Sin and punishment always sell better than virtue and reward. More people read Inferno and Paradise Lost than Paradiso and Paradise Regained. Terror and pity, too, attend the doom that follows the fatal flaw, not the lucky escape.
Perhaps that is why the financial crisis and the attempts to resolve it have been received so sullenly. The sinners who have infested banks, finance companies and regulatory boards are evident. But because they have wired us to the explosives they placed in their systems, they and their kind stand to be rewarded by a scheme dreamed up by their fellow sinners. Less Shakespeare Act V than Schwarzenegger Act I.
The crowd, cheated of blood, understandably boos players and referees alike. Who wants to hear of virtue now?
But if the reason why the financial markets collapsed was a culture of greed, it may be helpful to ask what a culture of virtue might look like.
Systematic greed and evasion of responsibility destroy the trust that is the condition for the market to operate. The corrosion of trust was masked because bankers, financiers, economists, regulators and ordinary people assumed greed was good and asked only technical questions about how the markets could continue to reward it.
Now that the naked Emperor of the Market has frozen up, we can ask the deeper cultural and ethical questions about how he might be clothed warmly in trust.
Trust is built and maintained in a culture and not made by technical adjustment to financial instruments. That is to say trust depends on relationships. When we are confident people are committed to a worthwhile enterprise, that they are faithful in their relationships to each other and to those for whom they work, and have a proper sense of priorities, we trust them. When we believe these values are generally shared by the participants, we shall trust the markets.
It may seem old-fashioned and purely homiletic to speak of worthwhile enterprises. But there is a simple test. If, after we describe in simple English what we do, our audience laughs or looks at us as if we had contracted moral leprosy, our enterprise is probably not worthwhile. Worthwhile enterprises benefit people by providing them with goods or services that enhance their lives. To be committed to an enterprise means focusing on the quality of what we do and make. We are in it for the long haul,