them the gift of a free will. Humans used the gift to rebel against God and employ for evil what God had intended for good. That rebellion created in human nature the tendency toward evil. It occurred only to the atheists of the late nineteenth century, such as Nietzsche, that without God humans cannot know what is good and evil so the atheist answer to the problem of evil not only destroys God but morality and all that distinguishes humans from animals. In the end, atheism destroyed man as well as God, which goes a long way toward explaining the mass deaths at the hands of atheists such as Hitler, Stalin and Mao.

  Adam Smith was a Christian

  Atheists and deists used the scientific method to fracture Western thought in a way that had not happened since the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire: they changed the way people thought about human nature. Christian theology had refined the definition of human nature and in the process that took 1,700 years had invent
ed individualism, as described in chapter 2. In addition to individualism, Christianity taught the Biblical story of Adam and Eve whom God created as good, moral beings without any tendency toward evil. But their rebellion changed their nature, which they bequeathed to all of the children born from them, or all of mankind. God expelled them from the Garden of Eden and humanity began its struggle for survival mired in deep poverty and battling a scarcity of resources. Mankind’s fallen nature included a mixture of good and evil with a strong tendency toward evil. Discipline in childhood and instruction by parents could civilize most people, but it could never change human nature. Only God had the power to do that and God offered redemption for mankind from his fallen state only through the death and resurrection of the God-man, Jesus Christ. Theologians summarized these ideas as the doctrine of original sin.

  The Christian doctrine offered a bleak outlook on mankind’s future. Left to himself, man would naturally gravitate toward evil. Return to the Garden was impossible, as were the utopias dreamed by Plato, Thomas Moore and many others throughout millennia. Becoming a Christian through belief in the death, burial and resurrection of Christ would start the process of changing one’s fallen nature, which theologians called sanctification, but it was not guaranteed because the fallen nature could reassert itself if the Christian succumbed to the many temptations to rebel that life offered.

  The doctrine of original sin formed the ocean through which philosophers such as Adam Smith swam. They took it for granted as folks do when something is commonly understood. Because of his belief in the doctrine, Smith’s “system of natural liberty,” which morphed into capitalism, was a very conservative system. It did not attempt to optimize the benefits that good and brilliant men could accomplish, but sought to limit the damage that evil men could inflict. It was a humble system without the pretension of rebuilding the Garden of Eden on earth. Essentially, it said that human nature will get no better or worse than it is, though we can be wealthier than we are if we follow the system of natural liberty.

  In Smith’s system, government was necessary to protect people from the worst among us, such as thieves, murders and con men. The scholars of Salamanca, Spain, in the sixteenth century had also insisted that the government had the duty to protect the citizen’s life, liberty and property. But for the lesser evils such as greed, Smith believed competition would provide the most effective restraint. Citizens could not rely on the government to restrain greed because unscrupulous businessmen would buy the votes of politicians to pass legislation that would favor them. Today, Smith’s pessimistic view of government is called the “public choice” school of political economics, which was recently revived by the Nobel Prize winning economist James Buchanan. Competition would restrain greed because greedy businessmen who abused their customers would soon lose them to businessmen who treated them better. In some ways the market is like romance: producers must woo customers and treat them well in order to keep them.

  However, unlike competition no mechanism in the market can restrain envy. The task of restraining envy must fall to religion. Competitive businessmen could see the short term damage of their greed on sales, but envious people could reap short term profits and make others bear the long term costs. As Hayek wrote in The Fatal Conceit, religion was the only power that could persuade men to ignore their short term envy in favor of longer term goals. Hayek quoted Adam Smith: “Religion, even in its crudest form, gave a sanction to the rules of morality long before the age of artificial reasoning and philosophy.” Hayek also observed,

  We owe it partly to mystical and religious beliefs, and, I believe, particularly to the main monotheistic ones, that beneficial traditions have been preserved and transmitted at least long enough to enable those groups following them to grow, and to have the opportunity to spread by natural or cultural selection. This means that, like it or not, we owe the persistence of certain practices, and the civilisation that resulted from them, in part to support from beliefs which are not true - or verifiable or testable - in the same sense as are scientific statements, and which are certainly not the result of rational argumentation. I sometimes think that it might be appropriate to call at least some of them, at least as a gesture of appreciation, “symbolic truths”, since they did help their adherents to “be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28).

  Atheism and human nature

  Atheists of the eighteenth century denied original sin and insisted that the scientific elite could re-create human nature in their image. For them, humans have no tendency toward evil but are born good or innocent at worst. People turn to evil only when forced by oppression. Remove oppression and their natural goodness will reassert itself. Crime and evil of all kinds will disappear. The scientific method will show the way. Just apply the methods of the natural sciences to the study of human beings the scientist will solve all problems. Scientism substituted for the Christian Gospel of redemption through faith in Christ a gospel of redemption of mankind through science and social engineering.

  A debate over human nature may seem esoteric and as important as determining the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. It is not, as Arthur C. Brooks and Peter Wehner wrote in “Human Nature and Capitalism”:

  The model of human nature one embraces will guide and shape everything else, from the economic system one prefers to the political system one supports. At the core of every social, political, and economic system is a picture of human nature (to paraphrase 20th-century columnist Walter Lippmann). The suppositions we begin with—the ways in which that picture is developed—determine the lives we lead, the institutions we build, and the civilizations we create. They are the foundation stone.

  Early socialists created a journal in France, the Producteur, as Hayek wrote in Counter-Revolution, “to develop and expand the principles of a philosophy of human nature...” The atheists and deists of the French Enlightenment such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that science and rationalism could perfect human nature and aimed for the regeneration of mankind. They influenced the original socialists, Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon and August Comte who “believed that human nature can be as easily reshaped as hot wax. They considered human nature plastic and malleable, to the point that no fixed human nature existed to speak of; architects of a social system could, therefore, mold it into anything they imagined,” according to Brooks and Wehner.

  The great scourge of mankind that inflicted all of the evil on society, according to the socialists, was private property. Property forced upon mankind great and unnatural inequalities of wealth and poverty. Poverty and inequality aroused envy, which led to theft, murder, revolution and all kinds of evils. All one had to do was eliminate property, divide all things equally and the new, good man would emerge as a butterfly from the constraints of its cocoon.

  Along with the doctrine of the natural goodness of mankind, the atheists and deists who became the early socialists believed that all people are equal, not in the sense of equality before God and the law as Adam Smith and his contemporaries understood it, but equal in abilities. Mises explained in Money, Method, and the Market Process:

  Since all men are equal, every individual participates in the genius that enlightened and stimulated the greatest heroes of mankind's intellectual, artistic, and political history. Only adverse postnatal influences prevented the proletarians from equaling the brilliance and the exploits of the greatest men. Therefore, as Trotsky told us, once this abominable system of capitalism will have given way to socialism, “the average human being will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx.”

  And that led to the deification of the masses, Mises wrote:

  The doctrine of the inborn biological equality of all men begot in the nineteenth century a quasi-religious mysticism of the “people” that finally converted it into the dogma of the “common man's” superiority. All men are born equal. But the members of the upper classes have unfortunately been corrupted
by the temptation of power and by indulgence in the luxuries they secured for themselves. The evils plaguing mankind are caused by the misdeeds of this foul minority. Once these mischief makers are dispossessed, the inbred nobility of the common man will control human affairs. It will be a delight to live in a world in which the infinite goodness and the congenital genius of the people will be supreme. Never-dreamt-of happiness for everyone is in store for mankind. For the Russian Social Revolutionaries this mystique was a substitute for the devotional practices of Russian Orthodoxy.

  Traditional Christianity had taught people to believe in God, and Jesus as his son, but to endure hardships in this world as preparation for a better world in eternity. The conversion of large numbers of Europeans to atheism and deism demolished the old ways of thinking about the nature of man and evil. The new gospel told people that modern science applied to the deliberate design of institutions could perfect human nature, rid the world of all evil and return man to the Garden. This was the mise en scene for the drama of the spawning of socialism.

  As part of the attack on Christianity, Atheists and deists also assaulted the Christian notion of individualism that had taken 1,800 years to perfect and implement. They replaced it with what Hayek called pseudo-rationalism in his essay “Individualism: True and False.” The new, false individualism empowered the individual to demolish traditions and institutions he could not personally understand or foresee the consequences of them. Finally, atheists and deists unleashed envy and elevated it to a virtue through the insistence on redistribution of wealth and calling it social justice.