A week ago at the Fabian Society in London Peter Mandelson warned that the recovery from recession would cause a major and painful consolidation of financial services and a reduction of the economy's dependence on such "financial services". Lord Mandelson said in the future there would be "less financial engineering and more real engineering in our economy". Indeed there would be an absolute necessity for the British economy to recover a significantly greater base in manufacturing, in the making of real things, in the production of that which can be traded. Sure money makes money, but it will become critically important to recover a manufacturing base, those people, and more people, who make the products that make the money to make money - I think is the argument.
Speaking a few weeks ago with a retired and previously very senior manager of one of Scotlands now troubled Banks, he was lamenting (that's the right word) the abandoning of traditional banking values and practices in pursuit of financial services and money marketing. Once Banks became more interested in selling credit at higher rates than they borrowed it, they began to lose interest in the depositing and saving customer and more interested in the borrower who is to be persuaded to buy increasingly unrealistic levels of credit. We all experienced it - you are there to do your own business and the teller can't get quickly enough to asking about your mortgage, credit needs - you are no longer a bank customer whose money is to be secured but a money-on-credit consumer from whom the Bank wants to make more money. The result is a global economy dependent less on producing and manufacturing goods, as one in which money moves around, circulates, in arteries increasingly furred up with bad cholesterol / debt.
And so to Dante. One of the serious and enlightening games the mind plays when reading a text that is pre-modern, culturally removed by centuries and geography, translated therefore out of a long gone worldview into the way we view the world, is finding the points of connection that make its insights universal. So I was intrigued to find the following passage dealing with the sin of usury. That's right - the sin of earning money solely by lending it, greedily selling its purchasing function to someone else for a price higher than its face value in hours worked, skills used and products manufactured.
Dante's theological aim is remarkably accurate. Human art, and that represents all productive work by artisans and trade guilds, reflects the Creator God. The good God creates the natural world, and since human beings are made in the image of God, human art expresses and imitates God's creativity. Usury, the lending of money for interest, offends against nature (God's child), and against human art (God's grandchild). It is this view of human work, our innate capacity for creation and stewardship of nature's resources, that Dante sees as the purposive human activity God intends. Amassing wealth by exacting interest is a parasitic activity that produces nothing but money - which will eventually lose its mundane value, and never had any heavenly value. Usury is ultimately an offence against the Creator, the sin of skiving while others do the work and earn the very wealth that is being amassed by credit sellers. Here's Dante's take on the credit crunch - its origins and why it happened.
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Go back a little to that point, I said,
Where you told me that usury offends
Divine goodness; unravel now that knot.
“Philosophy, for one who understands,
points out, and not in just one place”, he said,
“how nature follows – as she takes her course –
the Divine Intellect and Divine Art;
and if you read your Physics carefully,
not many pages from the start, you’ll see
that when it can, your art would follow nature,
just as a pupil imitates his master;
so that your art is almost God’s grandchild.
From these two, art and nature, it is fitting,
if you recall how Genesis begins,
for men to make their way, to gain their living;
and since the usurer prefers another
pathway, he scorns both nature in itself
and art, her follower; his hope is elsewhere.”
(Canto XI, lines 94-111)
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