Mammon’s Ecology: Metaphysic of the Empty Sign

223 Pages·2018·2.12 MB·English

by  Stan Goff

Mammon’s Ecology
Metaphysic of the Empty Sign
Stan Goff
Ched Myers
FOREWORD BY
Table of Contents
Title Page
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Detectives
Chapter 2: The Heat
Chapter 3: Nature
Chapter 4: Knowledge
Chapter 5: Exchange
Chapter 6: Technology
Chapter 7: Money
Chapter 8: Development
Chapter 9: Case Study: Finance, Food, Force & Foreign Policy
Chapter 10: Merged Understandings
Chapter 11: Church
Bibliography
For Daddy, Mimi, and Glen, who beat me to the barn.
No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one,
and love the other; or else he will hold to one, and despise the
other. You cannot serve God and mammon.
—L 16:13
UKE
Foreword
S G , unfamiliar with his growing body of work, is an
TAN OFF FOR THOSE
extraordinary and conscientious organic intellectual. He has traversed a
fascinating life-journey, from Vietnam to West Point, from Special Forces
operations in Haiti (where he began his radical transformation) to peace activist,
and post-Marxist social analyst to Christian disciple. In his quest to get to the
roots of both public and personal pathologies, he has increasingly “followed the
money.” This has led him to tackle, in this his sixth book, the unorthodox but
compelling thesis that “general-purpose money” is the central ecological issue of
our time.
Goff’s important study is a demanding read. This is because he is, on one
hand, trying to make a complicated thing simple enough to be intelligible to
laypeople, thus summarizing and distilling a vast body of economic and
philosophical thought; and on the other hand, trying to make that simple thing
complicated again by challenging us to move beyond rhetorical sound bites to
greater precision in our analysis and vocabulary of political economics. This is a
workbook, which invites us to become fellow “detectives” in discovering what
we might call “the secret life of money.” I commend it to all who want to go
deeper in their diagnosis of the dysfunction of our historical inheritance
—especially if you chafe, as I do, at the popular current maxim that “it is easier
to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (the provenance of
which Goff correctly identifies).
Goff chooses to frame this complicated terrain “simply” in terms of the
ancient trope of Mammon. We find this term in a key, if routinely mishandled,
parable (and commentary) of Jesus as recorded in Luke 16:1–15. This teaching
represents the heart of Luke’s theology of economic justice—and mirrors much
of the argument of this book. So it is worth exploring here as a portal into Goff’s
project.
Jesus’ story begins: “There was a rich man who . . .” (16:1). Luke’s chapter will
close with a second parable that repeats this phrase (16:19), revealing this
narrative sequence as a carefully composed chiasm, in which the two parables
bracket Jesus’ teaching concerning Mammon and the “love of money”
(16:9–15). Both parables are poignant fables that illustrate, in different ways, a
world caught between what Wendell Berry calls the “Two Economies”—one in
which money is used to repair social and ecological relations, and one in which
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both are sacrificed to accumulate capital. Here I want to focus on the first
parable which, as a tale about subverting a money system, both illumines and is
illumined by Goff’s study.
To subtitle this as the “Parable of the Dishonest Steward” (as so many
versions of the New Testament do) already biases how it is read. Indeed,
churches usually approach this text with an unconscious hermeneutic of
capitalist moralism, implicitly taking the “side” of the boss while vilifying the
worker—despite the fact that in the narrative, both the Master and Jesus
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commend the steward’s insubordinate initiatives!
I prefer to think of the main character as a “defective manager,” using the
modern analogy of a mid-level bureaucrat in a large corporation. Just as he is
about to be sacked because of below-expected sales numbers, he improvises a
desperate but ingenuous “fire sale” on credit that ingratiates him to his clients, in
hopes they will reciprocate when he’s out on his ear. In so doing he turns his
allegiances toward an alternative, local, relational economy of mutual aid, one
that ever persists just below the surface of the dominant market system. In this
reading, the manager is not the villain but the hero of the story. He represents a
sort of archetype for all of us who: (1) are captive to a toxic and oppressive
economic system; (2) realize that we too are becoming disenfranchised; and (3)
consequently try to “monkeywrench” whatever leverage we have to effect a
modicum of redistributive justice. The story gives dignity to such partial but
meaningful efforts to “build a new world within the shell of the old,” as Dorothy
Day famously put it.
Like so many of Jesus’ parables about the rich, this one acknowledges that the
world is ruled by the “rentier” class (an important term that Goff defines in
chapter 7). Luke’s Jesus has already made his attitude to the “1 percent”
painfully clear in an earlier folktale about a wealthy farmer who knew only how
to accumulate (12:16–21), and does so again in the parable that closes our
sequence . . . in which a self-indulgent Dives must face the cruel truth of the gulf
between the opulent and the destitute from Lazarus’ vantage point (12:19–31).
Interestingly, in both tales the elite come to terms with their contradictions only
in death; the Bible is so much less equivocal in its judgment on wealth disparity
than we are!
The “steward” of 16:1 (Greek oikonomos, whence our word economics)
belonged to what sociologist Gerhard Lenski called a dependent “retainer” class,
literate bureaucrats whose job was to secure exorbitant profits for the master
through merciless resource-extraction and labor exploitation, while at the same
time maintaining working relations with peasant producers, competitive
merchants, and customers. Here the analogy with modern, middle-class,
educated white-collar workers is fitting: we too are people who are privileged
within, yet subservient to, an economic system that both benefits and victimizes
us. So whereas most of Jesus’ parables feature peasants as protagonists, this
story uniquely calls us to discipleship.
“Charges were brought to the Master that this manager was wasting his
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goods” (16:1c). The resulting dismissal of the latter is summary, confirming the
absolute authority of the former (16:2). The accused neither argues nor defends
himself, knowing there is no due process in this system. Instead, in a poignant
internal dialogue, he focuses on the stark alternatives facing him (16:3). This
soft-handed bureaucrat realizes he cannot physically endure the brutal lot of day-
laborers, while resorting to alms would obliterate what remained of his “class”
honor. The story turns on the fired manager’s conclusion (16:4).
Though his plan is not yet revealed, the hoped-for result is: he is going to do
whatever it takes to “cross-over” from the economy engineered by (and for) the
rich to the remnant village economy of mutual aid. By redistributing some of his
Master’s wealth at his (temporary) disposal, he seeks to re-enter the traditional
ethos of “generalized reciprocity,” by which the communities exploited by his
Master manage to survive. A key value of that older economy is hospitality, and
the hope is that in return for his facilitation of debt-relief, “they will receive me
into their homes.” Having been kicked out of the Great Household, he must now
rely on what feminist economist Hazel Henderson calls the “love economy” for
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survival. It is precisely this older tradition of economic culture, Goff argues in
his conclusion, that we must rehabilitate if we are to restore ecological and social
equilibrium to a world plundered by our toxic and terminal money-system.
The rest of Luke’s story unfolds quickly (16:5–7). The defecting manager
hurries to his place of business and—still acting as the Master’s agent before
news of his termination is broadcast—summons his clients. “Tell me how much
you owe,” he barks, indicating that he no longer has the books; he does,
however, ask for their signature on the revised bill to make the transaction
official. This represents a sort of “Jubilee” strategy, re-enacting the old biblical
vision (Lev 25:36; Deut 15:1) that forever stands in tension with ruling
economies, as Goff notes.
The next verse brings the “punchline” (after all, parables mean to turn the
world upside down to crack open our political imaginations). Strangely, the
Master commends his feral manager (Luke 16:8a). As in the more well-known
(and equally misunderstood) parable of the Talents (Matt 25:26–29; Luke
19:22b), the Master here concedes that his system is corrupt, acknowledging the
one he fired as a “manager of injustice.” Yet he “gives him credit for being
shrewd.” In fact, the plutocrat has been outsmarted: since recipients of the debt
amnesty would praise the patrón for presumably authorizing it, to save face he
must begrudgingly honor the write-off, so as not to jeopardize the system with a
“credibility” crisis. Meanwhile, “Robin Hood’s” fate is in the hands of the
villagers.
Luke now switches abruptly to Jesus’ “decoding” of the parable: “For the
children of this age are shrewder than the children of light in dealing with their
own generation” (16:8b). This aphorism has an apocalyptic tone, the traditional
rhetoric of resistance in Jewish antiquity. It conveys an indictment of the “filthy
rotten system” (again, Dorothy Day) that must “pass away.” Yet also implied is
an acknowledgment that as long as it persists, “shrewdness” (repeating the
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Master’s approbation) will be required to survive it. In this case, a manager has
defected from his upwardly mobile track and linked his fate instead to the debtor
class below him, helping them in order to help himself. His Jubilary gesture
gives hard-pressed peasants a measure of relief and secures “refuge” among
them.
This brings us to the moral of the story, the crucial lesson for the “children of
light.” It is here that Luke introduces the infamous trope Goff has invoked:
“Make friends for yourselves, therefore, by means of the ‘Mammon of
injustice’” (16:9a). Mamōnās, which only appears here in the New Testament
(and its parallel in Matt 6:24), is an Aramaic word that probably stems from the
Hebrew for “that in which one trusts.” Though not in the Hebrew Bible, the term
does appear in later Jewish writings. In the Mishnah it connotes property, often
as contrasted with life; in the Targum it is an epithet for profit made through
exploitation: “He destroys his house who gathers the mammon of injustice”
(Targ Prov 15:27, italics added). A possible etymology could be from the
Babylonian manman, connoting “filth of hell.” Mammon thus seems to be, for
Jesus, a dark metaphor for the economic system of domination—or as Goff puts
it (following Ellul and Stringfellow), money as deadly principality and power.