Greed is one more
contribution in the Oxford lecture and book series on The Seven Deadly Sins,
a series in which scholars and writers map out popular understandings of human
"evils," exploring the conceptual and practical challenges posed to
spirituality, ethics and the good human life by each of the "deadly
seven."

Phyllis A. Tickle, renowned author,
public personality, and religion editor for Publishers Weekly,
approaches the knotty question of greed and other sins as a fundamentally
religious question. Tickle is convinced that religion configures all people’s
worldviews, even where, according to Tickle’s novel interpretation, the
"religion" is secularism. Tickle images religion as a rope, a
"good and anchoring cable," that renders meaning to a people’s
lifeworld. The rope is composed of three "strands"–spirituality,
corporeality, and morality. The inner strands, explains Tickle, are bound by
the "shared imagination" of the group and protected within an
exterior "sheath" of socio-religious narrative or "story"
(1-2).

Over time, explains Tickle,
historical events rupture the shared imagination and a meaning crisis emerges
that can cause an unraveling of the intricate cords of meaning that hold the
lifeworld in place. At such moments of meaning-crisis, explains Tickle, people
are compelled to take up their meaning systems, otherwise taken for granted and
assumed to be absolute "truth." They must peel away the
stories, reconsider the cable, take up the individual strands, and re-examine
the threads of meaning anew. They must challenge the "truths" of
their world before they may again tuck the strands neatly within their sheath
and return to their comfortably meaningful worlds.

On the basis of this metaphor,
Tickle takes up in turn each of the strands of the religion "rope" as
it exists for the Western consciousness, and especially for American society.
She sees the problem of spirituality resolved in the new secular world of the
West during the past several decades by the introduction and popular acceptance
of alternative forms of spirituality offered by science and a popularized
Buddhism. The second strand of religion’s anchoring cable, the strand of
corporeality, Tickle sees resolved, over the period from the Reformation
through the last century, as "overt and institutionalized" evidences
of religion came to be reformulated and the limits of authority, political
jurisdiction, and the realms of state and church power rearticulated.

The one strand that Tickle
understands to pose the thorniest of problems for the West and the farthest
from resolution is that of morality. "We have not even shaped the subset
of particulars that will become the questions of our next quarter
century," laments Tickle (16). There exits as yet no "shared
imaginary," no prior theoretical framework for conceptualizing morality.
Disentangling the threads of this knotted strand of lifeworld meaning is
crucial, claims Tickle, because morality governs conduct in private and public
spheres of life, and establishes appropriate behaviors of individual and
corporate entities. The very survival of civilization, claims Tickle, demands
the resolution of the problem of morality in the Western lifeworld.

Historically, explains Tickle,
greed has been understood as the deepest and most fundamental of vices.
"Indeed greed, by any name [and it has many–miserliness, envy,
covetousness, avidity], is the mother and matrix, root and consort, of all the
other sins," comments Tickle on historical conceptualizations of the vice
(15). Greed motivates theft, and theft is the common thread in all of the
prohibitions that form the core of social codes and populate the Ten
Commandments. For Tickle, however, greed is not a simple entity that unfolds
into negative forms. Instead, greed is the negative articulation born of a
natural human motivation that, when rightly directly is life-affirming. Herein
lies the conundrum of human existence: that the same taunting inner forces that
result in vice can as easily be expressed as virtues that can motivate the
well-being of the species.

For Tickle, all human drives are
Janus-faced realities. The "inner companions" or impulses that
motivate the human animal to action drive in two opposed directions. The seven
"deadlies" share a "chameleon-like quality to change from virtue
into vice and back again in the wink of an eye" (12). The inner forces
that hold life in place are instruments of tension that swing between courage
and cowardice, faith and treachery, humility and pride.

Since the Second World War and the
Holocaust, the truths of the Western lifeworld have been unraveling. People
have been compelled to take up the rope of their secularized religion, to
reconsider the triple aspects of their social imaginary, and to redefine the
moral meanings that hold in place their lifeworld. Greed presents a special
problem for all people, claims Tickle, since theft, the handmaiden of greed,
poses the greatest moral challenge to any lifeworld. But greed is a special
challenge to the Western world because greed is peculiarly evoked and
emblazoned by Western materialistic culture. It is crucial, warns Tickle, that
we get this inner companion right, and chart a careful course toward its alter
ego, the virtue of generosity or compassion. However, Westerners have developed
a morally-dangerous expertise at redefining the human drive to accumulate goods

A new self-conscious and self-congratulatory
greed is practiced in the West and emanates across the globe in new criminal
forms–global corporate corruption, the neocolonial rape of the third world,
and the imperialistic slaughter and occupation of foreign nations. The new
greed issues in new perceptible effects–in the daily starvation of tens of
thousands of children, in the bloodying of distant battlefields, and in the
amassing of corpses of innocent victims the world over.  The appeal of Tickle’s
small book on greed is her illumination of the fall from Western moral
awareness of the "vice" most deserving of "hellfire"
through its redefinition in Western minds as a mere infrequent
"blotch" on the common good of humanity. New catchy phrases, like laissez-faire,
the social contract, immanent domain, the wealth of nations, free trade, and
industriousness enable the vice most crippling to human societies to thrive,
mostly undetected, unrepressed and indeed uncondemned in the Western world.

Tickle’s little book offers a
compelling meditation on an old vice, with a novel approach to an old moral
problem. The brilliance of her work on greed, however, is located in her
abandonment of arid truism and abstract conceptualization in favor of a focused
critique of modern greed. She illuminates the injustices that saturate the
world when the ability of its greatest power(s) redefine, in new seductive
terms that purify, euphemize and even celebrate, their own unfettered vices.

© 2005 Wendy
Hamblet

Wendy C.
Hamblet, Ph.D., Philosophy Department, Adelphi
University, New
York, author of The Sacred Monstrous: A
Reflection on Violence in Human Communities (Lexington Books, 2003).

Categories: Philosophical, Ethics