Greed

No Rhyme or Reason (the fourth in a series of articles on each of the seven deadly sins* to be published on each Friday until Labour Day), by Geoff Ryan

“Greed is a sin directly against one’s neighbour, since one man cannot over-abound in external riches, without another man lacking.” (Thomas Acquinas).

“Suppose everybody cared enough, everybody shared enough, wouldn’t everybody have enough? There is enough in the world for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.” (Frank Buchman: Remaking the World)

“What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Matthew 16:26)

H

ere are a few of the more uncomfortable facts and figures comparing the world’s “haves” (us) with the world’s “have-nots” (most of the rest of the world). Keep in mind that, in spite of our efforts at ecological devastation, the world we live in was designed by God to produce enough sustenance for everyone in it:
• Every 3.6 seconds someone dies of hunger. Every year 15 million children die of hunger
• The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well-fed, one-third is under-fed one-third is starving
• Nearly one in four people, 1.3 billion - a majority of humanity - live on less than $1 per day, while the world’s 358 billionaires have assets exceeding the combined annual incomes of countries with 45 percent of the world’s people.
• Malnutrition is implicated in more than half of all child deaths worldwide.
• To satisfy the world’s sanitation and food requirements would cost only US$13 billion- what the people of the United States and the European Union spend on perfume each year.
• The assets of the world’s three richest men are more than the combined GNP of all the least developed countries on the plant. (http://library.thinkquest.org/C002291/high/present/stats.htm)

Nothing new here, I expect. We have heard it all before somewhere. In truth, abstract statistical calculations carry with them no real point of reference for us and therefore rarely effect much change in our behaviour. It is like reading an explanation of Einstein’s theory of relativity - it is real enough and possibly even somewhat interesting, but it does not really affect life to the point where the next time you are sitting through a boring sermon you comfort yourself with the knowledge that actually, you are wasting no more time than usual.

The point then, of all the above data, is to build my case that we in the industrialized, post-modern, consumer driven, Western world - Canada included - are greedy. It is a greed that kills and a sin without excuse.

Greed is the chameleon of the seven deadly sins. It pops up in many different forms and guises to the point that it seems almost irrepressible. The Bible refers to it as ‘covetousness’. I prefer that splendid, old word - avarice (it can be enunciated with a satisfying certitude rarely found in the truncated English that most of us speak now). Whatever you choose to call it, greed means pretty much the same thing: wanting more or wanting what you don’t have. Wanting it simply for the sake of possessing it rather than for itself, with an obsessive acquisitiveness that violates all laws of reason or justice in its need. We are talking about material things here. Unlike sloth, which is a sin primarily relating to spiritual matters, greed is unrepentantly about money and possessions and things - plain old stuff. The more the merrier.

…greed is unrepentantly about money and possessions and things - plain old stuff.

I understand greed. The 1980’s spanned some very formative years for me, from my late teenage hood through into marriage and my acceptance of a vocation, and the 1980’s were all about greed. It was the decade of Mike Milliken and Ivan Boesky, the “junk bond” kings. “Greed is good,” said Gordon Gecko, the corporate raider played by Michael Douglas in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, and this certainly seemed the motto for that whole decade. Reagan ruled in the American White House and Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street - venture capitalists both. In the 1980s greed came brazenly out of the closet and was told: “You’re OK.”

Not that greed is anything new. The French romantic writer, Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, railed against the greed of the emperor Napoleon: “…to become disgusted with conquerors, it would be necessary to know all the evils they cause; it would be necessary to witness the indifference with which the most innocent creatures are sacrificed to them in a corner of the world on which they have never set foot. The tactics of greed - Napoleon’s desire to own everything - are astonishing…they have no limits, not even their own destruction.” Greed is as old as original sin.

In recent times, we’ve had Enron and WorldCom and the Liberal sponsorship scandal. This past winter there was an NHL hockey strike which was, make no mistake, about greed (both on the part of the owners and the players). We’ve got the fall of Conrad Black and even more famously, Martha Stewart. In both Black’s and Stewart’s cases, there is no accounting for their actions other than the grip of greed. There is simply no other explanation for why someone as fabulously wealthy as Martha Stewart would do what she apparently did, for the sake of $51,000! Truly a pittance in comparison to her net worth and steadily rising profits (during her few months in prison her stocks rose by over $50 million).

Greed is irrational. There’s no accounting for it. Greed is different than the other six deadly sins in that it ultimately makes no sense - there is little “rhyme” to it. Unlike, say, lust or pride or anger, it is never celebrated or defended positively. Neither is there any “reason.” Yet, it is the only one of the deadly sins that is not utterly condemned by official (Roman Catholic) teaching. The Catholics figure that the desire for possessions is natural to humans and so greed, “if kept within the bounds of reason and justice and resisted triumphantly”, can be “positively meritorious”. The problem is, it can’t be kept “within the bounds”. The minute our natural desire for possessions crosses over any bound of reason or justice, it becomes the sin of greed and there is no positive spin that can be put on that.

It is the unreasonableness of greed that stymies me - it simply makes no sense. Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale, “The Young King”, is an evocative examination of the ripple effect of greed. In one of three dreams that the young king is visited with on the eve of his coronation, Greed (Avarice) and Death are watching a multitude of men toiling in the mud. “They are my servants,” says Avarice, holding three grains of corn in her palm. Death proposes a bargain to Avarice, saying that for one grain of corn she will leave the mean alone. Avarice refuses and Death kills off a third of them. The offer is made three times and refused three times. In the end, no man is left alive. It makes no sense - three grains of corn! But there you have it…greed.

I thought I had met a greedy man once. His name was Boris and he was with us right from the official opening weekend of The Salvation Army in Russia in July 1991. He was one of our first adherents and later, became one of our first soldiers. Boris was in his sixties and a man in whom the “failings of his toilet” were immediately apparent. He was eccentric in habit, mildly obsessive in his interests, unfailingly cheerful in his demeanour, long-winded of speech and downright annoying in personality, most of the time. For all this, he was quite endearing as there was something of the little boy in him. Oh yes, and he was greedy - or so I thought.

Much of what we would do in the Army in St. Petersburg centred around food. Once a month we would have soldiers meeting at which we always served a buffet meal. Every Sunday, following our meeting, we would serve teas and buns as a form of fellowship sacrament. It was at these times that Boris’s greed came out. He would stuff his face with the buns on Sundays and then, with his cheeks bulging like a squirrel, would proceed to stuff his pockets too. At soldiers meetings he would heap food so high on his plate that it defied gravity. He would hover around the table and at the end of everything, would pick through the debris, scooping leftovers into a bag to take home. My initial reaction on noticing Boris’ behaviour was annoyance. I soon became appalled at his unselfconscious opportunism. Curiously, however, none of the Russians gave it a passing thought. Keep in mind that we are talking about a people who have been taught by life to jealously watch everyone around them with suspicion, lest they gain even the slightest advantage. In Boris’ case, however, they made allowance for his increasingly obvious greed. I was puzzled.

My initial reaction on noticing Boris’ behaviour was annoyance. I soon became appalled at his unselfconscious opportunism. Curiously, however, none of the Russians gave it a passing thought.

One day, after making an irritated remark about Boris to one of the older women in the corps, I was taken aside so things could be explained to me. The medal that Boris always wore on his jacket lapel was indicated. It denoted that he was what the Russians call a “blockadnik”. He had been a child during the 900-day siege of Leningrad by the Nazis during WWII. Boris had survived a pitiless siege that lasted almost three years, over two harsh and bitter winters, marked by hunger, death, depravation and even cannibalism. By the time the blockade was lifted, over a million people had starved to death. Apparently, many “blockadniks”, due to the food deprivation of these formative years, had developed an obsessive phobia about food. They were hoarders. They would overeat, ferociously guarding their food portions from all comers until it was safely eaten by themselves. This was all well known to the Russians. It was known and understood and allowance was made. As a nation, they understood hunger and of necessity, they are a nation of hoarders. Greed they made no allowance for. But they understood that Boris’ problem was not greed.

Something had been broken in Boris right at the outset of this life. This deformation stayed with him throughout his life, right up to the end (he died about three years ago). It wasn’t his fault and he wasn’t to blame. It truly affected no one but him. There was a reason for Boris acting the way he did. There was a plausible explanation for his behaviour. Excuses were therefore made and accepted. If it had been greed, however, there would have been no excuse and no acceptable explanation.

But what about us? Not many of us have experienced the life-crippling trauma of Boris’ infancy. So what is it that compels us to live so greedily? Is it the relentless onslaught of the media, luring us with “things” and lifestyles options that are far out of the reach of most of us and which, if obtained, would corrode our souls anyway?

Not many of us have experienced the life-crippling trauma of Boris’ infancy. So what is it that compels us to live so greedily?

According the economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, in his new book “The End of Poverty”, 8 million people around the world die each year because they are too poor to stay alive (that’s about 20,000 people a day). They die “in hospital wards that lack drugs, in villages that lack antimalarial bed nets, in houses that lack safe drinking water”. Yet, according to Sachs, if the US would $16 billion dollars annually, to address the plight of the poorest of the poor, (one-thirtieth of the nearly 500 billion that they will spend this year alone on military spending), extreme poverty could actually be eradicated by the year 2025. To put this in proportion, $16 billion represents 0.15% of U.S. income or 15 cents on every $100 of our national income. But this is not going to happen. This is a fraction of what the US has repeatedly promised to give in numerous agreements and accords over the years. The giving to the poor has steadily declined for decades.

According the economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, in his new book “The End of Poverty”, 8 million people around the world die each year because they are too poor to stay alive (that’s about 20,000 people a day).

The United States is a lens through which we can look at ourselves. Truthfully there is culturally little difference between Americans and Canadians. Except that we Canadian are less generous than Americans. In foreign aid, we annually give less than a quarter of what the Americans do. We also give less than Italy, France, Britain, Germany, Japan, Spain, the Netherlands or Sweden - pretty much less than any other western nation. Unlike, Boris, however we have no excuse for our greed.

Co-Founder and Co-Editor of theRubicon and Co-Ordinator of the 614 Network (www.614network.com), Geoff and his wife Sandra minister to Regent Park, a social housing project in Downtown Toronto.

*First published in Horizons March/April 2005

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