Economics as Religious Praxis

Economics as Religious Praxis

        Wilde observed that "Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions." Science can be characterized by its tacit creation of a context that is conceptually exterior to the phenomenon under study - such a conceptual standpoint being necessary for the operation of inductive thinking. It is, by contrast, in the nature of a truly religious context to be imperceptible for those fully participating with it. For them, there can be 'nothing more beyond' i.e. no exterior standpoint from which to address critique. All is deduced from within.

The Catholic Reaction

         Christianity's Summa Economica is certainly the Lehrbuch der Nationoekonomie of the Rev. Dr. Henrich Pesch, S.J. Published in several editions between 1905 and 1926, this extensive work (running to some 3800 pages of surprisingly readable German) is credited with providing modern intellectual substrate for the Encyclical Tradition. Fr. Pesch originated much of the terminology (e.g.: subsidiarity, solidarity) used by the Holy Fathers in guiding us away from the Marxian Error ( by which the intimacies of family life are hoisted up to govern a presumably familial state) while preserving the family as a refuge from the raw state of nature that is the limit of free-market economics.

         America's foremost interpreter of the Rev. Dr. Pesch is certainly Professor of Economics Rupert Ederer. Though employed by an emphatically mundane institution (SUNY Buffalo) Professor Ederer has had no difficulty attributing Infallibility to Pesch's work <citation>. And, in specific reference to SFEcon, he invokes recent Papal Authority against the use of numerical quanta in the elucidation of economic science <citation>.

         Though available, these divine authorities were not invoked by the actual Jesuits who have driven our project into the intellectual underground. This would have been awkward in several respects: the University of San Francisco's faculties in Business and Economics won National Science Foundation grants in mathematics and supercomputing for SFEcon; the grant applications were submitted over the signature of USF's Fr. Provost; and the Reverend Fathers had collected tuition from students working under those grants.

         USF's Jesuits disposed of SFEcon's discomfiting ideas via the more powerful expedient of character assassination upon the ideas' originator - carrying through an auto de fe originating at our local state university <citation>. Though investigated without issue by the FBI, this 'evidence' found sufficient welcome in the Neo-conservative sentiments of State Senator (now Judge) Quentin Kopp for him to sustain the faculty's findings - which the Hearst family's news outlet in San Francisco was only to happy to advertise.

         In his treatment of the Rev. Dr. Pesch, Joseph Schumpeter gives credit to an interesting social thinker prepared by a deep appreciation for the history of economic thought. He does so, it would seem, in recognition of an important scholar that he ultimately sets aside on the ground that Pesch originated nothing in way of economic theory for Schumpter to catalogue. On the other hand, Schumpter's most esteemed theorist was certainly Léon Walras, whose theory SFEcon presumes to invest with numerical specificity. Thus if the Clerisy wishes Jihad with economic theory per se, Walras would be the more logical (and certainly more highly-valued) target. It would, therefore, seem that the Catholic authorities have no issues with economic theories so long as they remain beyond quantification. As the Holy Ghost exists as an item of contemplation, neither to be weighed nor measured, so it must be with material philosophy.

| top |

Libertarian Faith and Neo-conservative Social Initiative

         However disturbing, this very conclusion was directly pressed upon us in the following cease-and-desist order originating with the Cistercians' University of Dallas, operating under imprimi potest of the Archbishop of Dallas-Ft. Worth:

"Because utility functions cannot be quantified and each acting agent has free will to change their subjective unquantifiable preferences unpredictably, the SFEcon model has no foundation in social reality and can neither explain nor predict any economic phenomena. It certainly couldn't determine the value of anything, no matter what numbers it threw out. I suppose it is possible to construct a mathematical model of Hell, but why bother. The bottom line on theorizing is that there are no constants in economics that allow the use of mathematics as anything other than a pedagogical device or logical helpmate for conceptualizing economic relationships. If you really want to learn how market economies harness social cooperation to produce value and wealth, your time would be better spent studying 'Austrian School' economists such as F.A. Hayek. Give up playing with your computer and start by reading Hayek's collection of essays, Individualism and Economic Order."

unsolicited email, presented in its entirety, from

Professor Sam Bostaph, Chair

Department of Economics

University of Dallas

         This citation is placed here in the main line of our case because it so unabashedly conveys Neo-conservative motives from the standpoint of religious conviction.   Note:

'Discussions' with Libertarian economists cannot commence until one has granted that utility cannot be measured. (Quantified utility being an exterior conceptual standpoint from which to reflect upon the co-operation of elementary economic principles, it would constitute the end of philosophical materialism as religious observance, and the onset of economics as a science.)

A gratuitous reference to damnation entails Neo-conservatism's conviction that disagreement with their matters of faith is an expression of evil (cf.: evil empire; axis of evil, etc.)

The Cistercian faculty is not defending Fr. Pesch and the Encyclical Tradition; they are defending the atheist Hayek and the Godless individualism of Rand.

         A recent Cato Institute Book Forum honored the authors of two new books on F. A. Hayek. It featured extensive remarks by former leader of the Republican majority in Congress, and erstwhile economics professor, Dick Armey. In his remarks, the Honorable Professor Armey makes repeated references to von Mises' "miracle of the market" in arriving at efficient prices, emphasizing the literal nature of this miracle. As with SFEcon, he sees the economy as a "gigantic computer"; but he goes on to assert that "no human agent" could ever fathom its operations. Here the Libertarian Right expounds a faith too far.

         It is difficult to argue with professionals specializing in Hayek, such as those present for Mr. Armey's remarks. Hayek's extensive works are not yet fully catalogued, and his extraordinary scope might well have engendered whole sciences which have yet to coalesce. He was certainly involved enough with the Vienna School for us to conclude as to his agreement with their premise that the 'problem' they synthesized was beyond solution. And this gives some indirect support for those of his acolytes who find SFEcon unthinkable - a sentiment having now been affirmed several times in personal audiences at the Hoover Institution, St. Peter's of the Libertarian Right.

         But if Hayek specifically denied all possibility of a solution to the Vienna Problem, we have yet to discover the proscription in his published work. And it would have been uncharacteristic of Hayek to have refrained from a pronouncement of this order. He was, after all, deadly in his condemnation of general equilibrium models, for which SFEcon offers grateful homage in the form of an occasional citation.

         The several sciences now grappling with chaos and complexity very likely originated in Hayek's musings on "the spontaneous ordering of markets." Here Hayek, who was nothing if not precise, offers us something of a koan: that which happens spontaneously occurs for reasons we do not know; but a scientist, upon observing order, acknowledges an obligation to explain it. Perhaps those who would make an intellectual saint of Hayek do so only to retard the possibilities of human knowledge at the limit he obtained, without properly recognizing his optimism as to possibilities he sensed vaguely, but left for others to realize following maturation of his ideas on the nature of knowledge itself.

| top |

Right Religion in Faith and Science

         Altars are built for the propitiation of what we fear. As economic development has utterly transformed the nature of what we have to be afraid of, so have the celebrations of our deliverance been transformed. We no longer fear a stinted offering will render the fields barren, or a that misspoken incantation must bring a disastrous flood. We are confident that, should the old gods scowl on our land, the broad economic fabric of which we are a part will deliver from afar whatever is needed to knit-up our local misfortune. Are we not extensively supplied from remote and exotic environs in even the normal course of business? Thus the old forms of religious observation fall into disuse.

         But fear itself abides: will the material order hold now that it is so huge, so disperse, so extensively self-actuating, and consists so much in the mere abstraction of its organizational form? Could it all be heading toward a collapse that we will not foresee in time for corrective action? Will the value of my labor's marginal product cover my needs and obligations? Have we not been delivered from one mystery into another that might yet hold more terrors than were there before?

         The wise and well-situated among us have, therefore, directed portions of our expanded wealth to the establishment of temples and the lubrication of a priestly order to celebrate accord with this new mystery. The new dispensation is rational materialism; edifices of the world's central banks are its temples; and economists are its priests. In the words of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor of England and Wales, “Christianity is being replaced by…free market economics.”
         Economics is the theology of our rationalist-materialist age. It is secularism's sacred mystery - at least for so long as the hand of economic adjustment remains “unseen”; markets only organize themselves "miraculously" or “spontaneously”; and the interest rate does not occur naturally, but is divined by a deliberately obscurantist priesthood headed by a disciple of Ayn Rand. Thus the economic order is created for the popular mind as if it were still the plaything of fierce, remote, essentially pagan gods. Where the old gods required priestly supplications to assure benign regulation of the seasonal cycle upon which human fortunes once depended, the new gods require abaisance from our economists so that tenderness might be granted the business cycle.
         Some appreciation for our Catholic faith having miraculously survived prolonged contact with the Jesuit Province of California, the SFEcon crew is reminded that our church has, for the most part, only engaged superstition in order to minimize it. We can celebrate the birth of our God at the solstice without presuming it is the ceremony that makes the days stop growing shorter and become longer. While the pagan residue in our priests occasionally reasserts itself, these the are exceptions - as when the church played smash-mouth Catholicism with the Copernican system:

"The view that the sun stands motionless at the center of the universe is foolish, philosophically false, and utterly heretical, because contrary to Holy Scripture."

1616: Office of the Holy See at Rome

In the matter of one Galileo Galilei

Prior to Copernicus, the seasons had no explanation, and their precession could only be assured by a pagan priesthood. Since Copernicus, paganism has had to seek employment in the service of other mysteries.

         Christianity also disappoints when it invites appellations such as Gibbon's ". . . convenient footstool to the throne of the empire." When the church was young, and Constantine ruled, this ordering of truth with power was not without purpose. As much cannot be said of the church's current reinforcement of our imperial party's Libertarian faith:

Empire is neither a fact nor a likelihood in our time. Its impulse is presided-over by a figure much more on the order Claudius than Constantine.

Neo-conservatism has identified itself with the Vienna Problem's indissolubility, which ranks with Piltdown Man and N-rays among the great intellectual frauds of the 20th Century.  This large group's sympathies with Christianity being what they are, the Church will regret their error.

But it should also note the persistence of error in the face of evidence, on matters wherein the Church speaks ex cathedra, and carried out for the luxury of what the properly catechized will recognize as an alien, rival, sect-riven, and essentially pagan denomination.

| top |

Benediction

         The Christian appreciation of Hayek is certainly not misplaced. Hayek concluded upon a recognizable facsimile of Pesch's subsidiarity principle as an aspect of healthy community. He was even something of a Utopian in the proper sense of Augustine or Plato, i.e.: he saw the importance of elaborating ideals for the sake of their guidance, even while cautioning against attempting their implementation beyond the contemporary state of man's perfection. And, quite specifically, he realized that over-reaching the potential of certain social ideas active in his own time would tempt the fate of Babel.

         History might well credit Christ with having established the possibility of dignity in each person, without which the Libertarian cult of individualism might never have occurred to mankind. Libertarians, always correct as to their logic, might find further use for the traditional observation that man is a political animal. The premise of the individual, from which their message unfolds quite reasonably, is perhaps too narrow for application to issues generally arising from our inescapable relations with one another. In any case, tradition and Libertarianism make an unholy union when they meet on the ground of the algebra allowed to economic calculation.

         If the world needs another warning as to danger of fatuous over-interpretations upon mechanistic systems such as SFEcon, we should be pleased acknowledge the competence of either the traditional church or the Libertarian right in doing so. We do not oppose their respective missions, only their sources of authority for refuting our algebra. These authorities have better things to do.

         Should materialism's fundamental causality be quantified in the manner on an engineering discipline, then economics would be a fragment - not the whole - of our morality; and it would be a fragment - not an irrelevance - to our biology. However upsetting this might be to the certainties of our age, we would likely be better off for knowing more about the size of these fragments. Our current refusal to know these things can be seen in alliance with the business of selling fear by inflaming our potential for beliefs much more hysterical than z = pl.

| top |