As commodities, the fossil fuels are in a category strictly their own. Unlike other minerals that (in a sensible economy) can be reused, and unlike waterpower that uses water and releases it to be used again, the fossil fuels can be made useful only by being destroyed. They are useful and therefore valuable only in the instant in which they are burning.
To be available for their brief usefulness, these fuels must be dug or pumped from the ground. Their extraction has nearly always damaged, often irreparably, the places and the human communities from which they are taken. For coal to feed the fires by which we live, whole landscapes are destroyed, forests and their soils and creatures are obliterated, streams are covered over, watersheds are degraded and polluted, poisonous residues are left behind, communities are degraded or flooded by toxic wastes or runoff from denuded watersheds, the people are exploited and endangered, their houses damaged, their drinking water poisoned, their complaints and needs ignored. When the fossil fuels, extracted at such a cost to people and nature, are burned, they pollute the atmosphere of all the world, with consequences that are fearful, infamous, and continuing.
In a consciously responsible economy, such abuses would be inconceivable. They could not happen. To damage or destroy an otherwise permanent resource for the sake of a temporary advantage would be readily perceived as senseless by every practical measure and, by the measure of human wholeness, as insane. To value human wants above all the natural and human resources that supply human needs, as the now-failing economy has done, is to run risks and defy paradoxes by which it was and is bound to fail. If we pursue limitless “growth” now, we impose ever-narrower limits on the future. If we put spending first, we put solvency last. If we put wants first, we put needs last. If we put consumption first, we put health last. If we put money first, we put food last. If for some spurious reason such as “economic growth” or “economic recovery,” we put people and their comfort first, before nature and the land-based economies, then nature sooner or later will put people last.
But the fossil fuels, which involve destruction for the sake of production and again destruction as a consequence of production, are not the only typical products of our anti-economy. Also typical are products that replace, at high cost, goods that once were cheap or free. The genius of marketing and selling has given us, for example, bottled tapwater, for which we pay more than we pay for gasoline, because of our perfectly rational fear that our unbottled tapwater is polluted. The system of industry, finance, and “marketing” thus makes capital of its own viciousness and of the ignorance and gullibility of a supposedly educated public. By the influence of marketers and sellers, citizens and members are transformed into suckers. And so we have an alleged economy that is not only fire-dependent and consumption-dependent but also sucker-dependent.
For another example, consider the money-drenched entertainment industry. The human species, which has apparently outlived the name Homo sapiens, is said to be something like 200,000 years old. Except for the last seventy-five or so years of their life so far, and except for their decadent ruling classes, most humans have entertained themselves by remembering and telling stories, singing, dancing, playing games, and even by their work of providing themselves with necessities and things of beauty, which usually were the same things. All of this entertainment came free of charge, as a sort of overflow of human nature, local culture, and daily life. Even the beauty of good work and well-made things was a value added at no charge. The entertainment industry has improved upon this great freedom by providing at a high cost, in money but also in health and sanity, an egregiously overpaid corps of entertainers and athletes who tell or perform stories, sing, dance, and play games for us or sell games to us as we passively consume their often degrading productions. The wrong here may be at root only that of an inane and expensive redundancy. If you can read and have more imagination than a doorknob, what need do you have for a “movie version” of a novel?
This strange economy produces, typically and in the ordinary course of business, products that are destructive or fraudulent or unnecessary or useless, or all four at once. Another of its typical enterprises is remarkable for the production of what I suppose we will have to call no-product, or no product but money (to the extent that this works). The best-known or longest infamous example of a no-product financial industry is the practice of usury, which is to say the lending of money at exorbitant interest or (some have said) at any interest. In our cultural tradition, as opposed to financial precedent, the condemnation of usury seems to be unanimous.
The Hebrew Bible speaks emphatically against usury in ten of its chapters (by my count), calling it by name, but without much explanation, assuming apparently that its wrongfulness is obvious. From the context it is clear that usury is understood as an injustice and an offense against charity. It is a way for people of wealth to exploit the poor, whom they have been instructed to care for. Only the wealthy have a surplus of money to lend, and they should not use it to take advantage of the needs of others. Usury, moreover, cannot be consistent with the command (Leviticus 19:18) that “thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”
Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics also condemns usury and in language that is remarkably consistent with my description of our own economic malpractice. He classes usurers with pimps, as people who take “anything from any source” or who “take more than they ought and from wrong sources” (the Oxford edition, translated by Sir David Ross).
Dante is perfectly consistent with the Bible and Aristotle when he places the usurers in Hell (Inferno XI) with others who are guilty of violence against God. Virgil, explaining this fault to Dante, makes the case clearly and usefully. Usury is a violence against God because it is a violence against nature. Nature is the art of God, just as productive work, the making of useful things, is the art of humans. Humans prosper rightly when their goods come from nature by their good work. Usurers prosper, on the contrary, by making money grow from itself (by “making their money work for them,” as we say), thus holding in contempt both nature and work, both divine art and human art.
Ezra Pound, a poet of our own time, was in Dante’s tradition when he wrote the two versions of his eloquent poem against usury (Cantos XLV and LI). Pound who was (I hope) insane when at his worst, was perfectly sane when he wrote this:With usury has no man a good house
made of stone, no paradise on his church wall
With usury the stone cutter is kept from his stone
the weaver is kept from his loom by usura
Wool does not come into market
the peasant does not eat his own grain
the girl’s needle goes blunt in her hand
The looms are hushed one after another
Usury kills the child in the womb
And breaks short the young man’s courting
Usury brings age into youth; it lies between the bride
and the bridegroom
Usury is against Nature’s increase.
The point—as I understand it, though I understand also that this poem offers far more than a point—is that when money is misused to grow from itself into heaps in the possession inevitably of fewer and fewer people, it cannot be rightly used for the production of goods or even to maintain the subsistence of the people. Workers will not be well paid for good work. The arts will not flourish, and neither will nature.
I need to say here that this issue of usury is far from simple, and that I am not capable even of giving usury a proper definition. The issue is
