We continue our discussion with a brief departure in what we hope is not too presumptuous a claim to Christian anthropology. Human social order can theoretically take quite a number of forms, theoretically speaking. Primatologically, a typical social order is the endless aggression amongst males to yield the alpha male who then dominates the food supply and hence the female population...his “world” expands whilst those of his competitors contract, however, his “rule” is tenuous and always subject to challenges from others for the top spot in the dominance hierarchy, and so it goes. If we are honest with ourselves, much of human history answers to this description. Genuine religion consists of attempts to regulate and limit this eternal struggle for dominance by positing a higher good which comes from self-limitation in the interest of a larger social good, a greater human happiness that we term “civilization” which is characterized, at least in theory, as the absence of the brutishness that characterizes unmitigated aggression of the struggle for social dominance. Fortunately, this happens to actually work, and an implicit consensus exists in the human unconscious that a rational human order characterized by distributed resources and conjugal mates generates a far more livable state of affairs than the unmitigated aggression that characterizes unenlightened human groupings. Consensus does not, as Freud’s famous book title declares, mean unanimity; there are those who chafe at the limits imposed by civil order and its buttressing religions, and our contemporary world crisis is occasioned by the success of some of these asocial rebels in gaining power, influence and, sadly, prestige in the current world order, and are preparing to take humanity backwards to the more primitive scheme of social rank and privilege from which we’ve only recently emerged during our “Enlightenment.”
While we’ve used “religions” in the plural, as an acknowledgment that Christianity is not the only religion helping mankind progress to a more humane social existence, yet it remains the most important and useful of them all, insofar as it posits an ideal social order (the Kingdom of God) which it encourages human society to ever more closely emulate, and its tenets and integuments all derive from and support a primordial division of productive property and reproductive opportunity to assure each member of society a sufficient, albeit limited, opportunity for happy fulfillment. Lets now consider some proof of this:
Unarguably, the Decalogue is fundamental to the Judeo-Christian understanding of obligatory morality. Let’s begin with a consideration of the seventh and tenth commandments which concern themselves with property rights. Ceteris paribus, most of us will readily agree that taking what “belongs” to another is on its face wrong and immoral; we do not want others taking what belongs to us, so consequently we owe to others the same consideration. But there is an underlying assumption in this that some parity exists between what belongs to me, and what belongs to my neighbor. If each of us has some land and a home, then to set eyes on what my neighbor needs for his own family’s sustenance is plainly wrong. But if we remove this relative parity from our equation, and posit two individuals like the Dives and Lazarus of Jesus’ famous parable, let us see if the same moral principle applies: One family has “joined field to field” to monopolize food production, whereas another family has been left destitute in the process without access to arable land or the means to produce food. Foraging (poaching, gleaning) on the monopolized land is forbidden, so the poor family faces starvation. The rich family has no concern for them, and does not share with them from its surplus. Now, can anyone reasonably argue that for the poor family to desire some of the food “belonging” to the rich family is immoral, when the consequence of not wanting it and indeed taking it would likely mean death by starvation? Plainly not, and thus Christian theologians of the Middle Ages agreed that in such circumstances of severe economic oppression, people are not bound by these particular commandments, as they presuppose a degree of parity of property ownership between the owner and the thief.
The same logic applies to the sixth and ninth commandments, which have to do with the sanctity and inviolability of the marital relationship. In a strictly monogamous society this principle ought to hold, and indeed must hold for the social order to maintain internal peace. But consider the case of a more regressive society, which can still be found today in the Middle East and elsewhere, where economically dominant (i.e., aggressive) men are permitted as many wives as they can support. Again, this problem can be shown to reduce to maldistribution of productive property, but here we are concerned with the consequent need for sexual congress unsatisfied in many men because dominant men have monopolized relations with females in their harems or seraglios. Does an unmarried man who cannot support a wife under these circumstances commit a moral fault by committing adultery with one of the many wives of one of these “monopolygamists? “ It is hard to see how! The relative equity in property, which serves in turn to equalize marital opportunity, is an absolute precondition of this moral stricture , which in turn serves to buttress it. But there is no structure to support in the absence of parity of productive property, and absent this, moral principle breaks down when the “sin,” rather than violating the social equilibrium, rather serves to restore it, whether it is food or sexual congress of which unjust social arrangements have deprived the individual.
The need for institutionalized periodic subdivision of productive property between families, as explicated among the ancient Herbrews in Leviticus, is so self-evidently essential to the whole panoply of Judeo-Christian moral law that one is left to ask why in nearly two millennia of Christian ascendancy in the Western world there has never been a concerted effort to reinstitute it. The answer is that while Christianity superficially conquered pagan Rome, replacing its temples with churches, that when it came to this all-important matter of productive property distribution, the Judeo-Christian God never supplanted Fortuna, and the worship of her fickle godhead continues unabated today as the world’s property is regarded as nothing more than a commodity to become the property of whoever who can acquire it, without limit. This kind of activity is derided by Jesus as “unrighteous Mammon,” but it has not stopped Western “Civilization” from calling itself Christian whilst continuing this pagan approach to political economy. The organized Christian church, from Constantine on, deferred to the prevailing property owning classes, an unholy marriage if ever there was one. Observing this fact, Karl Marx and his followers dismissed the Christian religion as a mere prop of the propertied exploiting classes, and sought for solutions outside of its framework. Marx’s assessment was not inaccurate, but instead of radicalizing the church to pursue its mission in this respect, he advocated for a godless society without the church’s moral framework, leading invariably to collectivism and its attendant, insoluble problems.
It remains to us today to recover the radical attitude towards productive property inherent in the Judeo-Christian idea, and to pursue its implementation in the social order in which we find ourselves. Those who take their Christianity seriously would do well to consider the sage counsel of Pericles in the illustration below: