Capitalism
as we now practice it is soul-less.
Soul is
story. My soul is my story, with its sorrows and its joys. Soul-less capitalism
has no concern for the stories of individual human beings.
The
problem of soul-less capitalism is not only greed. Its greatest problem is
idolatry. Soul-less capitalism says that an abstraction, a number on a bottom
line, is more important than beauty, more important then love, more important
than health, more important than worship. If the bottom line drives beauty and
love and health and worship from the lives of billions of people, that is okay.
In the long run and in some places things are better. The problem is that
billions of people do not live in the long run or in the right places. “The
long run” story is an abstraction. It is idolatry.
We need
soul-friendly capitalism.
Soul-friendly
capitalism takes account of the stories of each man and woman and child on the
face of the earth. It says that competition is good, so long as competition
does not kill. It says that incentives for effort are good, but that earning
twenty or thirty times what the lowest paid worker in your company earns is
good enough to motivate effort. Earning hundreds of times what that worker
earns is feeding a beast with limitless hunger. The beast is an idol.
Soul-less
capitalism creates a train rushing to environmental destruction, whose
engineers are powerless to slow it down. Soul-friendly capitalism slows down
the train so the riders can enjoy the scenery, and so there will be scenery to
enjoy. Soul-friendly capitalism says that moments of contemplation are good,
and that every human being should be able to enjoy such moments, not just those
who worship the beast.
Soul-less
capitalism creates fundamentalists, who correctly perceive that such capitalism
is idolatrous. The violence needed to sustain soul-less capitalism breeds
violence in reaction to it. Soul-less capitalism rests on a foundation of
violence. It requires the biggest weapons in the world to sustain itself.
Billions of people face those weapons and curse us for them.
We need
soul-friendly capitalism, that will put down the weapons and be content with
the minimum force needed to keep order in a world community whose members can
live lives of beauty and love and health and worship.
Soul-friendly
capitalism is the better model that we need.
