Why greed is evil

So the more we have the more we must have in order to secure what we have. As Bill May observed, the vices in traditional catalogues of sins were often associated with various body parts - lying with the tongue; lust with the genitals; gluttony with the throat, pride with the chest, conceit with the turned head, and avarice with the arms and legs.

The person possessed by avarice reaches and grasps the goods of another. Things come into the possession of the greedy by reaching and holding. Mastery and possession are the marks of a person who is determined by avarice. That greed names the felt necessity to have more may help explain the seeming paradox that greed seems to become a particularly prominent challenge in economies of plenty. It is quite interesting, for example, that with the rise of money economies in Western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries there is a distinct increase in references to the sin of greed by theologians and bishops.

Money, it seems, allowed more people to manifest signs of wealth which meant the more wealth they had the more wealth they needed to sustain the wealth they had. For the rich there is never "enough. I do not mean to suggest that avarice only became a named vice with the development of moneyed economies. The rise of monasticism clearly was the crucial development necessary for the articulation of the seven deadly sins.

Augustine would identify pride as the cardinal or original sin, but the monks who inhabited the Egyptian desert thought greed to be the sin that birthed the other sins. According to Rusty Reno, "They observed a deep human fear of dependence on God that manifested itself in a perennial desire to accumulate some small margin of protective, sustaining property.

That monasticism preceded the identification of avarice as the primal sin is a nice confirmation that our very ability to name our sins is a theological achievement. In other words, the very presumption that we can name our sins and declare that we are sinners prior to God's grace is an indication that we are possessed by sin. For we are only able to confess that we are possessed by sin on our way out of sin. Accordingly a community must exist that makes possible the identification of the subtly of sin.

That is particularly true when you are dealing with a sin as subtle as greed. I think, for example, it is not accidental that you needed a Saint Francis for the discovery by Christians that we had lost the ability to recognize how greed possessed our lives.

The subsequent development of the Franciscan order was crucial for the acknowledgment by the church that the church itself was possessed by possessions. Yet the very Order that had at its centre the discipline of begging was soon able to make holiness a commodity subject to greed. William Langland in Piers Plowman depicts the friars' ability to turn their alleged sanctity into a means to acquire money. Langland characterized the friars, in the words of Kelly Johnson, as "hawkers of holiness," who are "all the more prone to simony because of their practices of poverty and begging.

Langland's suggestion that the "worst misfortune mounts up fast" might well be a description of our situation. That a poem like Piers Plowman could be written suggests that the poet could still draw on the tradition to show what greed looks like and why it is such a threat to Christians. But it is unclear if that is the case with us.

For greed has become the necessary engine to sustain economic growth. We are obligated to want more because if we do not want more then we will put someone out of a job. Most of us are familiar with Gordon Gekko's famed celebration of greed in Oliver Stone's film Wallstreet.

But the virtues of greed found its most original and persuasive form in Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees :. From Mandeville's perspective "frugality is like honesty, a mean starving virtue, that is only fit for small societies of good peaceable men, who are contented to be poor so that they may be easy; but in a large stirring nation you may soon have enough of it.

Deirdre McCloskey has tried to qualify Mandeville's account of the necessity of avarice for economic growth by arguing that markets live in communities of virtue for which economists often fail to account. William Schweiker even suggests that because "property" is a cultural construction entangled with arrangements for human identity and worth may mean that what we call "greed" should be better understood as an appropriate desire necessary to sustain market driven economies.

I am not convinced, however, that McCloskey's and Schweiker's language transforming proposals to understand greed even in a limited way as a good is a good idea. For example, Alasdair MacIntyre observes that for those shaped by the habits of modern societies it is assumed as a fundamental good that acquisitiveness is a character trait indispensable to continuous and limitless economic growth. Greed is the poisoned spring of all cunning and hypocrisy in the world.

It is greed which makes people sin Greed is the source of evil. An offshoot of this insecurity is the fearful need to hoard, store and cling to the wealth you have amassed. Greed manifests itself in two broad tendencies — the impulse to hoard and the impulse to spend extravagantly. Bigger, better, newer, faster I would say that the tendency to accumulate material wealth, the craving for more and more, is the root cause of human unhappiness.

The issue is not money. We all need money to survive and money is a fair reward for our contribution to the good of society. When we provide valuable service, we get paid. When people provide us with the same, they get paid as well. We all pay taxes to develop and maintain an infrastructure and support our governments.

This creates a society where everyone benefits. We often say that money is the root of all evil. It is not. Money allows us to do a tremendous amount of good in the world. It allows industry to thrive, it allows us to provide for our families, and it allows us to invest and to spend as we choose. The issue is not money, it is greed. The reverse is also true. In another set of studies, Piff found that people in lower social classes are more generous , charitable, trusting and helpful even at cost to themselves.

This helpful have-not behavior is classic altruism.