The poor are morally superior
Investment and divestment as two means to acquire different assets
Recently, someone I know, from this portal, and elsewhere, asked me whether I knew anyone who was intentionally poor. I told him I did, and I named them.
If we take Jesus Christ at His word, as related in the Gospel according to St Mark, chapter 10, from verse 21, those who trust in riches have difficulty in entering the kingdom of heaven. He doesn’t preach this as a lesson, it is not a sermon or a discourse. He is asked directly by a rich young man how he can attain the kingdom of God. Jesus tells him to abide by the Ten Commandments, what you might call a stock answer. But the fellow is insistent: he has already done this since he was a boy. Is there not something else that he must do? That smacks, to me, of a sense of inadequacy on the part of the man himself. Humility, perhaps.
Now, in spiritual terms, that means the young man was already a huge distance down the road to realisation. His question was not asked flippantly or sarcastically. The guy wanted to know. He had much material wealth surrounding him, but now he sought to enrich his spirit, and he asked how. So Jesus hit him with it, right between the eyes.
Go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.
He later remarked to his own disciples:
How hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God! … It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
The last line is controversial. Jesus was not given to hypebole, but he did resort to analogy, what we call his parables (literally something thrown alongside something else). However, this is not parable, and seems almost facetious in tone, which Jesus is not otherwise known for being, for that implies a dismissive attitude. If the image is obvious in its impossibility, the reference to the eye of a needle is neverthelees problematic for scholars.
So, if you feel your eyes fuzzing over as you read that last sentence, don’t worry, that’s normal. Mine did at one time too. Everybody’s do. Jesus knew that the guy He’d told to sell his assets had a task before him of great magnitude, but, if he could surmount that hurdle, then He’d offered him help for the rest. The man would get that help once he’d divested, because divestment is the hardest part. There is no more difficult act in this world than the divestment of one’s goods and chattels out of an act of charity. If you think there is, then, please, tell me.
People’s possessions can be prized out of their grip with the prospects of enrichment. That is relatively easy. A promised return on investment. Yet, even in stock trading, the higher the return, the riskier the investment. On that logic, an investment that comprises solely divestment should be a gilt-bound guarantee. It isn’t quite that, but it’s very, very close, because when you invest in your spiritual future, what matters is less the amount you invest and far more the intent with which you divest. And what Jesus was saying to this enquirer was that He cannot instil in a rich man the intent to divest. If He did that, it would be tantamount to confiscation. The rich must divest themselves.
The problem is compounded by the intent that is displayed when investing: enrichment. Making money work. Rates of return. Floor prices and guarantees. Investing is where you learn to drive a car, and, once you have your licence, you’re only ever able to drive down one-way streets. You look in your rear-view mirror and you notice the signs that all point in the opposite direction, but you don’t know these signs. When traffic comes towards you, you panic. Not knowing which side of the road you need to be on, and how to measure your speed, so unfamilar are you with seeing a vehicle’s radiator grill. What was all so easy when everything went in the one direction becomes fraught with problems when it starts to become two-way. And divestment, intentional divestment, is that other direction. Stock market losses are simply a case of where you hit reverse gear. Divestment is turning the car around.
The first passage quoted above is prefaced by Jesus’ remark that the young man (we never know his name) lacks one thing. That must initially have buoyed him: a rich man who lacks one thing lacks nothing, for if he has accumulated such riches as he has, then anything he lacks must be easy. Then he hears the words. What he lacks is poverty as an asset. Poverty as an asset.
Religion generally does this: it turns the logic of this world onto its head. It does this with a regularity and consistency that invite two solid conclusions.
One is that no man could have reasonably waded through the entirety of the world’s religious texts and redrafted them convincingly to present this effect. That is to say, the effect emerges from the very nature of God Himself, and not from some putative manipulation by Mankind. The Hitler Diaries were exposed as a fake by analysis of the paper, ink and some of the terminology. But anyone who supposes that the entire Bible is a fake … well, it’s a pretty good one, is all I’ll say.
The second conclusion is that, wherever a text proclaims a truth that is manifest to all of secular Mankind, there is a grave possibility that it has been misrepresented or is indeed false. In Islam, the doctrine of tahrif points criticism at passages of the Holy Bible to denounce them as false.1 This is an intellectual battleground in which Christians and Jews are not short of taking up arms themselves, and levelling criticism at the Koran. To take a neutral example, the practice in pagan times of burying a chieftain along with his treasured possessions to serve him in the afterlife, and sacrificing his concubine on an altar for his physical needs, are allied so closely to how their life had been on Earth that it invites criticism as an erroneous belief. It is precisely the insubstantial character of spirituality that lends it truth. In this case, the message that poverty was an asset that the young man lacked came with another all-too-earthy truth: he became very sad. We know this because it is reported:
At this the man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth.
That was surely a positive sign. After all, imagine you were to approach a rich man in our times and tell him this. Would he not laugh at you? Mock you? Deride you? Even kill you, as a dangerous radical element? But in the case reported by Mark, the man’s face fell. Disappointment. And, if pride comes before a fall, then disappointment comes before a resolve.
The promise of heaven is a cast-iron guarantee. If you believe. But of what it is a guarantee is less certain. Heaven’s prospectus offers embellished detail that is likely the product of imagination. It’s poetic, and poetry is the one language form that Man has resorted to across the ages to express the ineffable.
However, the speculation of a monetary investment has nothing to show as promise either, except past performance, which, the careful will see noted in the small print, cannot be taken as a promise of future returns. People invest their money in stocks and bonds because they think they understand them (or do understand them), know how they function, have seen that others have become rich with them, and think that there isn’t much that can go wrong. But things do go wrong. I sometimes wonder at people who blithely invest in crypto. A currency whose practical uses are limited to purchasing illegal pornography and paying off extortion merchants who hold your data to ransom. I hear supermarkets accept it in Ecuador, but I rarely shop in Ecuador. Yet, there are vast investments in the currency, so some people understand it better than I do. Or are more risk prone than I am. Or simply have money to burn, because it has benefits in other quarters. Maybe, just maybe, it’s not even their money that they’re investing.
But all these investments are underpinned by the investor’s belief in the intended goal. And that is precisely the same intention that is needed to divest: an intention to achieve the goal. And the goal is to open your spirit to something you never thought you would ever believe in but whose irrefutable logic dawns on you like a blinding light of epiphany. Once that happens, the road becomes two-way, and the purpose of each direction becomes patent, and wholesome, and right. Just exactly who is benefited by a stock market investment that turns sour, I’m not sure. Value gets wiped off the market, as if with some gigantic chiffon rag. Well, the money was paid at some time to someone, wasn’t it? But if you sold your possessions, those which you don’t actually need, and gave the proceeds to the poor, and it turned out that there is no such place as heaven, would there still have been anything wrong in what you did?
God’s is a promise with no contract or signature, no proof, no conditions, just a promise. Contracts, on the other hand, are legally binding and enforceable through courts of law. Which is the more fair, do you think?
One final thing Jesus said to the young man, and He meant it. A sort of follow-up counselling. If the young man would do what he, and he alone could do, and change the whole way in which he viewed the world around him, from a collection of resources out of which enrichment and entitlement could be garnered, to a world of needs to which he was in a position to succour, Jesus would be there for him: follow me, He said.
The moral superiority of the poor stems from a simple function of poverty. It comprises a lack of resources, and those who lack material resources will compensate for that with spiritual resources, the one type that they have in abundance. That was the essence of Jesus’ recommendation to the rich man to sell his possessions.
“What?” you may well ask. “You surely achieve morality through a process of reasoning, and not a process of material denial?” There you would like to have a point. Those born into poverty may yearn for riches and may even seek to procure them, through endeavour, invention or simple theft. And he who thieves through desire, rather than necessity, is lacking in moral superiority, for in heaven it is less material riches that burden the soul than malevolent intention.
However, poverty and riches act as a moral barometer. Regardless of how much intention a poor man may have formulated to acquire the riches of others, the mere fact of his poverty is evidence of his not having put those intentions to work. He may want to steal but, until he does so, he yields more to the fact that it is a sin to do so. And the turpitude that attaches to theft is still present when a poor man indulges in the act. But it is less than when a rich man does so. If you want to argue the toss, all property is theft, because at some point some bright spark had to appropriate it to himself.
The rich man, on the other hand, whilst cloaking his acquisitions in constructed legality and title, using concepts like contracts and consent, thus cleverly avoiding the commandment not to steal, blithely overlooks the tenth of the commandments: that thou should not covet.
Coveting is wanting what you don’t need, and that fact alone is enough to confer moral superiority on the poor, who want what they do need. Just as a barometer changes with air pressure, so moral superiority is gained or lost through the divestment of riches and acquisition of poverty.