The Rich Man, The Eye Of The Needle, And The Nobility Of The Poor - Self-Perpetuating Myths

Jack Townsend was a rich man, and his wealth was earned honestly - the American dream of enterprise, hard work, discipline, diligence, and opportunity, 

He was proud of his wealth - or rather the fruits of his labor - and felt no shame or guilt or harbored no second thoughts concerning his good fortune. His wealth was not built on the backs of the poor.  On the contrary it was the facilitator of their economic mobility.

He enjoyed his wealth and had no qualms about having houses in Palm Springs and St. Bart's, an all-expenses-paid lifestyle which was his right to enjoy.  Not the wages of sin but the wages of enterprise. 

 

His wealth, as significant as it was, was simply part of the international market moving according to fixed laws of supply and demand in arcane algorithms which in the era of Artificial Intelligence, was operating more according to their own mysterious mechanisms. 

His money was invested, and from Wall Street banks it circulated around the world - money markets, gold and silver exchanges, commodity futures, buy-outs, creative financial instruments, and the growth of businesses.  He was but one cog in an imponderable mechanism, but the thousands, millions of people like him made it turn. 

Wealth was the product of civilization and its enabler. There would be no Renaissance without the Medicis. 

 

Poverty was on the mind of former President Jimmy Carter when he talked about Jesus and the nobility of the poor, and how it was harder for a rich man to get into heaven than a camel to go through the eye of a needle.

The poor, Carter said, were anointed, chosen by Christ because of their simplicity, their lack of worldly temptations, and their profound faith in the Lord.  Carter spent his life in the service of the poor, building houses, speaking compassionately and hopefully about a new age of equality, and working the land shoulder to shoulder with tenant farmers.

 Lyndon Johnson saw poverty as an electoral promise – the more the poor made it out of the backwoods, the more votes would be cast in his favor. He was never a rearview president, looking back on the life that had preceded him, but a doer, and he shook down, intimidated, horse traded and wrangled with Congressional leaders to give him what he wanted – millions in cash for Texas. 

Bill Clinton was a good ol’ boy at heart and hated to leave the General Store, fishing for bass on Lake Ochoa, and hunting squirrels and coons in the foothills of the Ozarks.  He loved his people, never lost an opportunity to share tales on the porch of the general store, before and after church, and coming and going from the revival tent. 

All of them missed the point, for of course there was never any inherent nobility of the poor, nor any particular divine light shining on labor.  They were at best perfect examples of Hobbes’ aphorism about life in general – nasty, brutish, and short – consigned by poor breeding, circumstance, and inertia to the lowest rung, wondering what to do next.  In The Land of Opportunity, they missed the bus. 

America is based on many fictions and this, the nobility of poverty is one of them.  Work is simply a necessity, unequally apportioned, differentially paid.  There is no nobility in factory work, farm labor, office work, or public service.  Facts of life have no inherent value.  Economic variables even less. 

Today the question is moot.  Manual labor is reduced to a few essential industries not yet subject to robotics or Artificial Intelligence, and soon the knowledge economy will become universal.  The idea of the nobility of work or the nobility of poverty is not only a Victorian fiction but totally irrelevant. 

Catholic priests take vows of poverty, and within that narrow framework, individual priests find their calling.  Father Aloysius Brophy of the Church of the Holy Family, found the parable of the rich man, the camel, and the eye of the needle particularly insightful; and as he looked out over his well-heeled congregation, he spun his own parables about the dangers of wealth.  

He stopped short of indicting the rich - that they ipso facto would be denied the Kingdom of Heaven because of their wealth - but issued fair warning.  The path to riches is the road to sin. 

Despite current interpretations of Matthew (Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God) to equate wealth with sinful ignorance and a rejection of Christ's admonition to love the poor, Jesus meant only that a focus on wealth accumulation distracts from spiritual matters.  In fact his admonition was a derivation of ancient Hindu texts, the Upanishads which warn that the material world is nothing but Maya, illusion, a chimera of false promise. 

Townsend had left the church many years ago, not so much for the personalized, subjective blandishments of Father Murphy and his misinterpretations of the Bible but for its false idolatry. The Church, for all the heady intellectualism of Athanasius, Augustine, and Aquinas had fallen on hard moral times, grasping at divine straws while ignoring the undeniability of Darwin, Einstein, and Planck. 

The world was deterministic - random selection, indefinable quanta - and fixed mathematical absolutes.  The church had nothing to say either about the ineluctability of an aggressive, territorial, self-defensive human nature or a quantum physics which led its uncertainty principle to be applied to social dynamics. 

Today's progressivism stuck in Townsend's craw, for it was more idolatrous than the Vatican's facile, temporal interpretation of the foundational precepts of the Early Church. Progressives denied the ineradicable elements of human nature, insisted on social progress when none could be seen over millennia of successive generations, and proposed unfounded, idealist solutions to imagined problems. 

The nobility of the poor, an idea which Townsend thought was long dead and buried, emerged as a progressive precept.  There was not only something wrong with the accumulation of wealth per se, but it harmed the poor, a noble class, a worthy, equal piece of the social fabric. 

Nobility itself does have value as a moral feature of life - men and women of class, breeding, a sense of pride in themselves and a consideration for others were indeed noble - but when attached to a temporal equation like poverty, it loses potency and agency

And so it was that Jack Townsend went about his business, of clear mind and untroubled conscience, a man determined by factors beyond his control, with no destiny other than following those rules, not subject to any higher order of morality but respectful of the randomness of his success.