Evil in the economy

Yesterday I saw this headline in Business Week: Wall Street's Economic Crimes Against Humanity. In the article, Shoshana Zuboff assails the moral judgment of the suit and tie folks who work on Wall Street in the 'banality of evil' in which they indulged. In shocking terms for a major article in Business Week, she pounds and the personal responsibility of those involved, and not merely of the gigantic entities for which they worked. For the first time in a long time, the word evil has entered the vocabulary of capitalism. It recalled to me this insightful section from Lesslie Newbigin:

"But to say that capitalism requires a certain kind of moral foundation is to say that capitalism cannot survive permanently in a purely secular society. To quote a recent writer, 'The disinterested devotion which was vital to the creation of the capitalist world order and to the public life of industrial nations and which rested on a religious idea-system appears to be a type of moral capital debt which is no longer being serviced.' but this means that capitalism cannot be a self-sustaining system. It depends on the moral-cultural system and cannot be separated from it. But moral imperatives cannot operate merely as useful props for a profitable economic order. If they are not rooted in some belief about how the universe is in fact ordered, they collapse; and if they are so rooted, then the economic order cannot be isolated from their jurisdiction. If capitalism depends on the insights of a moral conscience, then that conscience has to have authority over the working of capitalist economics. (Foolishness to the Greeks p112).

Why is it that those whom Zuboff condemns so strongly were unaware of their banal evil? It certainly has to do with the mediation which Zuboff identifies in shielding them from those whom they exploited. But far more profoundly, the story that they had embraced - the story of limitless growth - was separated from the moral-cultural system which it rejected.

If there is to be real reform now, moral imperatives cannot be used merely as 'props for a profitable economic order.' They must be rooted in reality - which is precisely why Christians must engage in the public discourse about the purpose of society and economies. We testify to the One for whom, and by whom all things exist.