The problem of the world is that it doesn’t cultivate righteousness. Modern society is, as I laid out last week, hostile to God, hostile therefore to healthy relationships between men. This isn’t unusual, historically, but it still means we need some answers for what we are to do.

Read Part One.

We cannot simply wind back the clock. For one, if we did, we’d simply be reinstating the issues that got us here in the first place. The past had some things better, it is true, but it was not utopia in the slightest. The destruction of America’s public morals was sown in the incipient secularism, the statist utopianism, the educational idolatry, the abandonment of rigorous doctrine’s link to common joy and righteous diligence, the life of the 18^th and 19^th centuries; the seeds which broke the West were already planted in medieval Europe, in the hearts of the Reformers, in the things they built or which were built alongside them. Bunyan, Locke, Milton, and Thomas Hobbes all saw the same English Civil War.

For another, God does not call us to destroy the good which comes with the bad. Technology has brought much evil to the world, yes, but technology itself is a wonder of human fruitfulness, a part of fulfilling the dominion mandate of Genesis 1:28. The problem is how man has used that technology, how the church has failed to come to terms with its full result, how men at once idolize and minimize it, calling it the savior of the world and pretending it won’t have side-effects. Men get technology and they implement it with glee; then, because men are sinful, they find (are on occasion glad to find) that they have strengthened or planted sin by how they incorporated technology into their lives.

The cotton gin was a wonderful bit of ingenuity, and it helped prop up southern slavery for decades longer than it previously would have lasted. Partly as a result of this, the south underwent chastisement at the hands of another system, one which had implemented its technology not to keep the sin of chattel slavery alive but to incorporate man into new and exciting forms of debt slavery, of societal fragmenting, of machine-without-man. That was a war with much sin on both sides (and, I must add, an amount of Christianity truly remarkable in the annals of war. The Civil War even in its more ugly locales was more pleasant than what many nations in history would regard as standard). Technology, wrongly used, causes much suffering, but this means not that we should destroy it but that we should use it rightly.

The characteristic of modern solutions to this problem is the positing of a single principle from which is derived an in-depth plan for all parts of society. An answer is not an answer, it seems, unless it know precisely how the roads are to be funded and maintained, what the process of schooling is to be in each individual case, and all the rest. This is suitable, of course, to totalitarian systems, whether communist, fascist,¹ or pseudo-democratic (the American-British system of a ‘representative democracy’ largely peopled by a distinct political class and in coordination with an administrative state unresponsive to the people’s desires, as well as a judiciary peopled by a particular set of totalitarian viewpoints). They intend this regardless.

The problem, however, is that no single person can comprehend the whole of the world’s processes, nor can any given set of theorists. Ten people, a hundred, more, and you’ve still got the same problem. There’s only so much you can know, only so much you can be enough of an expert in to propose an actually workable system, let alone an ideal one. I know quite a bit about theology, a fair amount about politics-law-geopolitics, an extensive smattering of history, and an abnormal amount on a fair few other things (we all know an abnormally large amount about something, if we know much about anything²). I’d be a fool to say this qualifies me to design an entire world’s economic system, even if I know enough about economics and theology to give some very good advice on the topic.

Even if one person could know enough about one topic to design its perfect system in isolation, such systems are never in isolation. Medicine deals with the side-effects of industry with the results of mom-blog fads with the proclivities of a single grandmother in the 1900s with the clothing industry. More universally, every single part of the economy is in contact, close contact, with the operations of the families to which its participants belong. How it affects those families and their interrelations cannot be perfectly systematized without completely taking over the operation of the family- which is outside the right of any man to do, that being God’s concern (Ex. 3:15).

I say all this, but we do have a single principle on which to build the entirety of the system: “Do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Mic. 6:8). The difference is in how we apply this principle. It is, after all, an overarching principle, one whose full depth is the fullness of Scripture and Scripture’s meaning. It calls us to do ‘justice,’ and justice must be defined by His law in His word, the Bible. It can produce a ‘system’ of perfection, if we could apply it perfectly; it lacks the asymmetry to reality which dooms any attempt of man’s systems to effective universality.

The way we apply His law, however, has never been in the manner libertarianism, communism, and similar ideologies (to use Oakeshott’s definition of ‘ideology, for today) apply their central principle. I do not look at my life and meticulously plot out how every part will work, what is righteousness for each possible situation and element. To do so too often verges into being “anxious about tomorrow,” in the words of Christ’s admonition in Matthew 6:34. No, I learn and internalize Scripture, like the psalmist who wrote Psalm 119:11 if with less insight as yet, make Scripture’s structure and instruction the essence of my moral assessment; then, by the grace of God, I seek to honor God in each particular. Matthew 6 puts it in plain language: “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble” (Matt. 6:33-34).

In economics, then, the proper course is what I term ‘emergent economics.’ Rather than seeking to produce a system of perfection for all parts of the economy and then impose it, we should start from the bottom up. Am I a doctor? Then I should seek a business model which honors God and aids me to honor God (I have a good example here). Am I a lawyer? Then I should seek a business model which does the same, which aids me in promoting righteousness. Am I a roadworker? The same responsibility applies, even if by ‘business model’ I mean when I work and who I work for.

These subsystems will grind up against each other, of course, and against super-systems, against the patterns of society, against family structures, against cultural norms. Here, once again, the call is simple in principle, immense in application: honor God. We should work each in our paths, where God gives us insight, to create paths in which we honor Him and which make it easier to honor Him, which promote virtue and punish vice. If we have influence in any system, our pressure should be towards honoring God in the ways we are able to pressure.

In government, then, this model of economics calls not for the production of a master plan but for each part of the government’s action to be interrogated, first in itself, second in relation to the rest. Does it reward virtue (Romans 13:1-5)? Does it punish vice (ditto)? Does it acknowledge God? How does it affect this other system, its virtue and its vice, its efficiency in doing good, its corruptibility? To some men, these questions are given to ask and answer with more power- the ruler and officer- and to some with less (but still real) power- the voter, in the American system, the citizen in other systems.

That modern society breaks relationships is not to be solved by a careful, top-down systematization. We cannot simply appeal to the magic of a free market, without regard for culture (though, within its proper realm, the free market is an emergent system, a method of relinquishing planning into the hands of the populace. It’s just not proper as a whole-society system, man not being entirely commerce). We can’t give the government the job of fixing this. Does modern society break relationship? Then we must work to sanctify each part of our lives, including our specific relationships, and in this work the society will be inexorably altered towards promoting healthy relationship. Sometimes certain problems (like the influence of cars on the scattering of social relationships) will require men to come up with plans, with wholesale alterations- but these too are small parts of the system to be sanctified, even if the pattern of doing so is less mundane.

‘Emergent economics’ refers to a system of developing a system. It posits that man is too small to dictate how the world ought to be run as a whole- but that he is given the responsibility to make his part of the world run more and more towards Him, to use his part of the world to aid others in righteousness. Through the labor of Christians working across the world in their various fields, the world can be sanctified. In this process, men learn from each other, whether within the same genre of system- doctor to doctor, construction worker to construction worker, congressman to congressman- or cross-genre (doctor from lawyer from construction worker from pastor from mother from…). Always the principle is to honor God.

The resultant systems will be imperfect. They will start out broken and be broken in the end. They will mesh imperfectly with each other; they will have unexpected results. However, by the grace of God, the world moves towards holiness. A better way of honoring Him in medicine is a blessing to many; that a still better way is later found should be seen as further blessing, not condemnation of the method. In this world, the economy and all the world will never be perfect; sin will still intrude (1 John 1:10), with death as its companion (Rom. 6:23).

The last enemy to be defeated, however, is death (1 Cor. 15:26). What comfort we can take from this! Death will still be with us until He comes again, but by honoring Him in every small part of our lives we can build a whole which is ever more holy, ever more glorious. What blessing that will be! Give a hundred years, a thousand, and this work will produce a marvel of harmony and peace which we today can only anticipate, can only build a small part of the structure beneath, all upon the foundation of Christ who makes holy the world (John 3:16; Rom. 8:22). It will be no utopia- sin will still be there- but it will be a holiness and a beauty before God. Then comes the Second Coming of Christ, who is the death of death, and sin shall depart forevermore, that we may rejoice before Him. Until that day, though, we ought to be faithful- and essential to that faithfulness is the faithfulness of the small things, of our own lives, of the parts of the world which God has given us to take dominion over.

God bless.

Footnotes

1. See this article for more on the nature of communism and fascism. ↩︎
2. If we take a population in which everybody is an expert in one of five hundred topics, then every single person has an abnormal expertise, an expertise only one in five hundred have. Expand this to the thousands of areas of expertise- bread, cheese toast, politics, law, babies, fingernails, couches, sewing, sowing, and all the rest- and even if every person has fifteen areas of significant expertise, abnormal expertise is still the norm. ↩︎