Augustine argued that for one to be virtuous, his/her loves must be rightly ordered. That is, one must not only love the right things, but in the correct order. One may love (desire) good food, but if one loves it more than one’s children it becomes a vice. One may love one’s children, but to love one’s children more than God it becomes a vice.
Christians affirm a doctrine of Original Sin. Humans are born into a condition of sin, including wrongly ordered loves, and only a life united to God can begin to heal this situation.
It appears to me that our economic system currently seeks both to efficiently meet our loves (desires) regardless of their right ordering. And it marketing arm of our economy seeks to increase our desires in ways that consistently lead to their wrong ordering. Companies are happy to have you be obsessive about their products.
This leads me to several conclusions:
First, we must not place our hope in Capitalism to solve the deep social and spiritual problems of our nation. It promises no such thing. In fact, we ought not be surprised if it actually is an efficient means of bringing greater fragmentation and brokenness to fruition. It efficiently meets our desires, even if those desires ultimately lead to shattered lives.
Second, we ought to be very suspicious of groups which seek to re-order our desires based on their financial profit. If a virtuous life is a life of rightly ordered loves, we ought to be thoughtful and protective of who influences the order of our loves. Marketing is concerned to increase our desires so that they may find profit, not so we may live a moral life.
Augustine’s concept of ‘original sin’ in this context is intriguing. In many ways it is Augustine’s idea that becomes part of the Church dogma, and gets transmitted to modern social systems like capitalism. Max Weber talks about original sin as a response to the early ‘disorganized’ labor systems that had no effective work ethic. He openly espoused a system based on guilt instead: employees would feel guilty to their employers, employers would feel guilty to the government, and the government would feel guilty about everything. Of course this is all beneath the surface in his writing, but just barely. Many commentators have pointed out that Rousseau’s ‘social contract’ is also a reworking of original sin. What binds the people and their rulers in the mutual deal is a deep and profound sense that we are all flawed and only an immersion in sociality can save us and alter our collective ‘fate.’
I am not saying that social responsibility is unsound. Quite the opposite. Rather today the challenge is to see how the system fails to live up to its classical roots, how global capital has morphed into a strange substance that stands in for everything and nothing. And how that makes slippery arguments, like the distinction between immoral and amoral behavior, so popular with the likes of Warren Buffet and George Soros, both seductive and self-annihilating.
Augustine argued that for one to be virtuous, his/her loves must be rightly ordered. That is, one must not only love the right things, but in the correct order. One may love (desire) good food, but if one loves it more than one’s children it becomes a vice. One may love one’s children, but to love one’s children more than God it becomes a vice.
Can you reference this concept in Augustine’s work? I’m doing research on this topic and I’m hoping to have some primary sources for it.