A functioning and stable economy has to grow out of people's natural abilities

To Rethink Nature: Luther's economics was right on

In his notes on Marxism in the book La Nature, Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that the central problem with Marxism is that it lacks a theory of nature. Proceeding as if earth should be heaven, Marx sought to rectify the earth's ill by conflating Luther's two kingdoms into one, and proclaiming the next kingdom a fraud that we should be living in this one.

But entreprenurial ability is not evenly spread throughout the population. Few have it. Rarer than poetic genius (which it resembles) entreprenurial ability can't be taken for granted. The shoddy factories and crummy products of the Soviet Union demonstrate this. Right down to the sandpaper that they called toilet paper, the situation was anything but Charmin. It is doubtful if anything can rectify the lack of a green perspective in Marx. His philosophy was written prior to the notion of ecology.

A functioning and stable economy cannot be built from a blueprint. It has to grow out of people's natural abilities. Weeded here and there. To do the weeding himself (to weed out the bourgeoisie) was precisely what Christ warned against when he argued that we must leaving the weeding to Him, and meanwhile let the wheat and the chaff grow together for fear of killing them both. In Marxist economics, the ecology is too simple.

Much of Christian economics is too simple, too. Luther's economics was right on. It's what he was primarily thinking about when he got rid of the Pope. Remove that obese monstrosity, and there is more than enough to go around. And so northern Europe has prospered while southern Europe continues to strain under its fattened clergy. It's something of a miracle that Luther got this just right. It's quite difficult to understand. He had a wary mind, and one that matched hesitancy with boldness.

While the Lutheran democracies of Scandinavia remain as green as ever, and their products are almost universally prized for their ecological qualities, the ruined remains of the Ukrainian nuclear industry, the burnt out smelly forests of the East Bloc, and the horrible hulk of the proletarian revolution bespeak a terrible lack of an ecological thinking within Marxism itself.

Nothing was sacred except profit. It is hard to understand the role of a conscience in political thought. But we can see that there was no reverence toward the earth in Soviet thought. The disappearance of the world's fourth largest sea, the Aral, is but one of their blunders. I can't help but trace this blunder to what Merleau-Ponty calls the absolute absence of any ecological thought within Marx's oeuvre, its capital blunder. Thursday, May 18, 2006 ¶ 8:20 AM Comments (31) postCountTB('114796636175575274'); Trackback Lutheran Surrealism