I’m in the midst of revived efforts to explore modern knowledge of time, space, and matter to create an enriched and enlarged Christian understanding of Creation. My patterns of learning, contemplating, and writing are often interrupted by the horrifying spectacle of the United States decaying at a rapid rate and dragging with it a world which had allowed itself to grow dependent in many ways upon this immature giant of a country, this adolescent people who somehow got hold of the keys to the liquor cabinet and the bulldozer from Daddy’s company.
I’ve maintained and continue to maintain that we aren’t just facing some technical currency problems. Even the more substantial loss of productive capital from the United States is only a proximate and local problem in a world which seems to be heading towards a chaos of sort. We Americans, indeed all those of the modern West, have fundamental problems which are showing as specific problems, such as ethical breakdowns in banking and politics. Addressing bank regulatory breakdowns won’t help much if there are so many coming out of colleges and universities who have so little moral sense or perhaps so little in the way of moral courage — see my previous article, Developing Virtues the Thomistic Way, for a discussion of how to develop such a virtue.
As a civilization, we have somehow shed our moral sense, our sense of who we are, what our world is, and what a proper human life is. We have no reason to be here beyond getting a house with a living-room suited to a high-definition, wall-mounted, 60-inch television set. It’s really not so clear that Americans ever had a true understanding of the civilization in which they exist, the West. Albert Jay Nock recorded in the early 1900s a comment made by a European friend finishing up a tour of the United States: “The United States is the first country in history to go from barbarism to decadence without passing through a state of civilization in between.” [Quoted from memory.] As barbarians, we lived off the cultural heritage of still reasonably healthy Europe. As decadent hordes, we live off the cultural heritage of Hollywood and the National Football League.
This situation forms a background of sorts as I go about my work and provides a rather strong motivation for my efforts to make sense of the world in Christian terms, thus providing a foundation for a revived or reborn Christian civilization.
With this short apologia for my recent and anticipated efforts, I’ll move on to talk about the other side of Adam Smith’s golden coin. First, I’ll certainly admit that Smith was right, along with many others before and after him, that:
Markets and other complex assemblages of human beings can produce desirable results in the aggregate though the individual participants act as individuals, aiming for their personal good and not any aggregate good.
Nor do they aim for any aggregate evil which can, and does, arise along with or sometimes instead of the aggregate good. And so, I would expand the claim:
Markets and other complex assemblages of human beings can produce either or both of desirable or undesirable results in the aggregate though the individual participants act as individuals, aiming for their personal good and not any aggregate good or evil.
Often enough the desirable and undesirable results can occur in the same human communities. I’ll also add that evil is sometimes a deliberate result brought on by brutal or exploitive men, criminals though they might enter the history books as great industrialists or statesmen. There have always been wolves in the sheep-pens.
There are also issues with human understandings of good and evil, but I’ll only note for now that the good under development can appear grotesque, even in an evil way — see Freedom and Structure in Human Life — How Grotesque the Good when It’s Developing. This opens up a number of possibilities, including the possibility that the structures built by exploiters and despots might well be primitive versions of important structures which will appear in a completed, perfected form in the Body of Christ. Or they might simply be corruptions of structures or organs which can play good roles.
I’m an optimist in the long-term, believing that evolutionary selection processes work in human communities to favor socially desirable behaviors, but we mortal men live in the short-term and have to face the prospect that our human communities can be organized by free activities in a way that’s exploitive or even downright evil but stable in the short-term. To be stable in even the short-term, an exploitive system has to generate enough prosperity to pay the soldiers and policemen and bureaucrats. In the long-term, the effects of God’s grace, His mercy or love, can be seen in the generally upward movement of a race of great apes with some talent for violence.
Grace doesn’t destroy or replace nature. Grace completes and perfects nature. Even in this mortal realm, God’s grace is at work. It moves and changes individual men and also communities of men, not just the Christian Church, in the general direction of states of completeness and perfection. But God’s grace usually moves human communities forward at a glacial pace, relentlessly but slowly even when the humans in those communities are frenetically running around in circles. And glaciers often crush and pulverize towns and farmlands and beautiful stretches of forestland. Those crushing and pulverizing movements of glaciers are sometimes advances towards God’s goal of shaping us into the Body of Christ, but we see not the greater good when that glacier is crushing our friends and destroying our homes and means of living. Yet, Creation includes explosive volcanoes and fast-moving streams of lava as well as glaciers. When the Creator wants to make something fresh, He is good at destroying what lies in the way of His efforts.
When individual men and human communities are the agents of destruction and creation, we can speak of the invisible hand because of lack of better ways of speaking. As I wrote at the beginning of this article, I’m aiming to develop better understandings based upon modern empirical knowledge disciplined to the very small stock of truths God has revealed through the incarnate Son of God, Jesus Christ. Until then, we can use the obscurities of terms such as ‘invisible hand’ as early modern scientists had to use meaningful but fuzzy terms, such as ‘impulse’, before developing better terms and enriched and enlarged understandings of the physical aspects of this world.
The invisible hand is neither all good nor all bad. It’s a part of the movement of God’s narrative towards and through the ongoing Apocalypse, the ongoing formation of the Body of Christ. Though I sometimes speak pessimistically of destructive forces working on the West and perhaps other realms of humanity, I try to always speak of the great possibilities for building something still better than Western Civilization, something that will still be imperfect and full of sinful men but might have some unanticipated traits or organs of the Body of Christ.
Some of the forms of organization resulting from the invisible hand will be misused in the short-term, as Hitler and his followers used the techniques of modern management to round-up and murder millions of human beings. We can’t afford to be too pessimistic about the troubles of the past century or so, which seem to be intensifying in some ways even as I write. We should start looking at the potential good of proper use of modern knowledge and start trying to figure out how we and our parents and grandparents went so far off-track. Yet, we should remember again that we sometimes assume too much. We were warned by Jesus of Nazareth about the straight and wide path. It might well be that the path God wishes us to travel is narrow and also curves in certain ways. See my earlier article, Differential Geometry and Moral Narratives, for a short discussion of this issue, a discussion I hope to enlarge greatly in coming months.
Those who live in an age with cities having more than 10 million citizens and the total world population in the vicinity of 7 billion should appreciate the need for rational use of resources and for better and more creative use of modern empirical knowledge. We should also appreciate the need for proper moral guidance in the application of those rational techniques, but God will continue to shape humanity into the Body of Christ whether we work in the short-term for good or evil or for morally unguided short-term goals of prosperity or safety. This doesn’t mean that all human beings or all human communities will be part of that Body when fully-formed. It seems unlikely that all men or all societies will enter the World of the Resurrected to live for time without end.
It does mean we should try to discern the shape God intends for us, as particular individuals and as specific communities, and to cooperate with His shaping processes even when it means we, as particular individuals and as specific communities, will suffer in this mortal realm. It does mean that we will be pushed forward onto a path suited for this shaping process but we individuals can enter brier patches or tar-pits, the probability of such disasters increasing if we fight against God. It does mean we can move off the path and go over a cliff while looking back at a time and region which we define as having been better. It does mean we can gripe and turn ourselves against the path we travel not seeming to understand we travel as part of a story being told by the Almighty, thinking that we can come to a Heaven of our own definition though we refuse to bow to God by properly responding to His own acts as Creator of this messy and sometimes nasty world.