God, Immanency and the Invisible Hand.

One Friday, as a result of a long time curiosity about Thomas Merton, I showed up unannounced at the Gethsemane monastery in Kentucky. I wandered into a chapel where a lecture was being given by a red nosed monk who seemed to have spent the last few hours sampling the altar wine to make sure that it had not turned to vinegar.

There was a graphic crucifix overpowering the small room. The heavy cross itself was about four and a half feet tall and the tortured figure nailed to it looked like a skinny ten year old that had been varnished, frequently dusted and occasionally polished.

The Irish surnamed monk’s speech was not quite slurred, but it was too loud and broad for the room. He never quite looked at any of us, but either God was actually present somewhere in the building or the monk had a gift of immanency that could only be called spooky.

I can remember none of his words, but somehow the monk conveyed that Jesus had stepped around the corner and would be back in the room in a moment.  It was as though the monk and Jesus had been walking toward us in the hallway and Jesus had stopped in the bathroom. The monk appeared to have just a brief time to speak before the Deity himself came through the door and began the main presentation with an apology for needing to respond to a call of nature

I have learned since that this practiced skill of immanency is highly valued in many Christian sects. My Baltimore Catechism spoke of immanent God, but I never understood the idea until I had some time to reflect on my experience with the Red Nosed Monk.

What then, has this to do with economic ideas currently fashionable with the true-believing right?

Religious right thinking authors and pundits see a newly rehabilitated invisible hand, restrained by nefarious forces in the current administration, immanent and awaiting release by the faithful for the everlasting benefit of mankind. This is not our father’s invisible hand of self-interest, competition, and supply and demand. This is not the same invisible hand that created child labor and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. This new invisible hand hasn’t even thumbed through the Old Testament.

The old invisible hand was about as benign as that fire (killing 146, it was the primary impetus for workplace fire codes.) The secular world has come to understand that both fire and economic forces are useful if contained and harnessed, but deadly if assumed to have their own compassionate intelligence.  

The new invisible hand is attached to a white bearded Teddy bear with infinite patience, goodwill and wholesome intentions. It is not a big jump from thinking that the deity intervenes in the minutia of daily personal life, to thinking that markets are his way of implementing a grand beneficent plan on a national or international scale. An absurd idea to rational thinking economists, but an obvious fact to the deeply religious. They really do think that God has a plan, that nothing happens by chance, that everything has meaning and that goodness will prevail in the end.

Explaining the ever renewing crackpot theories of hidden chambers beneath the Sphinx and Great Pyramid, Egyptologist Zahi Hawass pointed out that many people prefer to “live in the mystery.” Despite unanimous scientific evidence to the contrary, new pointless excavations are constantly being proposed for theses sites. So it is with the religious/political right, now that they apply belief to the sphere of the social sciences. Countless interns and cranks in privately funded thinktanks infect the public discourse with a stream of seductive bad ideas that have been demonstrably false for half a century.  

Truly a wonder of the natural world, markets are well studied and frequently predictable. They are, however, sufficiently mysterious to light the neurons of irrationality in almost anyone, especially those with a stake in the outcome. Thus there is a new strain of popular economic thought that is founded in theology.

The most bizarre manifestation of this economic theology views government restraint of the invisible hand as a Lucifer inspired human postponement of the end times and Armageddon predicted in the Bible.  So, the new invisible hand will both lead us to the land of milk and honey and burn the non-Christians and former Christians up in a worldwide conflagration. The limitations of my rational and secular mind prevent me from fully getting my head around  this, but that is what makes me a social scientist rather than an Economic Theologian.