“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms – greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge – has marked the upward surge of mankind….”
So says Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film “Wall Street.”
Greed or avarice, from the Latin root for “desiring or longing after” may define our culture more than any of her six deadly siblings. Acquisitiveness, sadly instead of inquisitiveness, lies at the heart of many Americans’ everyday motivations and focus, and is certainly central to modern consumer capitalism.
The goods of this world need not be an unqualified evil. For instance, though the apostles explicitly did not do so after the Resurrection, the church has long defended the right to own private property (cf. Rerum Novarum). But lengthy and calamitous is the human record of temptation not to possess possessions, but to be possessed by them.
There is a secret Scrooge inside many of us, willing to exploit Tiny Tim to the fullest, either directly through theft and uncaring materialism or through more subtle sins of omission, to expand our bank accounts. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus warns against Gekko’s worldview: “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” And elsewhere: “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.”
Spenser, Milton and Dante all depict Mammon (or the closely related Plutus) as a sort of demonic money-god, the personification of our idolatrous infatuation with worldly goods and the “wolfish” tendency to sneak and store and hoard them for ourselves. There is something endlessly alluring about the honors of the world, whether in finance or prestige or power.
And yet Francis of Assisi, renouncing all luxury and comfort and inheritance in his voluntary betrothal to Lady Poverty, teaches us “It is only in giving, that we receive.”
It is a great mystery of human life. We take and take and still want more, the cavernous black hole of desire opens wider the more that we have in our possession. The corner office is never sufficient, the sportscar always too slow compared to our neighbors’, the vacation never long enough. However, when we pour ourselves out for others, to the point where we are not sure that we can do more or give of ourselves any further lest we break apart, then we are somehow filled. It’s cliché to the point of annoyance, but truly all the wealth in the world cannot buy that experience.
There is a complex twin relationship with poverty for Christians. We are called to eradicate it, to work untiringly to foster justice and indiscrimination over the face of the earth. And yet, Jesus says things like “The poor you will always have with you” and, even more puzzlingly, “Blessed [from the root word for happy] are the poor.”
This is not a trite, upper-echelon condescension – “Look at all those penniless little children in the ghetto and slums, good thing they are interiorly happy and blest, whether they realize it or not.”
Rather it’s a call to every person who has ever or will ever read those words, no matter their investment portfolio, to foster inner affluence by divesting himself or herself of those things which encumber our relationship with God and with our brothers and sisters, especially those most marginalized and vulnerable.
If we take the original World Magnate at His word, that “all that he has is ours,” perhaps we should tell the Gekko and Scrooge within: “You’re fired!”
Michael M. Canaris of Collingswood is an administrator at Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life and is on the faculty for the Department of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University.
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