The Vicar's Monthly Letter
Dear Reader,
“Money makes the world go round,
the world go round, the world go round.
Money makes the world go round,
it makes the world go round.
Money, money, money, money,
money, money, money, money,
makes the world go round!”
....or so the song goes.
At least one person who probably wouldn’t agree with that sentiment though is Dr Toby Ord, whose story appeared in the newspapers (and news programmes) as few months ago. Dr Ord is a young university academic whose subject is ethics. He felt that he ought to put his money where his mouth is, so to speak, and to try to live by the ethics he taught in his classes.
He said that he had been thinking for a while about how he could make a difference in the world. He predicted that in the course of his career, he could expect to earn a about £1.5 million in total and decided that he could afford to donate about £1 million of that to charities to alleviate poverty in the developing world – especially those fighting tropical diseases.
“I was living very happily as a student” he said, “and worked out what I’d need to continue living like that through my life – or a little better, to allow some room for improvement – and then I worked out how much I could do with the amount left over. I could save thousands of people’s lives.”
His intention is to give 10% of his salary plus an annual earnings about £20 000 (presumably adjusted for inflation!) for the rest of his career, and he has launched a society, “Giving What We Can” to encourage others to do likewise (or at least to give at least 10% of their income).
Dr Ord added that he was happy with his life and did not mind missing out on material wealth in the future. He had a “wonderful wife”, enjoyed reading books, seeing places and spending time with people. “I’ve got all of that” he said, “and I’ll just miss out on these various extras of having a bigger house or something like that. But that doesn’t really bother me”.
I don’t know whether you feel inspired or annoyed by his example? There were a mix of responses from those who posted comments on the BBC news website, from those who praised his generosity to those who said things like, “He can give some to me then” and “It’s OK if you can afford it!”
The last comment is certainly understandable from those who struggle to make ends meet, and there are likely to be more of those in the near future as unemployment rises, Governments cuts increase and the recession bites. However, I wonder whether those who sent in these comments really fit into that category. Very often it’s the poorest people, the “have-nots”, who are the most generous and the “have’s” who can only think about how they can get more.
It could be argued that one of the reasons why we’re in the economic mess that we find ourselves in here in this country and many other parts of the world at the moment is because we’ve prized money and material possessions too highly, wanted more and more, and spent beyond our means. And yet, although the last decade prior to the current crisis saw the majority of people becoming better off, it also saw the gap between the rich and the poor becoming much, much wider – within the UK as well as compared to other parts of the world – so it’s not the case that everyone benefitted from the money that was (or seemed to be) around during the “boom” years.
It is also a concern that as things get leaner in the next few years and services are cut, it will again be the poorer people in society that struggle the most, so whatever can be done to inspire people acts of generosity and to think of others and not just themselves, will surely be welcome.
One of the ethical questions that Dr Ord’s example addresses (and which he no doubt explores in his lectures and research), is indeed whether money really does “make the world go round”. On the one hand you could argue that “Yes, it does”. After all, even Dr Ord needs money to provide for his basic standard of living and to give to charity to help others. But on the other hand, it’s his ability to recognise that money doesn’t buy happiness and that he can enjoy most of the things that are important to him in life with the equivalent of an average (UK) wage, that frees him from the desire to want more and more things and enables him to be generous in his attitude to others.
It was the power of money to corrupt and to encourage selfishness in people that St Paul was attacking when he said that “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Timothy 6 verse 10) rather than the use of money itself.
I was also interested to read of two examples of the strange power that money can have over our attitudes. One was of a childcare centre in Israel. Frustrated by parents arriving late to pick up their children, they started imposing fines, only to find that the parents turned up even later than before. It seemed that their attitude was that if they were paying for a service (the staff staying on late to look after latecomers children) then they had a right to be late.
The other was of an attempt to encourage more people to give blood by providing financial incentives for donors, which actually resulted in fewer people coming forward. Again it seemed that once blood was being bought and sold as a commodity, people lost their sense of moral and civic obligation to help others in this way.
Both these examples were referred to by another academic, Professor Sandel in which his main theme was to call for a new politics of the “common good”, less oriented to the pursuit of individual self-interest than we perhaps have been. He argues that we’re not only a market economy, but have become a market society in which values are determined according to financial considerations rather than moral or spiritual ones.
Put more simply, it sounds like the old criticism that people can become those who “know the price of everything but the value of nothing”.
What do you value most in life and does the way you live truly reflect that?
Yours,
John
A PRAYER
O God, giver of all good gifts,
Help us to remember that Jesus said,
“It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
And put into our hearts that love
which knows that true happiness
comes from making others happy,
and true wealth from sharing what we have.
Amen.