A leftist Jesuit recommended the following to me:
(For the whole thing, see
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm)
The Market as God:
Living the New Dispensation
by Harvey Cox
A FEW years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going
on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my
lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to
expand my horizons; so I took the advice, vaguely fearful that I would have
to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary. Instead I was surprised to
discover that most of the concepts I ran across were quite familiar.
Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of déjà
vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of
Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the
Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine's City of God. Behind
descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of
the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the
inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put
them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall,
and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only
thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive
temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and,
ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose
of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East Asian
economies. Discuss this article in Post & Riposte.
The East Asians' troubles, votaries argue, derive from their heretical
deviation from free-market orthodoxy -- they were practitioners of "crony
capitalism," of "ethnocapitalism," of "statist capitalism," not of the one
true faith. The East Asian financial panics, the Russian debt repudiations,
the Brazilian economic turmoil, and the U.S. stock market's $1.5 trillion
"correction" momentarily shook belief in the new dispensation. But faith is
strengthened by adversity, and the Market God is emerging renewed from its
trial by financial "contagion." Since the argument from design no longer
proves its existence, it is fast becoming a postmodern deity -- believed in
despite the evidence. Alan Greenspan vindicated this tempered faith in
testimony before Congress last October. A leading hedge fund had just lost
billions of dollars, shaking market confidence and precipitating calls for
new federal regulation. Greenspan, usually Delphic in his comments, was
decisive. He believed that regulation would only impede these markets, and
that they should continue to be self-regulated. True faith, Saint Paul
tells us, is the evidence of things unseen.
From ATLANTIC MONTHLY, March 1999.
Harvey Cox is a professor of divinity at Harvard University.
His most recent book is Fire From Heaven (1994).
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
