There should be no Holy Books. Our species would make a significant step forward if it forsook the habit of declaring books to be sacred scriptures. The belief that certain books aren’t just the writings of human beings, but direct revelations from a divinity, or that they are “sacred” has caused no end of mischief. But I plead my case precisely because I love and respect books. There is some profound wisdom to be found, if one cares to look, in certain books. But there seems, in my view, to be no greater insult to a wise person than to turn their work into a silly magical talisman, to be mindlessly chanted and ranted, rather than read and judged with reason.
A noteworthy feature of holy scriptures is that people seldom read them. They may run glazed eyes over them. They may fix on whatever passages appear to confirm their base passions, their petty hatreds, or their tribal customs. They call on their authority as a trump card, usually under the direction of some self-declared religious authority. But they hardly ever actually read them.
A single reading of the Sermon on the Mount is sufficient to demonstrate that few people can actually have read it. North America has many tens of millions of people who claim to be “Christians”. They are supposedly inspired by the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Yet the Sermon on the Mount, which is the distillation of Christ’s message, teaches precisely the opposite of what most of these millions believe, proclaim, and practice. If one actually reads the words of Jesus Christ, it becomes perfectly obvious that there can’t be more than a few thousand practicing Christians in the entire United States, and none of those can be Republicans. Perhaps the percentage is a little better in Canada, where the mainstream churches are more in line with civilized values, but I’ve met many a Christ-hating “Christian” here, as well. You can’t convince me that anyone who opposes gay marriage, or anyone that promotes war and conquest, or anyone who carries out the barbaric social agenda of most of our Churches is a follower of Jesus, or has read his teachings. Nor is there any reason to accept the claims of Churches to interpret or direct, or to possess the ideas of Jesus Christ. Churches are political and financial institutions, concerned with acquiring wealth and power. They are not sources or repositories of any wisdom, and have no just claims on the minds of men. They are merely cults, mechanisms for fleecing and directing suckers.
The totalitarian political movements that claim to be “Islamic” or “Islamist” are similarly misnamed. I don’t agree with everything that Mohamed said, but he was an interesting man, and the Qur’an contains some worthwhile wisdom. But the various political movements now proclaiming themselves “Islamic” have no more to do with the Qur’an than Conservative “Christians” have to do with Christ. I don’t recall any sura of the Qur’an instructing the faithful to strap explosives on their bodies and murder children. Nowhere in the book does it teach the abuse of women. There is nothing Islamic about the hateful nonsense peddled by thousands of “fundamentalist” mullahs and nothing of Allah’s will in the fatwas that serve their greed and ambition.
“Holy Scriptures” remain unread to the degree to which they are perceived as “holy”. The pious and fanatical use their scriptures in roughly the same way that a chimpanzee might use a book: tear out some random pages, smear feces on them, and throw them at people.
No one who truly respects wisdom should allow a wise book to be turned into a magical fetish.
The tendency to do this is not confined to religion. Perhaps because the workings of economies are as unfathomable to us as the mysteries of life and death, the study of economics tends to generate “holy scriptures”.
I’ve just reread two works which share with the Bible and the Qur’an a tendency to be quoted, pronounced upon, and cited as holy writ, by people who can’t possibly have read them.
Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is one of the two. The more I hear Smith referred to, either with devout rapture or smarmy contempt, the more I’m convinced that all the millions of copies of the work in print must gather dust on shelves, unread. The nonsense that is said about Smith’s work — sometimes by eminent scholars — cannot be the result of people reading it. Take, for example, the “invisible hand”. Mention The Wealth of Nations to someone, and the “invisible hand” is the first thing that will pop out of their mouth. Most people seem to be under the impression that the work is driven by the image of the “invisible hand”, with Smith supposedly arguing that the Market needs no “regulating” because it “regulates itself”. This is the purest nonsense. Adam Smith never said or believed any such thing. Anybody who claims that he did cannot have read the book.
The phrase “invisible hand” occurs only once in the book, and the context in which it occurs has absolutely nothing to do with the regulation, or non-regulation, of markets. One has to read 485 pages into the book (in my copy) before even encountering the phrase. In a discussion of the promotion of domestic industry over foreign imports (which Smith approves of), he points out that many who are merely seeking to advance their own gain are “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of [their] intention.” He means that the pursuit of self-interest sometimes more reliably assures this particular public end. At the same time, he points out, those who proclaim that their financial activities are motivated by a regard for the public good are to be distrusted [“I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.”] The whole discussion has no relation to the issue of market regulation, whatsoever.
The point that Smith made was part and parcel of a larger discussion of morality. Smith was, primarily, a moral philosopher, and the economic issues in Wealth of Nations are a special subset of his larger ethical views. Smith’s ethics was the culmination of Enlightenment thought, which was in the process of overturning the traditional assumptions of Christian ethics. Among those assumptions was the belief that goodness was suffering. For centuries, the Churches had taught that suffering was good, and that virtue consisted of self-abnegation and self-destruction. The poor were “blessed” because they suffered. One did not demonstrate virtue by, say, relieving the suffering of the poor, or doing something to end poverty. One demonstrated virtue by wearing a hair shirt, or flogging oneself with barbed whips, or allowing oneself to be infested with lice. Enlightenment intellectuals tried to reason their way out of this absurd notion. The Good, they argued, was more effectively achieved by equity and fairness. Where equity and fairness prevailed, under just laws, then the Good emerged from the rational self-interest of human beings more consistently than from sacrifice or self-inflicted suffering. Smith took up this discussion from previous Enlightenment thinkers, chiefly John Mandeville, and applied it to economic thought. Trade — honest, equitable trade — was the epitome of rationally-produced goodness. The baker and the butcher, Smith explained, did not trade their bread and meat with each other out of self-sacrifice, but from a desire to better feed themselves and their children. The result was the achievement of a greater good for both, and the existence of all such equitable trade constituted a greater good for society as a whole. Just laws could secure that greater good. Laws that rigged the game, that violated equity, that were designed to further enrich the rich, or preserve monopoly and privilege, eroded or destroyed the greater good.
You can tell that enthusiasts of global corporatism, who often refer to the book in scriptural terms, have not read it. Smith despised corporations, and has nothing good to say about them. He generally considered them threats to liberty, drags on progress, and inherently corrupt. He compared the prosperity and progress of the American colonies, under the security of Common Law, to the exploitation, oppression and famine of India at the hands of an all-powerful mercantile corporation. Nor would enthusiasts for “deregulation” find much comfort if they actually read Adam Smith. Those who wish to engage in fraudulent or exploitative economic activities are in the habit of referring to law as “regulation”, because the word sounds petty and arbitrary, a mere annoying interference; but what they are really talking about is exemption from the rule of law. An “unregulated market” is a market without law. Adam Smith certainly never thought it a good idea for business to operate without laws, or exempted from the rule of law. Such an idea would have horrified, sickened, and infuriated him. An “unregulated market” is precisely the kind of arbitrary privilege and corruption that the whole of The Wealth of Nations was intended to denounce!
The other book I reread is John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. This is another “holy book” that you are bound to hear about from people who haven’t read it. Those who are eager to ride the bandwagon of “stimulus” will tell you that this particular holy scripture is about the limitless ability of government spending to create wealth. It isn’t. That’s not what Keynes says. Nor does Keynes advocate state ownership of production — in fact, he vigorously denounces it. Far from being an antithesis to Classical Economics, the book is mainly preoccupied with demonstrating that most of the “Classical” economists of his day contradicted their own premises, and failed to apply Classical principles consistently, chiefly through not grasping that economic processes take place in time. Keynes’ main concern was to preserve the integrity of free market institutions. His proposals to do this most explicitly did not include pumping tax-payers’ money into failing corporations (something which would have horrified him) or “stimulating” the economy with boondoggles and corporate welfare. But you can be sure that those who want to do those things today will invoke his name to justify it. They will do so safely, because, as another holy scripture, nobody will actually read the General Theory.
The coda to this piece is da capo: there should be no Holy Books.
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