The kindness of capitalism

To every generation, at every time, it always seems as though things have never been worse. We, it would seem, have a strong case to make for ownership rights to this complaint, today. After all we have been through this past century, look how the new one is starting out, and with what measure of hope on the horizon: we are beleaguered on all sides by ideologically-fired environmental wars, uncompromising political infighting, desperate religious strife - all set in motion by unbending people of intractably opposed opinions determined to impose their solutions on each other, and for each other’s good, no less.

Even Pope Benedict XVI is in on the act: he’s written a book in which he assesses what ails the world. And according to him, a great evil set loose upon us is: Capitalism. He seems to equate capitalism with wealth, leading him to suggest that even Jesus, having warned us about the evils of wealth, would also have disapproved of “the cruelty of capitalism,” which is responsible, the pope argues, for everything from slavery and sexual deviance to drug abuse - and, even, aid to poor countries that, he says, introduces a “technical mentality” into that part of the world.

It shouldn’t be necessary to point out that the evils that he complains of (even the “technical mentality,” to the extent to which it might be viewed as “evil.”) all existed prior to the elaboration of capitalism by Adam Smith and, certainly, its continuing success in the world last century and this. Indeed, its spread has coincided with both the remediation of many of those evils and even the discovery of new ones to combat.

No, capitalism is not one of the faces of evil - it is one of the means by which we defend ourselves from it. Those who criticise it as a baleful influence on society are often those who, really, don’t want the power of that defense to be in our hands. They genuinely believe that they know better than we what’s best for us, and they want to impose that on us either in one fell swoop or, at least, by whittling away at our ability to resist their prescriptions (and proscriptions).

Even those of us who support capitalism sometimes find ourselves alarmed at what it can unleash when at full voice. But, it is to be remembered, capitalism never stops. In releasing us to pursue our self-interest, it allows us, too, to consider what that is, and also what we have wrought.

Moreover, the aggregate of the countless assessments and decisions we all continuously make reveals not only the consequences of our individual ambitions, but (importantly, based on our aggregated individual input) of our capacities as peoples and nations for both evil and for good - something never achieved by previous and competing systems - nor by our presumed “leaders,” however well-intentioned - or superior to us - they may have felt themselves to be.

It is best to leave our morals to be discovered, examined, and incrementally improved by us as we struggle with the challenges that we, ourselves, discover piling up before us, rather than to have them imposed on us in whole by unbending people of intractable opinions. Saving us from such people is perhaps the greatest of the kindnesses of capitalism.