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<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0><tr> <td valign="top" colspan=2 height=90 BGCOLOR="#006699" TEXT="#080000" background="044085a3.jpg"> <div> <FONT SIZE="5" COLOR="#FFFFFF" FACE="Arial" ><B>Carmine Gorga</B></FONT><B>    </B><B> |     </B><A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Carmine Gorga"><U><B>home</B></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id57.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Some Evaluations"><U>Some Evaluations</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id20.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Concordian economics"><U>Concordian economics</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id23.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Relationalism"><U>Relationalism</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id19.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Books"><U>Books</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id21.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Articles"><U>Articles</U></A>   |   <B>Reviews</B>   |   <A HREF="id46.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Monographs"><U>Monographs</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id17.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Short Bio"><U>Short Bio</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id24.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Fuller Bio"><U>Fuller Bio</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id25.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="In the media"><U>In the media</U></A></div> <div> </div> </td> </tr><tr> <td valign="top" width=210 BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000" background="045d2e83.jpg"> <div> <IMG SRC="05b6fa20.jpg" border=0 width="111" height="162" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="id33.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Synopses of Major Articles"><U><I>Synopses</I></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id34.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Reprints"><U><I>Reprints</I></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id35.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Reviews"><U><I>Reviews</I></U></A></div> </td> <td valign="top" height=390 BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000"> <div> <I>Reviews</I></div> <bR> <div> <B>Religion Without Economics? </B></div> <div> A book review by Carmine Gorga for Amazon.com. </div> <bR> <div>                    <I>Reaching For Heaven On Earth</I></div> <div> <I>                  The Theological Meaning of Economics</I></div> <div>                         by Robert H. Nelson</div> <div>                 Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 1991, $24.95, 379 pp.                        </div> <div>                            </div> <div>      There are many reasons why Robert Nelson's new work, <I>Reaching for Heaven on Earth</I>, is proving to be a very quotable book. It can be enjoyed at different levels. If one wants to get a quick acquaintance with the many strands in Western political and economic thought, it can be used as a reference text. Its exhaustive bibliography alone will be of much help in this pursuit. Certainly the book will be a source of inspiration for further study because it offers a rich menu of subtle analysis, and thus it is a gold mine for future elaborations. At its most practical level, the book offers an overall view of the crisis currently enveloping all aspects of the Western tradition-from mathematics to physics, from politics to economics. How did the crisis start? How will it end? These are the concerns of the book. </div> <div> The book is written by a professional policy analyst for all those interested in public policy. Robert Nelson is a senior staff member of the Economics Advisory Group at the US Department of the Interior. He wisely spends his sabbaticals at prestigious research organizations to reflect on matters that let him more fully understand his immediate responsibilities. </div> <div> The thrust of Nelson's present reflections is that the current crisis in society, contrary to common belief, is not so much a crisis of economics as one of religion. Attuned as we are to the practicalities of our predicaments, this sounds like a startling observation. But one who follows Nelson's reasoning can hardly disagree. </div> <div> At the starting point of his analysis is an undeniable fact. Even though economics is in a self-acknowledged state of crisis, a crisis that profoundly affects the whole society, economists still have the ear of politicians and a veto power on social experimentation. Why? </div> <div> Nelson gradually enables us to see that economists have such power not because they produce the numbers or because economics is the hardest of the soft sciences; nor does he attribute much weight to the sophisticated hypothesis advanced, for instance, by the late George Stigler, a Nobel laureate in economics: Economists have power because their answers are counterintuitive - in other words, economics is a complex science, laymen keep out. </div> <div> The answer Nelson discovers and elaborates upon in this book is at once very simple and very complex:  Economics has such power because it is the religion of the modern age. </div> <div> The historical analysis that the author constructs to reach this conclusion is most enlightening. It is a fascinating look at what goes on behind the scenes of public debates over economic policy analysis. If there is a constant in this blow by blow account of how best to achieve economic progress, it is the recurring shift of the pendulum from trust in government intervention and regulation to faith in the free and unregulated market. This window effectively provides a view of what has gone on in our minds ever since the dawn of recorded history in economics as well as in moral philosophy and from there particularly in sociology and political philosophy. </div> <div> Just think of the array of thoughts and feelings associated with the history of the word Progressivism, or those gathered reading the morning newspaper. The dominant force behind the current debate as to whether the poor suffered at the hand of Ronald Reagan's policies is not statistical theory. Nor is it economics-in any of its multifarious manifestations. Behind the façade of the debate, there is precisely the set of issues analyzed in this book. </div> <div> The spine of the book unfolds along the interplay between authority and freedom. The author identifies these two major forces respectively as the Roman and the Protestant tradition. Thus one revisits the dialogue (or, too often, the lack of  dialogue) between Aristotle and Plato; Aquinas and (unmentioned  in the book) Duns Scotus; Locke and Hume; all the way down to the  blows exchanged between the believers in the welfare state and  the libertarians of today.      Newton and Darwin, the author lets us see, cast especially long shadows on our lives: "The message of Darwin was that, contrary to the teachings of Newton's disciples, the laws of nature do not assure a world of harmony.... Life is a never-ending struggle-not only for the birds, bees, and other lower species, but for man himself. In fact, mankind was now recognized as simply another species" (p. 128). </div> <div> In Nelson's book, ideas are never floating in a vacuum but are anchored to their effects on men and women. Consequently, he adds:  "If Newton's demonstration of the powers of the scientific method had raised confidence in human reason to new heights, Darwinism delivered a sharp blow. Indeed, the Darwinist interpretation of history tended to denigrate the role of reason" (p. 130). </div> <div> There is much to learn in the process. Who knew, for instance, that the "Coase theorem"-through which economists can consider "the making of monetary payments for damages done to another party-also has a long history of study in Jewish rabbinical writings" (p. 1)? Let me try to calm the classic anti-intellectual pragmatist who is going to say, So what? Who cares? The Coase theorem is at the foundation of the economics of pollution. Money is involved: either your money or the other fellow's money. Health is involved. Beauty is involved.      The learning process is very genteel. Nelson knows all the pitfalls so well: "To venture into the large questions addressed in this book can be an intimidating prospect" (p. xxvi). The author seems to understand all and to forgive all. There is not even a hint of annoyance at writers who, consciously or unconsciously dressing it up in a different garment, simply reformulate the thought of other people. But the trick does not pass unnoticed by him. For instance, he does not fail to point out that "Evolution by natural selection was not even a particularly new idea. Philosophers of the ancient world had laid out the basic idea of natural selection as early as the fifth century B.C. A Sicilian, Empedocles, asserted that nature creates many trials and experiments, out of which the most successful survive, resulting in the steady improvement of the species" (p. 128). </div> <div> The tension is all in the background. Ideas, Nelson makes the reader realize, are never without consequences. If one believes, as Darwin and his followers do, in the imperative of survival, then the actions of Marxists, Freudians, and Nazis inevitably follow. Nelson's book, read rather carefully, reveals the web that-often surprisingly-connects these, and many others, strands of Western thought. Two sentences explain this particular connection:  "Life in a Darwinist world is harsh and cruel. The workings of nature do not in fact tend toward harmony, but toward perpetual strife" (p. 131). </div> <div> The tension in this book is between what is and what ought not to have been-and ought never again to be. That is the subtext in this book. Read in this light, the effort becomes a protest against those ideas that have inevitably led to such disastrous consequences as religious wars old and new, the Gulag, the Holocaust, the burning of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ashes, or the Vietnam war, just to stay at safe distance from more current plights. </div> <div> Nelson's fight is not against windmills. It is not against past actions-and not even against past thoughts. Rather, it is against current thoughts whose origins have deep roots in the </div> <div> distant past: "Even as the end of the twentieth century approaches, the rethinking that must be done to adjust to these  and other shocks of this century is still incomplete" (p. 259). </div> <div> The two mistaken thoughts that are uppermost in Nelson's mind are these: First, the assumption that one can separate religion from economics; second, the assumption that one can reach heaven on earth. The program is all in the title and the subtitle. The reader will forget the message at his own peril. </div> <div> The message is this: Religion and Economics are never apart. Either religion controls the agenda of economics or economics controls the agenda of religion. This is a very crude and direct way of putting things which the reader will not find in Nelson's book. In the book one finds the full set of relationships that embed both religion and economics in the culture of the age. Hence Nelson's offering of the full sweep of Western cultural history. </div> <div> Herein lays the accumulating power of Nelson's message. The full sweep of Western cultural history is used to bring forth this point: The underpinnings of economics today are not in economic science; rather, they are in the appropriation by economics of the rhetoric and, at a deeper meaning, the aims of religion. The focal point emphasized throughout the book is this:  "Karl Marx was only one of many social thinkers of the modern age to preach that, when the problems of food, shelter, and other physical requirements of life are solved, humanity will then finally be free to realize its full emotional and natural potential. In short, for many faithful of modern economic theologies, economic progress has represented the route of salvation to a new heaven on earth, the means of banishing evil from the affairs of mankind" (pp. xxi-xxii). </div> <div> Keynes no less than Marx, Samuelson no less than Friedman is swept away by this maelstrom. Even though the book is written by an economist who pays constant attention to the economic facts of history, it is unlikely that many economists will either read it or profit from it. With the arrogance that often comes from the exercise of power, most economists are likely to shrug off Nelson's message, as they shrug off all such messages. If challenged, they will simply say: Can you do any better? And there the dialogue is likely to end. </div> <div> Yet, if they read this book, and take it in the proper spirit-namely, not as negative criticism, but as an exposition of the set of cultural conditions within which they operate-economists will profit much from it. Indeed, they might feel liberated. Learning about their true complexity, their burdens will weigh less heavily on them. If nothing else, they will learn that many policy issues they face today are ancient indeed. For instance, Nelson guides them to the knowledge that "In setting minimum wages and in regulating monopoly, unfair competition, discriminatory pricing,  and other business practices, the welfare state follows  precedents that can be found earlier in scholastic standards of justice in the marketplace" (p. 46). </div> <div> Known only to particular historians of economic thought, much of what is discussed today in public policy was already part of the discourse carried forth by Scholastic Fathers from the Middle Ages up to the late Renaissance. As a most practical gift, economists will acquire a larger laboratory in which to study successes as well as failures of the past. </div> <div> Religious people, theologians, moralists, even philosophers, logicians, sociologists, and political scientists, it turns out, should read this book-and likely they will. They will immeasurably profit from it. The practitioners of these sciences will no longer allow themselves to be cowed by the mathematical notations of the modern economist. They will ask for a literary translation of where economics stands today. Then the book will have achieved the deepest aims of its author. </div> <div> The intervention of this set of people in economic affairs is no longer an intellectual nicety. As Nelson makes it clear, with the collapse of the religion of economics-namely, the inability of the rationality of self-interest to provide the glue that holds society together-that participation has become a necessity. As he puts it, "Indeed, the conclusion seems inescapable that a viable national political community must be regarded in somewhat the same manner as a church. It cannot thrive and serve its members well unless there is a large dose of behavior that historically it has been the province of religion to provide" (p. 281). </div> <div> The required alchemy is composed of a dose of altruism-and morality, and dignity, and honor in equal parts-that is unintelligible to a modern economist: It cannot be measured directly; hence, it does not enter into economic reasoning and calculations. </div> <div> The book ends with a recommendation for appreciation of pluralism and tolerance of free secession. These are contemporary traits that Nelson discovers in many intellectual disciplines and projects. He trusts they will continue well into the future. </div> <bR> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> ***</div> <bR> <div> "The libertarian and pluralist influences of the late twentieth century can be found not only in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and theology, but also in economics.... [These tendencies] may well be more fully realized not in this century, but in the twenty-first century" (p. 269). Of course, this is an important recommendation. Yet it seems to come out of the illusions of the seventeenth century, when escape to the Americas was a concrete possibility and out of the illusions of the sixties when flower children could escape to the safety of father's checkbook. With these and many other avenues of escape closed off today, were one to stop at the right of secession one would have not learned enough from the book itself and from history.      The most important thing to learn from the book is that the right and the left set of ribs in the Western tradition never really meet-because they cannot and, in fact, they should not, meet. Authority can never make peace with freedom, or freedom with authority. Are we simply to expect, then, a boring and at times terrifying repetition of past errors? To avoid this stricture, we need to pursue the implications of a different set of recommendations:  not escape from, but head-on confrontation with, reality. Authority and freedom are both essential ingredients to a civilized organization of society. They will live harmoniously with each other, first if they are both internalized by and in each one of us; and then if, when they come to the surface again, they are supported on the spine of self-discipline. The believers in authority will have to have self-discipline-otherwise they will become totalitarians; the believers in freedom will have to have self-discipline-otherwise they will become libertines. The essential distinction in history will at that point automatically be, not between what is and what ought not to be, but between what is and what must be. </div> <div> This is a much more fiery swath than Nelson is perhaps ready to cut. To insist on what must be is to reconnect ourselves with an ancient set of ideals-ideals that have generally been shunted aside especially since the Enlightenment, because they seemed to be an imposition upon the free will of individual human beings. Yet, contrary to its appearance, to do what must be done implies the acceptance of a continuous succession of choices. In fact, it implies the rejection of the overriding culture of mechanism and determinism that has dominated the Western world during the last four to five hundred years. This is the culture that, as economists will discover or rediscover through Nelson's book, has especially dominated economics. </div> <div> Another major quibble with the book. Guided by the required dose of objectivity, Nelson simply reports one failure after another in the human attempt to reach heaven on earth. He recognizes that this attempt has often brought "mankind not toward a heaven on earth, but toward a new hell" (p. 215). Yet, still feeling the horror of the religious wars of the seventeenth  century, he is never tempted to explode, as Orestes Bronson for  instance did in the last century: "We vote God out of the state; we vote him out of our communities; and we concede him only a  figurative, a symbolic relation with the churches, denying almost  universally the Real Presence, and seeing it as a popish error; we plant ourselves on the all sufficiency of man, and then wonder  that we fall, and that, after three hundred years of effort at  reform, nothing is gained, and a true state of society seems to  be as far off as ever."       </div> <div> A third major quibble. With his objectivity and gentility, Nelson makes the nature of the crisis enveloping both religion and economics less clear to the reader than he could have. In the end, the crisis appears to be this. While religion suffers from a crisis of form, economics suffers from a crisis of substance: the former does no longer know how to say the right things, while the latter no longer has the right things to say. </div> <div> When the two mental disciplines became formally separated from each other, religious leaders, afraid of being second-guessed by economists, did not convincingly stress any longer that the claims of efficiency must be coordinated with those of morality; in this vacuum of leadership, many an economist had the gall to stress that the claims of efficiency had to be separated from the claims of morality. Both religious leaders and economists carved an easier task for themselves, but-in one case after another-society fell apart. The bounds of civilization were dissolved. </div> <div> The current crisis will be over when the crisis in economic theory and economic policy is resolved-and is resolved in a manner that is acceptable to religion. Economists have no choice. They have to carry this program to full fruition. And they know it. Theologians and other  scientists have three choices: they can sit on the sidelines and wait for the crisis in economics to be resolved; they can remain on the outside and rebuke economists for not speeding things  along; or they can enter the realm of economics and, having gained the right to participate, assist in the resolution of the  crisis. This is the one major disagreement between this reviewer and the author. The disagreement seems to be unbridgeable. But it is not as important in the reading of the book as in the shaping of future action. While Nelson recommends that economists learn about theology and restate their positions in theological terms, I would rather see a different type of effort. I would prefer for theologians to become economists, change all that needs to be changed there, and then incorporate the new discipline within their framework of analysis-just as Thomas Aquinas and other doctors of the church did. If economists should prevail again, at best, they would only give us a "new and improved" secular religion-an entity that, by definition, is in a continuous state of crisis. </div> <div> What a beautiful achievement is Nelson's ability to spur, through agreements and disagreements, important discussions on vital issues of the day. Who needs to despair any longer about the poverty of the current political discourse? Go forth, O reader, along the ancient path: abandon the ephemeral; let the permanent stick to your intellectual ribs. Read Nelson's book.</div> <div>           </div> <div> CARMINE GORGA is a former Fulbright scholar. A lecturer and author of numerous publications in fisheries economics and economic theory and policy, he is president of Polis-tics Inc., a consulting firm in Gloucester, MA. His latest book is <I>The Economic Process: An Instantaneous Non-Newtonian Picture</I> (University Press of America, 2002).</div> <bR> <bR> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>