Violent Mammon

I was driving back from having the family car serviced and trying to recover from the galactic shock of how much it cost and it struck me I have never posted about the mimetic roots of money!


And then I thought how important this really is, cost of a car service or not. It represents a big emerging question for Christians, like so many other things…

It’s of course a question of desire. Capitalism depends on desire, both in its hyped-up form as consumerism, but before that in the basic exchange of goods via money. Have you ever wondered why we automatically pay for stuff we get from the stores? Of course we know we will be arrested if we walk out without paying. But do you normally think about that? I’m certain ninety nine times out of a hundred the formal sanction doesn’t enter people’s minds. So then, is it morality, doing the decent thing? Sure, basic moral formation must play some sort of a role, but you know how unreliable that is. There must be something else, something more primitive, more automatic, to make it work so seamlessly.

And indeed there is. There is a more primary mechanism deeply embedded in humanity which anthropologists have described in one form or another. Imagine you were out in the bush and doing a trade, water for a sun hat, or a skin for a knife, something like that: there would be a powerful sense incumbent on the parties to complete the trade as agreed. You would perhaps fear the direct violence that would erupt if you did not, but just as likely the trade in and of itself would have meaning and power.

The reason for this is mimetic relationship, and the violence that goes with it, have morphed over hundreds of thousands of years into a structural program of credit and debt. The possibility of direct violence if I don’t complete the trade is secondary to a much deeper sense that I am bound to give over one item in exchange for another—but, all the time, and all the same, it depends deeply on violence and that is the point to keep in mind. Here is how it goes.

According to mimetic theory if I have object A you will desire to get A (my personal want for it makes you want it), and then if you take away object A I will fight fiercely for it. However, if I know in advance you desire A because I have it then at some point I can get you to give me object B because you have it and I desire it! This is quite unconscious and we can be sure that the actual process of going from two different desires for two different objects, to an actual peaceful exchange was fraught with extreme danger and any number of situations when the whole thing broke down into a fearful brawl. To even get to that point most likely depended on numerous intermediary steps and took millennia to achieve.

Take for example the institution of the taonga among the Maori, an object which is “given” but demands in itself or “spiritually” the return gift of another object (or the same one); or the kula shells and armbands in the islands off Papua New Guinea, that are exchanged in a huge circle given and received, but always “belonging” to their original owner. This type of highly ritual exchange may well have preceded and/or accompanied more ordinary economic exchanges--setting up a peaceful or "holy" sense of exchange. The point I am making is that embedded in the system itself is a hidden and constant charge of violence which has become “contained” or institutionalized in and as the system itself.

When you sell, say, some vegetables or a bicycle you don’t normally think about the possible need for fighting the person who takes your goods, rather there is an implicit faith that this other person will pay up. Why? Because, the violence of the original desire for the object has become deferred or latent in the system. It acts as a cultural institution in its own right which has a huge hold on all of us, but its roots lie in archaic sacred violence. The evolution of normal currency demonstrates this: coins and paper money are always stamped with symbols of the state and what else but the sacred violence of the state is symbolized, providing the backing for the piece of metal or paper? This is evident in Roman coinage with its figures of imperial Caesars, but even in modern democratic currency the whole thing is scattered around with awe-inspiring images of presidents, pyramids, eyes and seals etc. etc., loaded with sacrificial violence. It says this here is worth something because at its heart is overwhelming violence!

To analyze money this way is no different from asserting that “our struggle is…against the rulers, the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness.” (Eph.6:12) And Jesus said it more clearly: “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” What is different today is we have the human-science tools to delve deeper into the roots of human culture and understand what Jesus was talking about when he expressed himself in his typical prophetic and elliptic manner. It means that, more than ever, while as Christians we continue having to use money we are committed to sharing and showing a completely different manner of living.

The Spirit of God, the Spirit of Jesus, is sheer gift. It undoes all the violence of the world in a single breathtaking event of generosity and outpouring love, of fore-giveness. It is the true event of creation—when the human pathway comes to maturity, when the half-baked, futile-minded, violence-rooted humanity that we have known until now gives way to an inconceivable emergence of another way. It means that when Christians realize this, understand this, they no longer live according to the violence of capitalism, of an exchange system based in violence, but according to the marvelous new economy of giving and love instituted by Jesus.

Christians have been so used to compromising with capitalism, or even positively embracing it as guided by God (the same God as Jesus’ Father who cares for the birds and the flowers and us, without asking anything in return!), that it might be a matter of despair to think that we could begin to take up this gospel practice of “giveness”. But I am not cast down. It seems that the truth of the new human way cannot help but emerge, and with it a progressive shift in Christian practice. I think one day, and not too long in the future, going to church on Sunday as the mark of being a Christian will be as irrelevant as sacrificing a lamb or a bull is to being Jewish. Something else, something much more beautiful, dangerous, radical, hopeful and human will begin to take its place. The growing intertwined crises of the West are demanding it from the roots of our being, because in so many ways it is the half-baked gospel that has set these crises in motion. The Spirit of God cries out from our hearts, “Now, now is the time for Christians to be faithful to the depth of their calling, because the superficial version is falling apart and is also making the world fall apart.” The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.” And let everyone who hears say, “Come!”