Our economic morality & the ethic of Jesus

Front matter

CESSES

WR

% Soto ° . 2

Preface

Tus book was first planned, some years ago, as a dis- _ cussion of profit and property from the viewpoint of ° the ethic of Jesus. As these activities and aims of the acquisitive society in which we live were discussed with the students of several seminars, and as the American scene in the present world drama developed, it became increasingly clear that they could not be adequately treated without some consideration of the popular philosophy of life that underlies and justifies them. ,

In most of the English-speaking world, certainly in England where a Labor Party which challenges the accepted economic morality has administered the government and where the new industrial program of the Liberal Party specifies the points at which traditional economic behavior is both inequitable and inefficient, much that is herein written would be superfluous. But we are living in a country where a nominee for the presidency, reputed to be a religious man and also one intelligent in economic affairs has, in his speech of acceptance, just informed the nation that, “With impressive proof on all sides of magnificent progress no one can rightly deny the fundamental correctness of our economic system.”

In 1919 I wrote, as did a number of others, confive cerning the general outlines of a new world that appeared to be forming. In the preface to that book I said that the details of the matters therein discussed could “be considered in less urgent times, after the main outlines of the form the molten world is to take have been determined.” The present volume is an attempt to meet a part of the obligation implied in that statement. Only now the work must be ‘mainly critical if it is to be at all constructive. For the main evidence to justify the wartime hope of a new social order was the ways in which the great conflict had shattered the capitalist economy and substituted for it other forms of administration and other modes of thought. But the consequence of the war in this country has been not only the stabilization of capitalism but also the strengthening of its vices. Never in the story of mankind has any nation made as much money with as little consideration for moral values and social consequences as the United States in the last decade. ‘This fact and what it means for the future of this people, especially for the part they will play in relation to economic developments _@ in the rest of the world, must determine the course of those among us who discuss the economic problem from the standpoint of ethics and religion.

It is manifestly impossible for anyone today to treat this theme without being heavily in debt to other writers. For the aid of those who wish to pursue the subject further I have appended a list of the works and authors to whom I have referred, so that he who reads and runs need not be distracted by footnotes. The chapter on the profit motive of

Dyed necessity follows the same general approach as my pamphlet on that topic issued by the League for Industrial Democracy, but the treatment is sufficiently different so that those who desire a more detailed consideration of the subject may turn to that publication.

To those who will make haste to say that judgment should not be passed on the weighty and complex matters under discussion without more documentaf tion, I would point out that the responsibility for the omission lies elsewhere. The price of books required by the present way of providing the population with the necessities of life makes condensation compulsory if the persons I most desire to reach are to be able to read what I have written. In any event, the issue between the critics and the protagonists of competitive profit seeking is not to be decided by evidence alone. It is at bottom a difference in value judgments concerning the present trend of events, the capacities of mankind and the meaning of life; therefore it can be settled only by the verdict of ane future which I for one am well content to await.

In developing this subject I have received much help in discussion with students and colleagues of Union Theological Seminary. I am under particularly heavy obligation to my friend Professor John H. Gray and to my son Gordon. The former—who was my first and has been my continuous teacher in economics—is an authority of very wide observation in this field, in specific parts of which the latter is a student and investigator. One of them was good enough to read the entire manuscript, and the other,

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those chapters that refer to matters with which he is now engaged. ‘They both gave me invaluable criticism, suggestion and information. To my wife and my daughter I am deeply indebted for undertaking the drudgery of copying and correcting my sometimes illegible pages.

Harry F. Warp Palisade, New Jersey September, 1928

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Contents

I. AN IRRECONCILABLE ANTAGONISM II. A STERILE PHILOSOPHY .

IV. THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST .

V. THe Heart oF INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY .

Chapter I | An Irreconcilable Antagonism

When our modern economic behavior is viewed in relation to the rest of human activities and interests, its most challenging characteristic is a claim to moral independence. Ever since the discovery of the trade routes—to India, the Far East, and the Americas— the opening up of new continents and the invention of the power machine gave a new impetus to the pursuit of business and drove the economic process to a larger place in the life of man, that process has been impatient of any control, save that of its own needs. It has demanded that both government and religion keep hands off its affairs. It has been, and it proposes to be, as far as possible, a law unto itself. In due time, the economic aspect of life added to its assertion of moral independence the claim of moral sovereignty. It now declares that to the basic necessity of economic efficiency all other human needs must yield, all aspirations submit. If honesty is desirable, it is because it is the best policy. If mutual aid is to be developed it is because he profits most who serves best. In its infancy capitalistic industrialism destroyed the control which medieval society had placed about the economic appetites, and rejected the restraints with which the church had curbed greed. Then in its lusty youth it discovered the authority of natural law under which to license its predatory spirit, and in the end persuaded official religion to add its sanction and blessing. That story has been adequately told in the pages of Tawney.

In Europe and particularly in England, where industrial society started, these tendencies were modified by the accumulated habits, traditions, and ideals of centuries of community organization. In the United States, where there was a continent to subdue and settle by the initiative of individuals, they had free reign. In such a favorable environment they reached the climax of their development, the acme of their power. So strong did they become, so confident of their self-righteousness, so sure of their social usefulness, that when the necessities of organized living imposed some restraints upon them they first defied, then evaded, and finally controlled many of these restraints to their own ends. The latest chapter in the story of regulation of business by government is the nullification of the regulating bodies by packing them with men opposed to the purpose for which these agencies were created. Profit-seeking enterprise finds the growing assertion of the common need in the twentieth-century United States as much alien to its spirit and inimical to its progress as was the inherited and ingrained social control of seventeenthcentury England.

Because of this inheritance, it was impossible in Great Britain to carry on economic discussion without reference to ethical principles. ‘The social code was sufficiently established to require that some kind of moral sanction be found for economic behavior. Hence the hypothesis of natural law, when the canon law—which attempted to enforce the teachings of the medieval church concerning a just price, a fair wage, and the immorality of interest—had become unreal, and impossible in the economic world. But among us the guardians and expounders of classical economic theory tend to eschew moral ideas entirely, and utterly to abhor ideals. It is their pride to separate facts and opinions, though what becomes of their own opinions and what happens to the facts in the process of separation is not quite clear. It is their contention that economics is a science dealing with facts, whereas moral considerations are mostly matters of sentiment which must be ruled out as confusing the issue. As though no sentiment attached to the defence of orthodox economics and the maintenance of the status quo! As though sentiments are not also facts! As though there could be any social science that did not deal with the whole of man’s life!

So widely is this view held that it was an event in American academic life when a group of economists and political scientists recently signed a statement regarding war debts and reparations which contained an appeal to the sense of justice. Also the two sessions of the American Economic Association which stand out in its records as unique are those in which, with the classicists strongly in the negative, there was discussed at one time a proposal to compensate workmen displaced by machinery and at another some suggestions for the abolition of poverty. This modern attempt at economics without morals enlarges the historic monstrosity of the economic man— who was impervious to all stimuli save the prospect of financial gain—into a system, without heart or conscience. The consolation is that such a system must finally be without brains or blood. This kind of economics is now on its way out of the universities into the business colleges, and there it should be listed under its proper name of chrematistics—the science of money-making. In that situation it may, pending its extinction, be made less harmful by de- - veloping for it a professional code, as was done with dueling and war. At least intellectual honesty requires that it sail under its own colors as the pursuit of private gain and not be allowed to conceal its real nature under the claim of being either a national or a social economy. ,

Naturally the attempt to separate ethics and economics is still more noticeable in the practical world. Business is business and men are not in it for their health. In a competitive situation, consideration for others—which is the essence of morality—becomes an increasingly impossible luxury. Recognizing this, the hard-headed in the universities naturally produce the hard-boiled in offices and editorial rooms and are by them in due course supported and repeated. If we do finally endanger our economic well-being through being foolishly sentimental in our consideration for the weak and unfortunate, in our desire for justice and our aspiration for equality, it will certainly not.

be for lack of warning in the newspapers and at the banquets of the successful. ‘The conviction that moral sentiment cannot be mixed with business if business is to be successful comes to its full strength at the point of the relation of religion to economic practice. It is recorded in the current saying that the Golden Rule will not work in the business world.

The separation between religion and economics in the Western world since the Reformation must be charged as much to the religionists as to the economists and the business men. Most of them have religiously kept the practical affairs of daily life outside the house of the Lord, so that now it seems to many people irreverent and almost sacrilegious to deal with economic matters in sermon or prayer. Recently that famous English preacher, Dean Inge told the students of one of our divinity schools that there are no economic principles in the gospels. Yet Jesus taught that a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of the things he possesses, and the ruling principle of modern industrialism is that it does therein consist. When Protestantism, as the religious expression of the rising individualism, opened up direct access to God for the individual, it tended thereby to keep him apart from his neighbor. Its distinction between the sacred and the secular also operated to that end. Fellow Christians, despite their occasional emotional unity, never really got together in their religion, because the common business of life was excluded from their hours of religious fellowship. Economic well-being never became a common end. They pursued it separately. The compensation that hoe the Puritan strain developed in its early days by laying upon the individual conscience the obligation to do business in the sight of God tended to disappear when God was viewed not alone from the standpoint of Old Testament morality, but also in the light of the ethic of Jesus. ‘Then it became clear that his kind of morality was to a large degree impracticable in a competitive, profit-seeking world. The captain of industry or finance who is trying to follow Jesus has about the same problem as a Roman centurion. How much easier is the case of the preacher in a ministry with a competitive salary scale and a luxury standard of living for those at the top?

The growing recognition of the essential antagonism between the principles of Jesus and those upon which capitalistic industrialism is trying to organize a civilization has been increased by recent developments. For almost a generation the left wing of the forces of religion has been attempting to end the separation between economic practice and religious ideals, to develop some moral authority for economic behavior. Protestants, Catholics, and Jews have joined in this endeavor. Occupying itself at first with inhuman conditions in the world of industry, and uttering some joint moral judgment concerning them, this undertaking finds itself pushed back more and more to the issue of the underlying principles; it begins to analyze the moral nature of competition, profit, property.

What, then, is the reaction from the world of business? The crass response of ruthless profiteers, with their senseless cry of “Bolshevik,” can be disregarded.

What counts is that first there is resistance to reform, and then its acceptance as good business. The net result in the economic process of the attempt to Christianize the social order, aside from changes in attitude and mind-set that have yet to bear fruit, is some humanizing of industry. But this leaves the basic factors untouched. Indeed, it tends to make them more endurable and lasting. Shorter hours, more safety and health, better living conditions, higher wages, employee representation—these things pay. They provide dividends in cash as well as in human contentment. Also they carry less liability of change. It is harder to get a religious denomination to consider relating its publishing house to the unions of the printing trades after a company union has been installed than it was before. Vested rights accrue to the non-union men, and along with them vested justifications and satisfactions for the management. Religion is an opiate in more ways than one.

When it comes to developing the ethical principles of Jesus at the heart of the economic process, then of necessity we get a different answer from the world of business. ‘This reply records the contrast between the sayings of the founder of the religion professed by the Christian nations and their economic practice. Obviously in a competitive struggle in which others are constantly trying to take away all that he has, a man will not get very far by being willing to give his cloak as well as his coat. There are times for generosity and sacrifice, but mostly outside office hours. The discount on purchases that is offered to preachers recognizes not only the limited wal income of most of them but also another standard for human relationships. Therefore it is also usually given to relatives. But it would be fatal to attempt to do business in the acquisitive society on the basis of the morality of the family group—which is the basis of the ethic of Jesus.

For you to love your neighbor as you do yourself in business would be to let him make as much profit off you as you take from him. Sometimes in their enthusiasm our advertising copywriters inform us that a successful business transaction is one in which both _ parties are mutually advantaged, but obviously neither millionaires nor a poverty line are made that way. But there is more than its interference with money-making behind the commonplace statement that the Golden Rule cannot be carried out in business. When _men in charge of our economic affairs tell us wistfully and regretfully that the Sermon on the Mount is a beautiful ideal but it will not work in a practical world, some of them at least are going deeper than their own profits or comfort. Their statement is not altogether a rationalization of their own security. They honestly hold that economic efficiency—the getting of the goods which the world needs—is incompatible with the ethics of Jesus. On the assumptions of modern business enterprise, how can they think otherwise? Bred and trained in a money-making economics, if they are ruthlessly honest with themselves, they must conclude that exploitation—that is, the taking and using by the successful of a part of the labor product of the weaker—is a condition of an efficient economic order. By that process the un-

[8 | successful will ultimately have more than if they were left with only the meager results of their own efforts. If lives are broken through unemployment due to technical improvements which at the same time increase dividends, it is the price of progress. The next generation will be better off. When the gospels are opened in the presence of such a philosophy of life, it is apparent to even the casual reader that two kinds of morality have come into collision. In a society fashioned around intelligent self-interest Aristotle would be perfectly at home, but Jesus would again. have difficulty in finding a place to lay his head. The Greek is better known and followed in universities founded by churches than is the Nazarene. We must be gentlemen even though we dare not be Christians. The ethics of capitalistic industrialism aims at economic efficiency and mutual. advantage through the exaltation of self-interest, with such enlargement of other human capacities as may thereafter indirectly accrue. The ethic of Jesus seek human development directly through the limitation of self-interest by mutual adjustment and mutual aid. The antagonism between these two solutions for the problem of associated living is indeed irreconcilable. One will in the end give way to the other. Industrial society cannot continue in its present divided, inconsistent, increasingly futile state—partly humane and partly callous, now democratic and now imperialistic. Nor can a religion whose function it is to develop the ethic of Jesus remain half bound to, and half free from, the living death of this acquisitive society. It must either transfuse our failing economic order with new life or die with it. It cannot, as in the matter’ of the war, declare a moral moratorium.

e economic order is permanent. ‘Therefore the “ollowers of Jesus must either get his moral currency adopted or the religion that names itself after him will have to suspend payment altogether.

Various modern writers, notably Rauschenbusch in this country, Tawney in England, and Max Weber in Germany, have demonstrated that the greatest obstacle to the spread of the principles and spirit of Jesus throughout human society is our present economic procedure. Their judgment has been confirmed and reiterated in the utterances of religious bodies, particularly at the close of the war, when emotions were high and vision keen. If organized religion is not now minded to follow the moral imperative in this‘ conclusion, if it should be willing to busy itself with other and less dangerous duties, .if it should consent to divorce—as the climax of the separation between economics and religion that began with the industrial revolution, it can of course get substantial alimony allowed—for missions abroad and for reprodueing at home ecclesiastical architecture of a bygone age in Europe. But it will then find ‘that something else is involved. Having yielded voice and part in the control’of the common household, religion would face a demand for service to which something in its own nature impels it to yield. If it does not work in the common interest, religion works for special privilege. Unless it denies life like Buddhism by abnegating desire, it always plays some part in economic activities. First with its magic it helps the

[rou primitive community to get its food. Then with its moral sanctions it helps the successful to hold their property and their power. Then at times it aids th the redistribution of these privileges.” That in brie4 has been its record, part of it already repeated in this land and other parts on the way—for instance, the attempt to transpose Jesus into a super-salesman. What other generation ever achieved quite so mean a blasphemy against its higher self? What kind of society is it in which religion is asked to accept such a role?

To understand what is involved in the rejection of the ethic of Jesus by the supporters of our present economic procedure, it must be clearly recognized that this is no rebellion against ecclesiastical authority as was a similar situation at the end of the Middle Ages. No modern churches have attempted. to enforce the ethic of Jesus even in their own economic activities, any more than the synagogues have tried to mak&® officially authoritative the morality of the law and the prophets which he fulfilled. Indeed, it is only the left wing in religion that has even inquired concerning the ethical nature of the teaching of Jesus and its relation to the life of man. The effort to reconstruct

Jesus as an historic figure, to get at his original sayings, has operated as much tc increase the separation between ethics and economics as it has to end it. For each expositor who has read into Luke some.«of his ee own socialistic preconceptions there has been more '

than one to read something dut, because Luke was a socialist. While one school has taken the principles of Jesus as an historic development to be carried -still

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~~ further, another school has proclaimed them as only an ad interim ethic, conceived in and shaped by an overwhelming conviction that the Kingdom of God —as an apocalyptic event—was at hand, the end of the world in sight. Therefore of course they could be no guide for a continuing human society. This seems to be a gratuitous deduction. If it be true, and _it is now strongly disputed, that the apocalyptic note is dominant in the teaching of Jesus, it does not follow that his ethical teaching was made only for the intervening period before the destruction of the world. Over and over again he emphasized the relation of his sayings to the law and the prophets. They therefore must be evaluated in relation to that long development out of which they came. Jesus may have considered this moral process valid for eternity as well as for time.

In any event what that teaching was is historically certain, while fashions in New Testament interpretation are still subject to change. It is clear beyond dispute that the eighth-century prophets of Israel started a creative movement to fashion an ethical religion, that they caught a glimpse of an ethical god who was to express himself, and to be experienced, in moral attitudes and conduct—particularly in the economic life of the Hebrew people, in the working out of justice and fellowship. It is evident beyond question that the prophetic attitude, and that of the law, toward the property question had for its foundation the principle of the subordination of property rights to common human needs, and that this viewpoint leads in the direction of the depreciation of material wealth as against moral and spiritual values. Yet when Jesus so treats the issue, plenty of scholars decide that he did it because property did not matter if the end of the world was near. Thus they supply a reason to the holders of anti-social forms and unjust amounts of property for the hope that is in them that the teachings of Jesus will not work.

However that may be, neither those practical people who find the ethic of Jesus economically impracticable, nor those scholars who support them by the ad interim hypothesis, nor those who have affinity for the moderation of Aristotle rather than the perfectionism of Jesus, have come to the end of the matter. What they have to face at last is more than the authority of the revealed word, or the sayings of the most influential personality in the human record, or the power of a Mystic Name around which the hopes of multitudes have gathered. ‘They have to reckon finally with a long historic movement in which Jesus appeared as a focal point. They have to deal also with the fact that as this movement becomes understood, it gathers into itself kindred aspirations all around the world. What they are asking modern man to reject is some of the most vital, persistent, and universal ideals of the race—control by consent not power, differerices adjusted by goodwill instead of force, property as an instrument not an end, equality of development for all. The present attempt to discover some moral authority for the economic process views these not as fixed absolutes to be brought down into life by the authority of religion, but as developing principles. It seeks not to apply them as rigid

[ 13 | formulae but to unfold them pragmatically. Thus it discovers authority within the process of life. The ethical values of its God are immanently revealed. Just as the rejection of the ethic of Jesus in economic practice involves the refusal of that previous development in human experience which fashioned them, so does it carry with it the negation of the attempts that have been made since the days of Jesus to express an ethical religion in the practical activities of the common life. Naturally there follows the denial of democracy. The core of the democratic movement is the struggle for equality, and spiritual equality is a central doctrine in the New Testament, just as equality in the right to food was central in the law and the prophets. The part that the equalitarian philosophy has played in American life has been described recently in a book by T. V. Smith. In an earlier volume he elucidates the obvious fact that political equality is unattainable unless economic equality can be constantly approached. It is because the movement of American life has been the other way that we now see inequality and autocracy in the economic order subverting the democratic state. Money determines elections and business controls government. Increasingly the independent citizen counts as less than one. Inevitably most of those who, in one breath, reject the ethic of Jesus for economic purposes, in the other give praise and honor to Fascism, whose recent envoy finds here much support for it, particularly, he says, among the social classes. Equally inevitable is it that our attempt at cultural equality—which is the condition of the successful operation of a democratic community—should now be assailed in academic quarters, even by those who are themselves the beneficiaries of it. The postulate of the effort to distribute the opportunity for the good life to the bottom of society was that everybody should have, or be able to get, the necessary economic means. When this condition disappears, there goes with it the idea which distinguishes America from Europe, that everybody has or should have the chance to develop. The spoon-fed products of a culture dispensed as charity by well-meaning foundations are not likely to be the makers of a democratic society.

The assertion that the efforts of Jesus are impossible involves also the abandonment of the idea of progress. That this concept is now under fire was to be expected. The attack upon it is another sign of an economic situation which is becoming static. The beneficiaries of early capitalistic industry naturally ‘desire to stabilize their gains and positions for their dependents and descendants. Hence all the talk about progress which characterized the stirring energies of expanding industrialism will gradually be muted, as the main economic purpose is to insure the collection of dividends. The mental and moral atmosphere of New England today compared with that of the days of Emerson, Lowell, and Garrison is a perfect case in point.

But the value and meaning of life, by common consent of the great souls who have flashed a little light for the rest of us upon this strange interlude between the eternities, is to be found in the struggle to lessen the gap between the ideal and the actual, eas between what man may desire or hope and what at . any given time he can do. Was it not in the last days of the Roman Empire, when its collective life was slowly passing, that the impetus to make a new world was passed on by those who refused to surrender to the decay that enveloped and assailed them, choosing rather to fight within themselves the battle of the undying spirit? What, then, does it mean that American industrialism, now but one hundred years old, asks a pioneer people to accept stabilization, to resign itself in so far as the form and nature of its society is concerned to an effortless old age? Poetry, philosophy, and religion alike have found their highest motif in the unending struggle between the satisfactions of the present and the dreams of the future, in the effort to bring the transient into subjection to the permanent, to subdue the separating self in the interest of the integrating whole. Now capitalistic industrialism asks us to end this struggle: by surrender and the acceptance of defeat. It asks us to accept economic efficiency at the price of abandoning in our organic life the future development of those values—truth, beauty, and goodness; justice, fellowship, and equality—in whose pursuit the wisdom of the past everywhere agrees is to be found the fullest meaning and worth of life. For this, then, have we subdued nature, made the marvel of the machine, and fashioned human organizations after its pattern—to defeat ourselves? Scarcely have we heard that the machine makes possible the means to the good life for all the people, when we are told that the good life itself is impossible because of the exi-