Greed: Gut Feelings, Growth, and History

This lively new book is a wide-ranging inquiry into how greed works in our lives and in the world at large. Western philosophy has intellectualized human passions, explaining and justifying our expansive desires as ‘rational self-interest’. However, an examination of the visceral power of greed tells us something about the apathy of modern theory. It shows us how confused we have become about the meanings of growth, creating false and morally hazardous distinctions between biology on the one hand, and history on the other. With greed as a guide, this book considers how the integrity of these meanings may be restored.

This remarkable book will be of interest to anyone concerned about the morality of economic behavior in the modern world. It will be an important text for students in the social sciences, especially in
anthropology, sociology, development studies, and business studies.

“Greed” is an insult which strikes right to the gut. The overstuffed child or the overcompensated executive may beg for kinder words, but there it is in the parental scorn or the banner headlines. Greedy! The word doesn’t fuss around the head or the heart, it jabs just below the navel. It sounds angry, taunting, emetic. It cuts back at the fancy talk of the self-fixated, the rich and powerful. It is a nice little weapon of the weak. Greed is a tell-tale, pointing to the presence of our bodies and our guts in contexts where we would prefer to ignore them or deny their relevance. For centuries, we have been trying to find nicer ways of talking about greed, but our best efforts (“self-interest”, “egoism”) look puny and apologetic. Western scholars have gone to great lengths to refine our minds and take them out of our bodies, and as a result our accounts of “Economy,” or “History,” or “Culture” have become lifeless and apathetic. Worse, we have created the lethal illu-sion that modern institutions like banks, businesses, or governments have transcended human passions, and can thus absolve us from blame.

This book takes popular understandings of greed as a guide for putting feeling back into our scholarly explanations. Greed monitors the relationship between desires and growth, measuring our expansive urges against our living bodies. Ordinary people know that greed is as much a gut feeling as an idea, but can we, as scholars, learn anything from this common-sense perception? Greed looms large in modern life. The word pops up in all forms of communication – novels, movies, cartoons, graffiti, political and religious rhetoric, and casual conversation. Greed is a favorite topic of satirists and cartoonists. It has inspired a surprising amount of poetry, and quite a few popular songs.1 We see evidence of greed everywhere in our consumer societies: in lottery frenzy, day-trading, and Pokémon fever, in the hedonistic advertising which envelops our daily lives, in kickbacks to public officials, in excessive damage claims in the lawcourts, and in exorbitant fees collected by the lawyers. The word appears frequently both in religious tracts and in criticism of television evangelists. The idea that more is better is not simply futile because it keeps satisfaction out of reach, it is disgusting and it is unfair. The so-called “wealth effect” rebukes the new super-rich at the turn of the millennium: excess breeds excess; the more you get, the more you want. The urge to accumulate and consume is at best a guilty pleasure, and today the anxiety it generates is painfully evident in the fences, locks, guards, and alarms which draw the lines between the extravagance of the wealthy and the relentlessly expanding misery of the poor. Are we greedy because we are modern, or are we modern because we are greedy? The notion that it is something new in human history at least offers us some hope of redemption. Perhaps we imagine that if we could revert to our older, simpler selves, the future of our children and our planet would be more secure. But do we really have a sweeter, more generous nature to which we can return? The alternative proposition, that we are modern because we are greedy, may seem less naive but it is certainly more disheartening. There is now so much more of everything for greed to get its beastly teeth into, and so much less in the way of moral restraint. But if we are all greedy at heart, how can we save ourselves? “Greed, gluttony and over-indulgence” purrs an advertisement for diet crackers. “Like Ryvita, they’re totally natural.”2 A sampling of the 63,000 Web pages on “greed” selected by the search engine Alta Vista in March 2000 indicates that it is generally regarded as a force deeply rooted in our constitution as human animals. Its effect is to make people “want more than they need.” If greediness is built into every body everywhere, the moral issue is whether and how we can contain these urges. This is the age-old war between the beastly passions of the individual and the moral constraints of society. As an urge to take for oneself rather than to give or to share, greed is contrasted with generosity. Abstention or self-denial are ways of recognizing its boundaries. Yet there is ambivalence: although greed may eventually destroy us all, without it we would probably not have progressed beyond pond scum. “We need greed,” says Tony Hendra. “Greed makes the world go round. Greed drives history. The greedy fish wriggled up onto shore, looking for more, and its greedy spawn grew feet and arms and waddled about looking greedily for food, becoming in the fullness of time Rush Limbaugh . . .”