Greed...

Why we want more, more, more all the time

By John Blake

ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

Tuesday, July 30, 2002

Greed is good. Not anymore.

Greed, one of the seven deadly sins, is out of fashion. After a sickening string of corporate scandals, many Americans have concluded that the rich are indeed not like us -- they're shamelessly greedy.

Even Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan rebuked the U.S. business community. Testifying before the Senate Banking Committee, Greenspan declared that "an infectious greed" had gripped the corporate community.

But the virus that has spread through corporate America has long infected ordinary society, scholars and religious leaders say. Greed is a social norm -- and we are closer to WorldCom's cuff-linked executives than we would like to be.

"We live in a culture that cultivates us all to be addicts, not to illegal drugs, but to experiences, products or one another," says Rodney Clapp, author of "Border Crossings: Christian Trespasses on Popular Culture and Public Affairs." "We're never supposed to have enough."

Clapp says this greed manifests itself far beyond Wall Street.

It shapes the calendar, which is defined not so much by holy days as by a string of commercially hyped holidays.

It infiltrates the ballpark when millionaire baseball players haggle with millionaire owners over their contracts.

It fueled the dizzying boom and bust of the dot-com era.

It blots the physical and cyber landscape with a steady barrage of e-mail spam, billboards and mailboxes stuffed with get-rich schemes.

Greed greases the engine of our economic system, says Elizabeth Bounds, an ethics professor at Emory University.

"Our economy is based on consumerism, and consumerism fosters greed," she says. "What the economy wants us to do is buy more Nike."

Greed defined

Webster's defines greed as "an overwhelming desire to acquire or have, as wealth or power, in excess of what one requires or deserves."

Cornelius Plantinga, author of "Not the Way It's Supposed to Be," describes greedy people as those who find their security in money, not in God.

"You find people thinking of money as their piece of the rock or talking about certain investment instruments that are called securities," he says. "For Christians, that's a grave danger to think that our real comfort is something other than God himself."

All major religions condemn greed. Islam, for example, commands all of its believers to practice charity, one of the faith's five pillars. The Quran says that "if your neighbor is hungry, you should not go to sleep unless your neighbor is fed." The warning against greed is also found in Judaism. One of the Ten Commandments is "Thou shalt not covet."

Greed can be good if it is channeled honorably, says Randy Cohen, a syndicated columnist who writes about ethics and is the author of "The Good, the Bad & the Difference: How to Tell Right from Wrong in Everyday Situations."

"One person's greed is another person's ambition. If it drives you to work real hard and invest yourself in a lifesaving serum that brings life to thousands, we will all applaud you and your house on the hill," Cohen says.

Greed was necessary for our ancestors' survivors, he says. When humans lived as hunters and gatherers, people developed a craving for fats and sweets because they were scarce. If people were lucky enough to find them, they were programmed to stuff themselves.

"But when you live in a world where there's a lot of stuff, it's no longer healthy," Cohen says.

The need for greed

The craving for stuff fuels greed. But Clapp, who wrote about the Christian response to greed in an essay, "Why the Devil Takes Visa," says there was once a time when more social stigma was attached to having too much stuff.

The church, for example, once considered making money with money a sin. Until the Reformation, the church banned the charging of interest, Clapp says. "Business is in itself an evil," Augustine declared.

Clapp says that in 1635, a Boston merchant was hauled before the court and charged by the elders of his Puritan church with defaming God's name. His crime? He had sold his wares at 6 percent profit, 2 percent above the maximum allowed by law.

The emphasis on thrift persisted into the 20th century, Clapp says. But as the Industrial Revolution gained momentum, manufacturers realized they had to pump up consumption to avoid surpluses. And to accomplish that, they would have to teach people to move away from habits of thrift, Clapp says.

Modern advertising was born. That's when companies began introducing credit buying, inventing brand names and company mascots. They learned not just to cater to preexisting needs but to create new needs, Clapp says, a trend thoroughly embraced today.

Clapp calls it the "deification of dissatisfaction."

"What advertising is about is letting us know that we have a need that we were formerly unaware of," he says.

You really need that?

This artificially induced need fuels greed. And greed worms through people's lives in all sorts of insidious ways.

Plantinga says it corrupts the judicial system when judge and juries are bribed. It corrupts families when greedy children, screaming for toys, turn into greedy adults waiting for parents to die so they can inherit the wealth. It drives the drug trade.

"In places where greed has taken hold, it tends to mess up everything it touches," Plantinga says.

He says he knows rich people who are not greedy. They aren't preoccupied with amassing wealth, live below their means and give much of their money away.

And then there are greedy poor people. They're constantly preoccupied with getting more than they need, Plantinga says.

"The lines at the lottery store are longer in the poor neighborhoods than any other," he says.

If one doesn't loosen greed's grip, disaster follows -- a hearing before a Senate subcommittee, jail or on a mundane level, a life of constant grasping followed by emptiness.

"It's true of all of us," Clapp says. "All we have to do is have one itch scratched in order to find another. One of the things we know about human nature is that we can always want more.