reading

The Predator Culture (2010)
The Inquest (2010)
Wheels of Fortune (2006)
Ricardo’s Law: House Prices and the Great
Tax Clawback Scam (2006)
Boom Bust: House Prices, Banking and the
Depression of 2010
(2005; 2nd edn 2010)
The Chaos Makers (1997 with Frederic J.Jones)
The Corruption of Economics (1994 with Mason Gaffney)
The Power in the Land (1983)

The Traumatised Society

First published in 2012 by
Shepheard-Walwyn (Publishers) Ltd
107 Parkway House, Sheen Lane
London SW14 8LS
www.shepheard-walwyn.co.uk
www.ethicaleconomics.org.uk

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

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Printed and bound in the United Kingdom
by Short Run Press Ltd, Exeter

Prologue: The Existential Crisis

FOLLOW the money. The trail is murky: the crooks have had centuries to cover their tracks. But we shall discover that it leads to the greatest crime ever committed in the history of mankind.

It is the crime that destroys civilisations. Is there time for us to intervene in the unfolding events that threaten our civilisation? I believe that there is, but not without a popular reawakening, a democratic revolution. That is unlikely unless enough people take control of the future of their communities. For one consequence of the crime is the comprehensive failure of leadership. I would go so far as to say that the West has been and is being betrayed by those who presume to govern, to philosophise and to moralise. They have access to the knowledge that would consign the great crises of our age to history, and they fail to use it.

Following the money will first require a re-examination of our forensic tools; tools that have been blunted by the cheats of old. Their mission was to ensure that we, as victims, would not know what was being done to us. They succeeded. One outcome is that what passes for democracy is not an authentic democratic process. Our world has been distorted by the culture of cheating. The story of one victim dramatizes the nature of the deprivation which we all now endure.

Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) was a lawyer who nearly succeeded in outlawing behaviour at the heart of the privileges of the people who get rich by cheating the rest of us. He coined the word genocide and succeeded in piloting the concept through to the point where it became a crime against humanity. But he failed in his ultimate mission. We are all paying the price for that failure.

Lemkin was a Polish Jew who worked as a public prosecutor. He observed how the Nazis systematically dismantled his country. He was able to forensically assess the destruction of a nation because, by then, he had examined the way the people of Armenia had been massacred by Turkey, and Assyrians had been massacred in Iraq. He defined genocide in these terms:

I have added the emphasis. Lemkin considered these words to represent the most important part of genocide. He fought for the inclusion of cultural genocide during the drafting of the UN Convention on Genocide. He argued that “Cultural Genocide is the most important part of the Convention”.² Cultural genocide was deleted from what became a crime against humanity. In his autobiography, he recalled:

Despite the atrocities of World War II, nations which had declared their commitment to human rights refused to recognise cultural genocide as a crime against humanity. Why?

Culture represents the collective consciousness of a population, its memory and all the intellectual and institutional supports that individuals need to live as members of the human species. Erase culture, and you erase what it means to be human. Lemkin came to see this with crystal clarity, and he fought to make the destruction of culture a crime. He wrote:

I have emphasised a part of this statement. I invite the reader to refer back to Lemkin’s words while reading my account of humanicide. If Lemkin had succeeded in persuading the United Nations to accept his definition of genocide, the tumultuous second half of the 20^th century would have evolved in an entirely different direction. For the policy changes that would have been necessary to avoid committing Lemkin’s definition of genocide would have guided the West away from the crises that now challenge its existence. But there was an evil logic to the refusal to accept Lemkin’s definition of genocide.

Culture is produced over evolutionary timescales. It originated with the investment of mental and material resources. Those collectively deployed resources are continuously needed to maintain the vitality of culture. Culture is something that we produce. The basis of that production is the economic surplus that a population is able to generate. The technical term for those resources is economic rent. This concept signifies the way we measure the value of the services provided by two distinct “commons”: the commons of the natural universe, and the commons of our social universe. In The Traumatised Society I explain how the privatisation of those rents causes the destruction of a population’s authentic culture. The rent-seekers who came to control society could not allow their behaviour to be outlawed as a crime against humanity.

Lemkin was unable to understand the underlying reason why his definition of genocide was unacceptable to the Western nations that shaped the human rights agenda. We are now able to do so. The story is horrifying, and painful for me to tell. The evidence, in brief, demonstrates that the Western mind-set was manipulated to protect the privileges of the cheats. Milestones in the mind-bending process include these two curiosities:

• The word land – representing all of the planet’s resources – was omitted from the convention that purported to define every person’s equal rights: the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

• The word rent – which classical economics identified as the revenue ideally suited to fund the public’s shared services – was eviscerated as an analytical concept by what became the neo-classical school of economics.

The motives for these acts and omissions will unfold in my narrative. The evidence leads to a terrible conclusion. It does not take evil men like Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot to commit genocide. In Lemkin’s terms, the democracies of the West were subjecting their citizens to cultural genocide, and they continue to commit this crime to this day.

THE task before us is nothing less than the reconfiguring of the Western mindset (Part 3). So fundamental is the necessary change to the way that we view the world, that we have to go back to the beginning.

My starting point is a unified theory of social evolution. We begin by elaborating a general theory of corruption (Part I). By identifying the core cause of the major cases of abnormal mass behaviour, we can isolate the one reform to the financial system that would mobilise people behind the determination to modify the flaws in the foundations of our communities.

Our task is not made easier by confusion over the best approach to viewing the world. Disputes over methods, such as whether the emphasis should be on nature or nurture to explain deep-seated problems, are distractions. Should we emphasise spiritual or secular principles? The monotheistic religions have spiritualised their teachings, while science, when its methods are applied to human affairs, is compromised by the suppression of a vital realm of reality from its database. Information that was available and understood a hundred years ago has been transformed into secret knowledge.

But the tragedies associated with the seizure of the Western world’s financial arteries in 2008 give us reason to be optimistic. There is a growing consensus that a fundamental defect lurks somewhere deep in the system. Set against the new questioning of once cherished beliefs, however, is the barrier to straight thinking. The analytical framework that is needed to account for the myriad failures is not available.

But we are privileged like no other generation before us. We can equip ourselves with the knowledge to negotiate a new covenant to save our civilisation. That requires a negotiation which, as I explain in Ch. 1, must be in two parts. One is with whoever (or whatever) owns nature. The other is with whoever owns the commons created by our forefathers: culture. The act of genius of our ancestors was in the way they united the two distinct commons in a single practical formula: a stream of income that the classical economists called economic rent.

This volume is an investigation into how we have all been cheated out of our inheritance: an equal right of access to, and share in, the commons.

CHEATING is now the principal operating mechanism in society. I employ this word as an analytical concept, well aware that its confrontational nature will provoke resistance. Confrontation, unfortunately, is unavoidable if we are to begin the painful process of recovering our humanity.

Cheating is a word that combines two realms of reality. It refers to deeds by persons, but it also articulates a moral attitude. How we interrogate the cheating that distorts our communities will determine the future of the West.

I am concerned not with individual deeds of cheating, but with the institutionalised kind that is sanctified by law. It is easy to get angry about particular acts and, in doing so, misdirecting our attention from root causes. How, for example, should we respond to the revelations of corruption in the Western banking system? It has exposed itself as disreputable since the financial crisis of 2008. First there were the sub-prime mortgages which caused the crisis. Subsequently there were the disclosures of Ponzi schemes (especially in the Anglo-American countries). Revelations came thick and fast, including market-rigging dishonesty that cost consumers billions in over-priced products. Major banks like Barclays were exposed for manipulating interest rates. Then there was the mis-selling of complex derivatives to small businesses that threatened to cause bankruptcies. Bankers became Enemy No. 1. But were these no more than symptoms of a deep-seated flaw in the structure of society? Manifestations of a culture that rewards deviant behaviour that ought to be outlawed?

Cheating is now so deep-seated that it is the defining characteristic of Western culture. That is why it threatens the viability of the West. Explaining the future of civilisation in terms of a particular kind of cheating overturns conventional explanations for the global crises of the 21^st century (one favourite scapegoat is “human nature”⁵).

I offer a mono-causal explanation for these crises. The theft of a nation’s economic surplus is the root cause of our major problems. This surplus is the net income after remunerating labour (wages) and capital (profits, or interest). Net income is the rent that a nation generates as its taxable income. Rent is unique because it is the basis of the social evolution of our species. By understanding its social (for some, its sacred) character, rent lays bare the story of how early humans evolved from those who daubed abstract images on cave walls 40,000 years ago to the builders of urban civilisations. Without rent (which changed its material form with each phase of evolution), we would not have become the bearers of culture.

Rent is at the heart of the dialectic of power. It measures the energy that is pumped into making and sustaining complex societies. The direction of the flow of that stream of income tells us whether culture is flourishing or decaying, whether a civilisation is growing or dying. By chronicling the fate of rent, we begin to understand where a society may be located in the grand sweep of its history. And yet, rent is the one value which national statisticians and economists treat in a cavalier manner. This is not accidental. Obscuring the size and direction of flow of rent serves the interests of the rent-seekers.

The stakes are the gravest imaginable. When rents are misappropriated, the psycho-social health of the population is degraded and the reproduction of culture is prejudiced. There comes a point when, with culture and the natural habitat debased, civilisation slides into irreversible decline. But to grasp the profound significance of rent as a flow of income, and the cheating that is now associated with it, we need to clean up our language.

CHEATING was institutionalised by the rent-seekers of the past 500 years who developed the art of manipulating our minds. They needed us to lose track of what they were doing, and they were eminently successful in their mission. That is why, for example, economics as a social science is a discipline in crisis. It is no longer a tool for solving problems. Instead, it compounds our problems. In particular, it inhibits us from understanding that cheating is a routine process in the capitalist economy. No steps are being taken to erase that cheating, because it is not recognised for what it is – a corrupted culture that impoverishes the lives of everyone.

Economists disguise the cheating with words that sanitise and legitimise behaviour which would not be acceptable (say) on the sporting field. By deconstructing those concepts, we begin to glimpse the power of the forces that obstruct change.

I have the misfortune to be a symbol of the cheating that has now traumatised modern societies (three cases are documented in Part II). I am a reluctant cheat, I hasten to add, but one whose palm has been crossed with silver. I own a piece of residential land. My home has risen in value by leaps and bounds without my lifting a finger.

In yesteryear, the archetypal cheat was a member of the aristocracy. Today, “hard-working middle class homeowners” have joined their ranks. We do not mean to cheat anyone. We abhor cheating and are quick to censure those who do not abide by the rules of fairness. But the rules were rigged by the barons and knights of yore. The legacy is a social process that co-opts decent people into behaving as if they were congenital cheats. Coming to terms with that awful reality is the biggest moral challenge many of us must now face.

We cannot evade that moral challenge. For cheating has suffused our globalised society to the point where a piecemeal approach to analysis and remedy is futile, if we wish to meet the existential challenge.

The last time we humans faced such a crisis was about 25,000 years ago. Neanderthals were bigger than us. They used tools, like us. And there were more of them than us. So the odds were in their favour.

The technical term for what we did is supplanting. We took over their territories, drove them out, and watched while they grew extinct.

This time, the threat to humanity is from our own kind. And, again, the contest is over who controls the resources of nature.

We need to remind ourselves that cheating as a social process was the primary cause of the demise of the earliest civilisations. Why we have failed to learn from those tragedies is one of the questions we seek to answer. The evidence mounts to suggest that our abuse of both nature and society is leading Homo sapiens down a dead end. Our intellectual and political leaders wilfully ignore the survival rules that primitive humans brought with them out of nature. Our ancestors evolved by mimicking the laws of nature. This enabled them to create a new universe, the social universe.

Being human does not merely mean that we are more capable than other animals at using tools, or behaving socially, or communicating by means of sophisticated sounds and gestures. Our unique accomplishment was in combining these skills to adapt the laws of nature into rules to which people agreed to conform. They acted as if they were conforming to the laws of nature, but they did so within the context of a universe of their creation, a universe that was not accessible to other species. That made Homo sapiens unique.

The two universes, of nature and human society, are distinct but inextricably related. Early humans had to make them co-exist out of biological necessity. Today, we access the surreal world of virtual reality with the aid of our PCs, but there is no escaping the fact that our social universe remains anchored in the material universe.

WE NEED a fresh start based on multi-disciplinary studies. I call my formulation of that approach sociogenics. It combines the social sciences with biology. How does this differ from Edward Wilson’s sociobiology? Wilson of Harvard University is a student of the social behaviour of bees and ants. Insights from these creatures, he argues, can inform our understanding of human behaviour.⁶ His work of synthesis, The Social Conquest of Earth, insists that we must rely on science to understand the nature of humanity.⁷ But his methodology, which highlights the notion of conquest, also leads to dangerously inappropriate conclusions about the nature of the threats facing our civilisation.

Social behaviour was paramount in the evolution of Homo sapiens. But the threat that we now face is not the result of social behaviour. All the major pathologies that call into question the future of our species are the product of anti-social behaviour. If our forefathers had managed to preserve the social values that made civilisation possible, we would not now be wondering, with Wilson, whether our species is going to survive. We need to rescue the science of society (sociology) from the wastelands to which it has been banished, and synthesise its knowledge with biology to provide a more robust understanding of what it means to be human.

In my view, our civilisation has passed the tipping point into collapse. But we cannot blame Acts of God. The crises are not the result of “market failures”. Nor can they be attributed to defects in “human nature”. These are scapegoats which happen to serve the interests of rent-seekers. There is a job of work to be done to deal with the fall-out from the social and natural cataclysms which will recur with increased ferocity. We may be able to forestall the worst. But we will not make progress until we recover a sense of the meaning of humanity. The boy’s-finger-in-the-dyke’s-hole initiatives (such as the attempt to deal with the financial crisis by piling new debts on old debts), will not save the West.

The challenges appear insurmountable, but that is because the levers of power are operated inefficiently and unfairly. This dysfunctional behaviour is programmed by a pathologically disturbed culture that manifests itself in societal trauma. Fortunately, enquiring minds across the scientific disciplines and caring professions are beginning to pool knowledge. An example is the MRI brain scanning technique which, developed since the 1980s, is facilitating major advances in neurobiology and psychotherapy. This is deepening our understanding of intergenerational trauma. Trauma is a concept that now needs to be developed and applied to whole populations.

We can save our civilisation if we find the moral resources within each and every one of us to think straight and act courageously. We need to go back to the beginning, to recover knowledge that has been repressed. But which beginning? Biology, and the theory of evolution? Myths, and the findings of ethnographers and anthropologists? History, and the tablets and parchments excavated by archaeologists? An eclectic approach would combine all disciplines to animate a therapeutic process with the cathartic power to rescue our traumatised societies. That entails the engagement of everyone in an informed democracy. We need to forestall the temptation of granting power to the Strong Men who will offer to solve our social problems if we yield ourselves to their lethal embrace.

5 According to John Coates, a research fellow at the University of Cambridge, the economic boom that led to the biggest bust since the 1930s was due to the fact that testosterone-fuelled traders in the financial markets were slaves to their hormones (Coates [2012]).

Part 1

A General Theory of Cheating

Chapter 1: God’s Land Deal

IT was the first criminal act in history. Genesis reports the deed, but we are not told how Cain killed his younger brother. Did he pick up a rock that marked the edge of his field and smash Abel’s skull? Or was a dagger concealed beneath his cloak, its sharp point plunged with mortal effect?

God’s role is problematic. He sat in judgement on the offerings brought by the brothers. He approved of Abel’s offering, but not Cain’s. Why? What made the difference that it should incur the displeasure of God? Cain was mortified. God remonstrated with him. The next thing we know is that the brothers met in that field, and Cain had murder on his mind.

This was not just a family tragedy. Genesis intends it as a warning. For the narrative is set in the context of God’s reason for intervening in earthly affairs. They did not own the land. He did. That is what the Old Testament is about. God.

The social pressures that lead to murder may be inferred from the account of the deed. We learn nothing about the brothers, other than how they earned their living. This information is given its significance by the context. The Old Testament is the first formal contract to delineate the ownership and use of land.

And so we learn that Abel was a shepherd, “but Cain was a tiller of the ground” (Genesis 4:2). Why but? What may we infer from the difference in the way they earned their living? Their household economies were worlds apart. They dramatised the interface between two universes: the natural and the social. Abel was from the old world. Cain symbolised the future. The differences between those two worlds were most starkly defined by the way land was possessed, and the way that the benefits were distributed.

Biblical scholars continue to dispute whether the narratives should be treated as history or as meaningful myths. Either way, the covenant is an inspired account of the psychology and sociology of land. It goes to the heart of the issue that might one day threaten the survival of the human species. Undisciplined, might civilisation grow into an all-devouring monster with the power to destroy life on planet Earth?

Frictions in the model of urban settlements were not being resolved by the people whose genius had made civilisation possible. The issues at stake were laid bare by the story of Cain and Abel. For what happened in that field is a metaphor for the social forces that were crushing the cities of the Near East.

Abel subsisted by hunting and by gathering food and fuel from nature. He could live comfortably, if the rains came, the grass grew and his flock could eat. He was at the end of a cultural continuum spanning the better part of 200,000 years.

The secrets of nature were being unlocked. Those secrets would make it possible to transform culture. In the annals of our species, that transformation would eclipse in significance events like landing men on the moon. Cain produced a surplus of food that could be traded and invested. That made possible giant leaps in the arts of governance and the formation of urban infrastructure.

The Bible is not interested in morbid family gossip. So why provide the account of Cain’s crime in a text that elaborated a theology of land? The answer to that question, in my view, is that we are invited to reflect on the consequences of a social transition that threatened the tranquillity of ancient communities.

The shift from pastoralism to agriculture ruptured more than personal relationships. It triggered a systemic crisis. It shattered the terms on which people had co-existed, a breach in ways of living unprecedented in the history of our species. The big problem was that people had forgotten how to resolve conflicts over the possession of land.

Abel’s nomadic lifestyle relied on practises sanctioned by an evolutionary process tracking back millions of years. Territorial behaviour, encoded in DNA, mediated the evolution of animals and vegetables. The territorial instinct was the organising principle that guided foraging and reproductive behaviour, and in regulating population size.² It was the mechanism that framed the evolution of our species. But if humans were to evolve out of nature, they had to adapt that instinct by developing a cultural equivalent. If they were to access new layers of existence, expanding their numbers and diversifying their cultures, a code of conduct was needed that was flexible, but resilient, and faithful to the principles of territorialism.

To co-evolve with nature, and to live in harmony with their fellow beings, a law was needed that synchronised spatial resources with abilities inscribed in DNA. Lawyers class the rules of this code under the concept of tenure. The rules had to be flexible but robust. Humans were unleashing themselves from the rigid laws of nature. If they were to create their own dynamic world, they would need to elaborate and honour a system of tenure that preserved harmony within their communities. The shift from gathering to growing food would create the greatest challenge of all. The confrontation between Cain and Abel represented the dangers in that transformation.

Still operating as a pastoralist, living off nature, Abel needed to roam the land with his flock. Cain, on the other hand, had learnt how to harness nature’s powers to increase the productivity of his labour. That meant his household would enjoy a higher income. But to achieve the greater output, he needed to erect fences to protect his crops against foraging flocks. This collision of land uses signposted the most profound break between genetic past and cultural future.

In the pre-agricultural age, land was held and used in common. Rights of access were determined by carefully honed customs and practises. People enjoyed equal rights that were defined by kinship associations. Without those rights, the rites of courtship, marriage and the reproduction of the family would have been meaningless.

Agriculture demanded a new kind of tenure: a demarcation of boundaries. Private possession. This was necessary, if people were to invest their labour and capital to feed the present and fund the future. Primordial practises would be rendered obsolete.

Uncertainty remains about much of our evolutionary past. Archaeologists have not settled the question of when early humans came out of Africa and began using stone tools. Such tools discovered in present-day United Arab Emirates are dated to about 125,000 years ago. But we can be confident about certain aspects of our past. One of these is related to the changing role of land use, and the rights that regulated the relationships between people. Customs and practises were evolved to secure a sensitively balanced use of nature. Oral techniques transmitted knowledge down the generations. The moral in the tragedy of Cain and Abel, for example, appears not only in the Old Testament but other holy texts, and it is featured in mythologies of pre-literate peoples around the world.

That drama is enacted in similar contests over land which divide communities to this day. It is the template for Hollywood Westerns which relive the way cattlemen who roamed the open range tried to resist barbed wire fences, causing many a gunfight showdown (Box 1:1). So the challenge presented by God of the landless remains with us to this day: the search for the meaning of the Good Life without letting the blood of our brothers.

The systemic problem was incubated 10,000 years ago. Neolithic people began to transform fields by selecting seeds, channelling water and tilling the soil. But why would the capacity to nurture food out of the fields incur the disrespect of God? The clues are contained in Cain’s offering to God. What was exceptional about it? Was it all the product of Cain’s labour, or did God have a stake in it? Did God disapprove of the way in which the surplus was being used? Was Cain hoarding his extra output without sharing the bounty with others? Why should Cain share any part of what was surplus to the immediate needs of his family?

The Old Testament is a dialectic on moral governance and economics, at the heart of which is the issue of land. People willing to hear were left in no doubt about the terms on which land gifted by God may be occupied, but they would have to work out the practical rules to suit particular circumstances.

• Fenced off land was no longer available to those who had previously accessed it. Was Cain under an obligation to compensate the losers? What form could such compensation take?

• Should the surplus product be used for purposes other than current consumption? If so, how should it be invested, and how would this affect the rest of the community?

That something was terribly wrong in those emerging city settlements was evident from the abject poverty of able-bodied people, the bloody territorial conflicts that tore nations apart, the abuse of nature. People had lost the wisdom that had sustained their communities for tens of thousands of years. Civilisation was threatening to become a dead-end experiment.

The Metaphysics of Earth

The genius of early humans was displayed when they combined the natural and social universes.

When Neolithic people took the final step out of nature, they needed abstract images to help them to visualise a unique way of existing. They were shifting away from biologically-based instincts to a universe that was unique in the solar system. Without practical rules for regulating their behaviour, there was nothing to stop them from pitting their lethal powers against each other.

Box 1:1
Today’s Cain & Abel Struggles

LAND disputes between cattle rancher and corn grower in the Wild West symbolise contests that divide communities on every continent in the 21^st century.

• In Latin America, the Nukak Maku (first contacted in 1988), were driven out of their Amazon homeland by guerrillas who sought a refuge. The tribe faces extinction because, as nomads, their shrunken territory is insufficient to sustain them.

• In Africa, the Kalahari Bushmen locked themselves into an epic constitutional struggle over the right to remain in their desert settlements. The Botswana government wanted to control the diamond-rich desert.

• In Canada and Australia, aboriginal peoples remain in limbo land following the colonial displacement. Government apologies alone for past transgressions – displacement from their territories – cannot rescue the alienated first settlers.

The economic crises in the USA and Europe today can only be understood in terms of their origins in the land market.

The title deeds to nature were assigned to deities. Super-natural forces regulated the flow of the energy circulating within nature. Gods lived in trees, were borne on the wind, brought the rains, inhabited caves, breathed fire. That determined the ownership rights. Mere mortals would settle for being the stewards of nature.

Two South African scholars, David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce, drew the links between the material and spiritual worlds. Economic activity and social organisation were articulated in

People would not fight each other for privileged access to nature’s resources, because the resources belonged to the gods. Each individual was given the equal chance to contribute further to the biological, psychological and cultural welfare of those within the gene pool.

But what about the administration of those heaven-sent resources? Earthly representatives of the deities were needed. The bridge between the people and nature could be a tribal chief or a priest or a prince. They would act on behalf of supernatural authority to enforce behaviour which satisfied the common interest.

Before they could learn to paint on Sistine ceilings, write heavenly scores for orchestras or invent technologies to take men to the moon, our ancestors had to resolve the problem beneath their feet. Thanks to the invention of, and interventions by, the deities, there would be no systematic cheating, no profane contests to monopolise nature’s resources, no depletion of the creative energies of people who wished to work for the mutual benefit of themselves and their neighbours. That sacred settlement was shattered by kings who administered the city civilisations.

Interpreting the Mind of God

God first exposed his mind to mortal gaze with the expression of disapproval of Cain’s gift. He was signalling a problem with the way the additional income was being used.

There was something wrong with the disposition of the product that the Cains of the new world were hewing from the land. God’s business was to reveal the nature of the problem.

Interpretations of God’s mind were provided by the first of the great Christian bishops. Their insights were complemented by first-hand observations of the civilisations of the classical world. The empirical evidence confirmed what they knew about the plight of people in the ancient world who lost their land and lapsed into debt bondage (Box 1:2).

The Christian bishops had front seats in the unfolding drama that became the decline and fall of the Roman empire. Men like Clement of Alexandria (c150-c215), Ambrose of Milan (337?-397) and Basil the Great (329?-379). One of them, John Chrysostom (347-407), lived almost long enough to witness their warnings come true. Rome was sacked in the year 410. They monitored the emerging poverty among Roman citizens, causally connecting it to the way land owners were monopolising the rents from land. Aided with the teachings of the covenant and the sermons of Jesus of Nazareth, they repeatedly warned that Rome was being degraded. Landlessness and poverty were induced by the misappropriation of land. Culture and the moral life were being depleted.

Box 1:2
Debt Bondage & the Clean Slate

SOME people in the earliest civilisations fell victim to poverty (as when crops failed, and they borrowed money which they found they could not repay). To address the threat to the stability of the community, a practice known as Clean Slate proclamations was employed. Periodically, the land would be restored to families. This corrective measure was known as the Jubilee. It was proclaimed every 49 years or on the accession to the throne of a new prince. Debts were also cancelled, of the personal (but not commercial) kind.

This ancient practise is recorded in Leviticus, Chapter 25. God reminds Moses that “The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me” (25:23). To secure social stability, “ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty through all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family” (25:10).

The observations on property articulated by the patristic teachers are now missing from pulpit preaching. Charles Avila recovered them while studying at a seminary in the Philippines. He had involved himself in the fight for peasant rights. This led him to a study of early Christian teaching. He drew the threads together in this summary of the state of the late Roman Empire.

This lifestyle was unsustainable. When resources can be consumed without having to labour for them, the biological boundaries to limitless desires (labour power) are removed. Avarice prevails. And so, the land owners seized more of the peasants’ land, to accumulate and consume yet more rents. Peasants were driven into the towns. The discontent of the unemployed was assuaged with “bread and circuses”. The deterioration in the minds and morals of the population set the course for the implosion of a civilisation. Without a free peasantry that could stock the army, the Caesars had to rely on mercenaries recruited from the barbarian margins of the empire. Those barbarians would one day use their swords to take over the seats of power.

It was in the self-interest of the land owners to reverse the decline of their society, but this required reform of the tenure-and-tax system. They were not willing to heed the warnings of the bishops.

The leadership of Rome lapsed into a state of trauma (see Ch.5). Once the city’s culture had been corrupted by the privatisation of rent – the social revenue – all classes lost sight of the natural laws on which a viable community relies for survival and growth. The patricians gorged themselves on the rents and could not – would not – yield their power for the sake of national survival. The dispossessed lost the capacity to reclaim their natural right to share the rents which they helped to create. The end became inevitable.

The Covenant

The tablets which Moses brought down from the mountain were inscribed with the terms of the land deal. The children of Abraham were required to conform to a moral code. But the Old Testament was more than just about morality. It was a manual on how to construct a stable community. It provided a comprehensive sociological and psychological account of what happens when people fail to treat their common wealth in ways that work with the grain of social evolution. A synoptic treatment of that manual has been provided by Walter Brueggemann, a Professor of Old Testament at an American seminary.

God as the voice of the landless assumed the mission to restore order. His wrath was directed at kings who managed the land for selfish reasons. The kings referred to in the Bible were those who presided over Israel and so had responsibility for the land.⁷ Kings who mis-manage land are a disaster. By hoarding the economic surplus, they amass the means of coercion (horse-mounted troops), they lavished silver and gold on themselves and their homes, and turned people into serfs. That form of governance leads to landlessness.

To comply with the moral code, vigilance is necessary. Otherwise, there is landlessness. Solomon’s abuse of power illustrates the way in which morality and culture are appropriated by those who abuse their positions of authority. Solomon enforced bondservice on people and created a bureaucratic state organised into tax districts. Monumental buildings were constructed to celebrate his greatness.

The rules for judging kings are set out, as in Deuteronomy (17:16-20). Kings did not have the right to rule as they saw fit, because God’s care for the land was inalienable. In his discussion on “the royal road to exile”, Brueggemann stresses that God holds the trump card. “No amount of royal finesse can change that. It is still covenant word and not royal hardware which governs land.”⁹

Brueggemann summarises the ethic of possession in these terms: “Land is not, if viewed as gift, for self-security but for the brother and sister. Land is not given to the calculating, but to the ‘meek,’ that is, to the ones who do not presume”.¹⁰ But if the meek are not vigilant, landlessness follows.

Landlessness is portrayed with the imagery of wilderness – a formless void. Displacement “in that time and our time, is experienced like the empty dread of primordial chaos”. Landlessness is “to be at the disposal of an environment totally without life supports and without any visible hint that there is an opening to the future”.¹¹ To be landless is to be locked in a state of trauma, endured “as a place of murmur, protest, quarrelsome, dissatisfaction”.¹²

When God gifts land, order is restored. Food, and the minerals needed to construct urban settlements, are available, but more besides. There is a restoration of psychological health. Brueggemann notes that “The change is to be understood not simply in terms of geographic placement but in terms of an alternative consciousness in which sociological and cultural possibilities were transformed”.¹⁴

Breaching the Covenant

Modern societies do not comply with the terms of the covenant. The Cain and Abel tragedy is ever present. So once again, their story becomes a point of departure for the re-examination of conflicts over the possession of land.

• The State of Israel believes that land in the Negev region could be put to better use by displacing the Bedouin who have occupied that territory for thousands of years.

• Islamic fundamentalists, disputing over their territories, invoke Allah as they strap explosives to their bodies to blow up innocent people in market places.

• Christians have their share of blood on their hands. We shall see from the cases discussed in this volume that European societies led the modern world into a surreal space between God and mammon.

Money is made out of causing mass poverty. Money is made by abusing the environment. Money is made through the propagation of instability in the economy. The financial interests which gain from this are mobilised to prevent change.¹⁵ They expect their privileges to remain sacrosanct, whatever the cost to others, protected by multi-layered stockades. Do these barricades to justice inhibit us from even thinking about the root causes of the world’s great problems? We need a route map back to terra ferma. To this end, we will examine the evidence to test this hypothesis:

Did the rent-seekers skew language to invert reality? The word capitalism, for example, is at the heart of confusion in the public discourse. The meaning attributed to it seriously mis-describes the West’s economy. Rent-seekers had good reasons to distract the population at large. But what about Karl Marx?

Marx fathered the most influential of dissenting doctrines. According to his account, modern pathologies were inevitable, inscribed in history. That thesis, however, also gave hope. Feudalism would be overthrown by capitalism, which would be overthrown by socialism to lead us to a new Promised Land. While such ideologies pre-occupy the young in universities, the villains roam free.

Marx’s demonisation of capitalism contributed to the deepening of the crises that we now face, by obscuring root causes. But Marx was not alone in misdirecting attention. Sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920), in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), characterised capitalism as the product of technology and the logic of bureaucracy. Awkwardly, the repeated booms and grievous busts that contradict the rationality emphasised by Weber also failed to authenticate his argument that capitalism was built on the prudence of the Protestant ethic.

Who benefits from the confusion? The impact of mangled language is displayed in economic policy, and the persistent failure to define remedies to the financial crises that exploded in the depression of the late 19^th century, the depression of the 1930s and, once again, in the depression of the 2010s. ^st¹⁶