Is the invisible hand justly celebrated by Adam Smith really the hand of the pilgrim human community, of the Body of Christ forming—however imperfectly and incompletely—in this mortal realm?
Yes, though the language is far from optimal and that language can lead to improper concepts regarding the Body of Christ and its relationships to human beings in this mortal realm, this empirical realm of facts which we Christians can’t continue to accept when we go to the hospital to be scanned for cancers and then ignore in our worship of God and our efforts to understand God in His freely chosen role as Creator. The Invisible Hand is actually Invisible Mind and Invisible Heart as well as Invisible Hand(s) of the Body of Christ at work on forming itself, something like the self-organizational processes which seem to bring brute matter to life and to organize some brute matter (say stars and other objects as well as gaseous matter) into galaxies and into various complex groupings of galaxies.
The formation of the Body of Christ in this mortal realm is mostly a natural process though it has its aspects which could be labeled `mystical’ without too much damage to human understanding of Creation, of the actual work of the Creator as opposed to fairy tales and dreams preferred by far too many Christians—in recent centuries, even including theologians and philosophers and ecclesiastical leaders. Once those fairy tales and dreams were something different, corresponding well to the best understandings of empirical reality. We’ve kept them too long, like an eccentric lady who keeps threadbare curtains up and rickety unsafe furniture in her house when she could do better, at least repairing the old stuff which is no longer suiting the purpose of a human habitation; a complete refurnishing is often the better course of action, but a refurnishing which respects the context of that particular house.
The Body of Christ, in its preliminary forms in this world of evolution and development, is all of our communities even though many of those communities wage various sorts of war against each other and exploit each other in less violent ways. For now, the Body of Christ is somewhat of a colony of organisms rather than itself an organism, as jellyfish and some other creatures are also colonies of organisms, though amazingly well-evolved and well-developed for life as if truly cells or organs in an organism. As I said, the pilgrim Body of Christ doesn’t form in a smooth way, not even so much as does a community which is a jellyfish. Human beings and smaller human communities are too ornery and contrary for such processes of aggregation to proceed smoothly.
I’ve claimed before, and still claim, that the fullness of a good human life will be found in the world of the resurrected and, thus, the Church, the center and source of our direct relationships with God, is Herself an organ and not the entirety of the Body. Our activities as actors in the economy and the political realm, in music and other arts, in scientific and literary pursuits, in farming and woodworking, are legitimate parts of human life; we would be mutilated creatures if this were all torn away from us; if we were to sit in choirs in heavenly churches for time without end, we would soon be so bored as to be praying for the end of time.
As the Body of Christ forms in this mortal realm, however incompletely and imperfectly, all of its organs and other parts form in a way that suggests a bit of independence of parts and whole—at least in this mortal realm. We Christians have had to admit the incompleteness and imperfection of our organs of worship, our churches, even the Mother Church in Rome and the equally ancient sacramental churches of western Asia have sinned greatly and erred greatly as communities and as gatherings of individuals. Protestant and other Christian churches have done no better. The pilgrim Church moves through this world, advancing at times in Her reluctant and unsteady obedience to God and regressing at other times; at times, the Church in Rome and all other Christian churches I know of have been no better than filthy images of the Church in Heaven. The same can be said of the other developing parts of the Body of Christ, organs and other parts which are the communal analog to the various parts of individual human being. Our political and economic systems also decay to exploitive class-based systems. Our local communities in the modern world seem to vaporize as soon as one generation decides to seek something more exciting, such as a country-club and night-club life.
The economy, the realms in which we make our livings and—for many—act in the most meaningful ways is a central part of our lives, even if our economy is restricted to a family farm. Even an impoverished writer such as myself, is still working as if living in a world with a better publishing industry and more demanding readers. Like the butcher, I don’t write out of pure benevolence but rather because, perhaps with God’s help, I worked myself into a state of being where I’m a thinker and writer, paid or not. Whatever comes of, or from, the works I’m publishing for free on the Web, I’m fulfilling a role which is at least potentially as important as the great public roles of our day.
We human beings are forming various communities in this mortal realm. Some human beings are not obviously God-centered and many seem to be actual enemies of God, at least enemies of any God compatible with the teachings of Isaiah and Jeremiah or the very Person of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God. Those human beings also are playing a role in the formation of the Body of Christ, even if they are playing a seemingly negative role; the biological world has plenty of parasites and microbial invaders of other life-forms. I discussed the issue of human predators before, especially in Predators, Producers, Sheep, and the Love of Liberty and in lesser detail in other essays.
Rather than trying to justify either HIV or government-employed professional murderers, rather than even wishing they not exist, we should recognize they are part of the story as much as a pretty songbird or a dedicated nurse. Sad, but the story has sad aspects. If the story were radically different, the creatures in the story would be different—human beings are the result of evolutionary and development processes in a world with pirates on the high seas and pirates on Wall Street as well as medical and religious missionaries around the world. We wouldn’t exist if the world had been either one where human beings were a special creation beginning with Adam and Eve or if it were a place without disease and famine, war and crimes.
What’s amazing in this world of brutal struggles is the good that emerges, even from great nastiness. The persisting good is order, in the physical things and structures of this universe such as galaxies, in the environment of earth where multitudes of living organisms and physical things all shape one another. There is no need to assume any changes in human moral character, either in its makeup or its strength. The forms of imperfect and incomplete order within the evolving and developing communities of the Body of Christ are sufficient to help us modify our manifested natures, though we might remain potentially murderers and adulterers in our dreams. They are also sufficient to sometimes gather us into armies serving criminal governments or into hateful and perhaps genocidal mobs.
We may not be able to build Heaven on earth, but a productive and morally well-ordered barbarian village is nothing to sneer at; a civilization, however minor, is a great wonder. We must keep alive the awareness of the imperfections, cruelties and outright crimes, of those villages and civilizations, whether communal or individual, but we court disaster if we forget the good that was found even in Rome with its gladiator contests and its brutal conquests. I speak mostly of long-lived communities because truly perverse communities, such as Nazi Germany, will self-destruct because they don’t honor even our basic needs and most primitive moral instincts of the sort discussed in some of our great literature and certainly in the Bible.
Human communities are for real as they move toward order as part of a general movement within this universe. These communities aren’t just voluntary, contractual gatherings of freestanding human beings. We human beings remain individuals even as we become truly communities; think of this as analogical to the Christian belief that God is Father and Son and Holy Spirit, each of whom remain individuals while also being one God. We remain individual human beings while also becoming one Body of Christ.
This shows in Adam Smith’s great example though I’ll rephrase it in terms of a more fully Christian morality rather than using language consistent with Adam Smith’s Deistic outlook: the butcher doesn’t provide you with meat out of his benevolence but rather because he has taken on a role in which he makes a living and provides certain products and services for others within his community or other nearby communities. Though there are some exceptions, individual human beings nearly always feel most complete and best satisfied when fulfilling such a role with some competence.
We are tied together by our human natures, individual natures which are made to be part of certain types of communities. We are first tied together by bonds of dependency before those of love. To be stable and satisfying, those bonds of dependency must meet our basic needs and the desires which lead us to satisfy our needs. Bonds of love might develop or might come to be before or at the same time as bonds of dependencies, but it is those latter bonds which are more important and must be accepted before we can form true communities, before we can become the Body of Christ.
As sociobiologists, such as E O Wilson, have told us, our desires for forming certain basic sorts of communities and capabilities of doing so exist in the genes of the individual human being, though I would add soma and environment to make a more complete picture. We desire to form communal relationships. We engage in tentative relationships, often the accepting of dependencies upon others, and grow in communal being, communal mass, communal muscle, communal intelligence or intellect. For a variety of reasons, most of which have to do with the human brain and the mind it can make, we human beings form ever more complex communities, sometimes as a result of lesser activities which include not only economic and political activities but also those involving sports and music and stamp-collecting.
We desire communal relationships. If we succeed in forming good relationships, we begin to create communal stuff and shaping it. As the perfect and completed man is Christ, so the perfect and completed community is the Body of Christ. This way of discussion comes from the ancient Christian principle that grace does not destroy or replace nature, grace perfects and completes nature. What we are in this mortal realm tells us much about what we shall be in the world of the resurrected; in principle, it would tell us the entirety if our minds were powerful enough and if our hearts were pure enough to properly guide our minds.
So it is that when we see complex and well-ordered human communities form as if by magic, we’re really seeing the natural side of a process by which the Body of Christ is developing.
I’m going to step back a little and explain part of what is going on behind the scenes when I write my books or essays. It’s something to be found in my writings as both side-comments and as major statements. The entire small book of select writings, Making Peace with Empirical Reality, deals with some of the basic issues of accepting empirical reality as the manifestations of a lot of thoughts of God, some of those thoughts being mathematical, some being story-telling, others being analogous to other categories of human activities. See my book, Four Kinds of Knowledge, for an overview of my understanding of the necessary, but dangerous and ultimately untrue, fragmentation of human knowledge, a fragmentation which can deform our human beings if we accept it as literally and necessarily true.
Our ways of thinking and speaking, if only concessions to the weakness and smallness of the human mind, work their ways into our hearts and minds, become our attitudes and thoughts. If we use radically different knowledge for our ways of speaking of our Christian beliefs than we use for speaking of the universe, then the universe is no longer part of God’s Creation in our thoughts. We will have bracketed our religious beliefs and will only think inside those brackets on Sunday morning for an hour or so and maybe during our weekly Bible readings and daily prayers. We need technical language for theology and Bible study as well as for economics and physics, but there has to be a bit of overlap and bridges which, at least for the philosophically minded, allow smooth movement from one realm of human thought to another. Modern men have built more walls than bridges inside their minds.
We need a Christian civilization which is a rich variety of compatible cultures; we need such a group of cultures each of which teaches us to speak about the empirical world in such a way that it is part of Creation. We also need a rich variety of understandings of the ancient creeds (and their Biblical foundation) and corresponding practices; we need these varied ways of speaking and thinking of the transcendent God in such a way that He is not only Father and Son and Holy Spirit in one God but also, by His own free-will, the ever-present Creator of this world. This means that we must think and speak of God in His freely chosen role of Creator in such ways as to recognize He works through processes described by modern empirical scientists, through social and cultural and political processes described by modern empirical scientists and exegetes of traditional literary works, theorists and experimenters and practitioners who are firmly planted in empirical reality.
From the time of at least Augustine and Jerome, through Anselm and then Albertus Magnus and his student Thomas Aquinas, there were important thinkers whose works embodied an open and honest recognition of empirical reality—though necessarily within the context of their times. Now it is easy enough to re-interpret some of these works in ethereal ways, but that is not how they were written. With the persecution of Galileo, who was actually an orthodox Catholic thinker of an Augustinian sort, the hierarchy and intellectual mainstream of the Western Church began to separate themselves from an honest and courageous and faithful respect for God’s Creation. It seems odd at first but makes sense upon contemplation that the Church soon lost the skills of speaking of Heaven, the world of the resurrected, in ways other than vague dreams or gushing allusions which make no sense in terms of the only part of Creation we know or can directly explore, the part in which we are born and are shaped, the mortal world which is the source of the world of the resurrected.
In general, theological talk in its academic forms and its more accessible forms deals with creatures and worlds which have little or nothing to do with the only part of Creation we know. Human sin is explained in sermons and homilies and spiritual works as the result of acts by a human couple which never existed—it is likely the last common male ancestor and last common female ancestor of the human race lived tens of thousands of years apart. Matter and time and space are discussed in ways drawn from pre-modern thought, much of it originating in ancient Greece. What saves the Catholic Church from utter disintegration are the large number of priests who exercise greater sense and wisdom than could come from the very defective scripts they are taught in seminary. I would imagine similar comments could be made of other Christian churches.
The invisible hand is a rather misleading way of speaking of some aspects of the formation of the Body of Christ, ultimately a community of friends of Jesus Christ which is well-ordered in various ways, some moral and some seemingly having little to do with morality, but all the order works toward both moral and utilitarian purposes. The mind of the Body of Christ forms by encapsulating this order. It is the mind of that Body and the objective relationships which arise in this moral realm which are of concern. The hand of the Body can only act by instinct unless guided by the mind in developing proper habits and customs, moral and otherwise. This most certainly does not often mean a group of experts gathered in the conference room of some resort hotel nor in the meeting room of some bank or government agency. It nearly always means businessmen planning expansions during a period of growing populations or a group of parents organizing a baseball league for young boys or girls or an international and loose-knit community of scientists pursuing an understanding of some interesting phenomenon which might or might not have commercial application. These are purposeful activities but not attempts to plan from the top down.
Most especially in the past century or so, we’ve seen how much harm can be done by those sorts of planning processes and the consequent efforts to control a seeming chaos as it organizes itself. We saw that harm in the devastation which was Russia after the Bolsheviks had ruled for decades and we saw it in the design and construction of the national highway systems of the United States and other countries, using taxpayer monies to benefit the military-industrial complex but also large corporate employers in general and also mall developers. This led to massive damage to an admittedly inadequate Main Street, where many of those taxpayers lived and worked and purchased goods and services. It’s true that Main Street was likely inadequate to modern needs, but it was crucial to the lives of so many small towns and so many neighborhoods of large cities. We would probably be a country with less junk filling our garages and basements, a country more stable, a country filled with happier and stronger families and church communities, if we’d let Main Street grow and change to meet new needs. That mall down the street and the huge aerospace factory in a nearby town are not the result of any Invisible Hand but rather the result of the velvet-gloved Iron Hand of would-be tyrants, small or great.