TheMarketForIdeas

What makes a good life – state institutions, religion, or money? In this first part, I will trace the deep historical entanglement between political power and religious authority, from Saint Augustine to Karl Marx and Max Weber, setting the stage for a contemporary reflection continued in Part II.

Why such a title?

Today’s piece is not only about economics. In fact, none ever is “pure”; nor is it cheap fantasy – it cannot be.

I would need at least a full course, without interruption, to fully articulate everything I have in mind under this title.

To shorten the path, I begin with two clarifications.

First, I use the phrase “a good life” as a substitute for development – a development that does not mean merely a full stomach.

Something more is needed: serenity of the soul, the joy of living in peace, understanding and tolerance, good education, health, successful descendants, openness to the world, and freedom.

Second, what unsettles me and leads me to this title is the widely shared sense that what is happening today in Iran gives us pause.

And this is because, in that country, religion – placed at the forefront of political decision-making, with the aim of demonstrating possible miracles – fails dramatically. It is a religion expanded to the point of fusion with politics, forming an almost atomic combination that clouds rationality, such that those who govern no longer think through what they do. The country is proven to support terrorist regimes and organizations and, more recently, poses a potential nuclear danger. In other words, clerics – at the head of a theocratic system and claiming divine sanction – have come not only to frighten the world, but also to make life undesirable for their own citizens.

We will use this situation as a case study in order to argue, as thoroughly as possible, an answer to the question in the title.

What circumstances justify the pairing of state and religious authority?

The association between the state and religious authority is not new. These two organizational entities, both heavily institutionalized, have always sought one another out and courted each other in what we may call a marriage of convenience.

Those who have institutionally represented religion have needed the arm of the state in order to impose themselves and to shepherd their own order. At the same time, those who have represented states – from minor politicians to emperors – have seen in religious anointment a chance to acquire something of the mark of divinity. It has always been so. We see that it is the same today.

It is not only interest that authorizes placing these two entities on comparable planes. Their origins, in logical terms, justify it: both are rooted in human needs. If the state emerged to compensate for our shortcomings (as neo-institutionalists argue), religious authorities, as institutions (church, mosque, temple, synagogue, etc.), arose to soothe our fears.

In the Christian world, this interpenetration is theoretically linked to the name of Saint Augustine. The subordination – admittedly only moral and spiritual – of public power to religious authority was, in his view, in the natural order of things.

The state, a necessary evil entrusted with earthly, ephemeral order, was thus to be placed under the institution responsible for eternal order. It is also there, by the same logic, that justice was to be dispensed. The idea has not disappeared.

The symmetry of how “good” is produced and distributed

There is another circumstance that places us before the complementarity of the two instances mentioned. It concerns the symmetrical way in which “good” is produced and distributed.

“Give, for you give to yourself,” say Christian hierarchs.

“By giving you shall gain” is the formulation of Nicolae Steinhardt, closest to the biblical meaning. Formally a paradox, the text, once deciphered, is an exhortation to offer support, help, understanding, generosity, forgiveness, and so on, to your fellow human beings in this world, with the aim of benefiting from heavenly reward in the world to come. It should be noted that a self-service formula is not accepted. In fact, the simplest thing would be to give directly to oneself. But one is told that the qualified chance of being on the right path is to resort to professional mediation.

A similar logic applies to the good provided by the state: you pay taxes and duties – willingly or not – in order to benefit from collective goods and services whose provision exceeds individual capacities. Public finance calls this the principle of equivalence.

At the dawn of modern development, all three Abrahamic religions condemned interest, based on an almost excessive insistence on equivalence – viewing it as an unjustified surplus beyond what is given. Today, only where Sharia law prevails is interest (riba) anathematized as anti-Islamic.

We may also note that both entities provide, in exchange for what is offered to them, forms of social protection: the state – pensions and social assistance; religious authority – public meals, charity, shelter, and so on.

All things considered, it remains to be seen what is more reliable: the good of the afterlife, promised by religious leaders with remarkable certainty – as if they had visited those places – or the good promised by the state in this visible world, lived either well or poorly. In a corrupt and failing state, one is almost tempted to bet on heavenly reward. In such situations, where harmony seems illusory, religion might lend a helping hand.

Can people live without religion? Marx does not think so.

I have lived long enough to agree with Gunnar Myrdal and to see that disinterested good is not cheap fantasy, but rather a vain illusion.

It is true that crude commercial transactions – such as the buying of indulgences – passed into history through Luther. Today’s perspective turns almsgiving into the most accessible way to cleanse oneself of sin.

I also believe that people cannot live without religion, whatever form it may take. Even the most fervent declared atheists are haunted by fundamental existential questions to which religion can contribute answers. It would be appropriate here to more fully exploit the Judaic vein of questioning – the possibility of dialogue with the Creator.

Nor did Karl Marx, despite common belief, remove religion from human life. He wrote – forever quotable – that religion is “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” A balm for suffering, a chance to overcome it, an analgesic for everything – that is what emerges from this passage. But the ending of the quote is a hook. Just as a drug, by offering euphoria, reduces the addict’s chance of breaking free from the source of false happiness, so religion, by anesthetizing, diminishes critical sense; everything becomes “as the One above wills.”

And yet, if for so many – indeed, increasingly many – contact with religion brings a surplus of well-being, it makes no sense to oppose this large-scale search for happiness, even if it is imperfect. And to conclude in the spirit in which I began: do we go to church or temple without money in our pockets, in order to honour the services we receive?

Honorarium, not salary!

Attempting to answer this question opens a necessary parenthesis.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Western Europe debated the distinction between salary and honorarium.

A salary was considered a fixed sum paid for strictly determined work, constrained by state or employer conditions.

An honorarium, by contrast, honoured a special service, provided by a special individual who, through high qualification and a particular innate endowment, enters into the intimacy of your life: lawyer, priest, doctor, and so on. Their work was not considered quantifiable or suitable for crude commercial transaction.

Payment was flexible, unconstrained, according to the possibilities and the standing of those who healed your physical or spiritual suffering. Although this practice has disappeared institutionally, its spirit remains alive. First, because it has a rational core; second, because a presence from above seems to intervene: not just anyone becomes an exceptional doctor, a skilled lawyer, or a deeply gifted spiritual guide. Beyond effort, something else is needed – one might say that God must lay His hand upon them.

Religion accompanies economic dynamism in the West

The way in which these two fundamental institutions have interacted has shaped the path by which societies have sought their well-being.

It has become commonplace that, regarding capitalist mentality – attitudes toward the market, private property, money and interest, competition, individualism, and freedom – religious authority has never been neutral. On the contrary, it has been present and influential, for better or worse, since the early emergence of capitalism in Europe (11^th-12th centuries), and even earlier in China.

For the West, Max Weber and Werner Sombart argued respectively that Protestant ethics were most compatible with capitalist development, and that Jewish communities were key carriers of the new economic order.

Weber wrote his famous work convinced that the capitalist spirit had found its people in Protestants – especially Calvinists – precisely because the doctrine of predestination encourages individuals to act on earth in ways pleasing to God.

And what pleases God? The answers point to the Bible: not leisure and pleasure, but action; “he who does not work shall not eat”; inequality of goods is part of divine order; time is money.

In sum, Weber shows that honest work, prudence, moderation, punctuality, and profit itself are compatible with divine will. Once religious barriers were broken, the path to capitalism was open – and it has remained so.

(To be continued)