Adam Smith and St. Francis - Justice and What Bothers Us

In his "Theory of Moral Sentiments," Adam Smith offers us a picture of our motivations for justice--

"Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity."

The benevolent "man of humanity" would "express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people" and "make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of life."

But, after all these musings, life would return to normal, Smith suggests. "And when all this fine philosophy was over,  when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquility, as if no such accident had happened."

Then, Smith then imagines how we react to much smaller difficulties in our lives. "The most frivilous disaster which could befal himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own."

Smith is not far off. How often have we seen Christians more excised over the minor slights and inconveniences done them than they are about the great violence and injustices against the poor, the vulnerable and excluded minorities? We tolerate and excuse the big banks that very nearly collapsed the world's economy back in 2008, bringing none of their chief executives to account. But, we demand that the poor keep to every dot and tittle of the law, sometimes at the price of their lives, as Ferguson, MO., teaches us recently.

St. Francis saw this insane logic in his own day. He created a new enterprise that turned motivations upside down. He asked that his followers take on the perspective of the poor, the vulnerable and the excluded before they claimed their own rights. It was his theology of dispossession that opened up a new ethical space for the engagement of the politics of his time. Revenge and vendetta were the order of his day, where people were consumed (as Smith later suggests) by their own "frivolous disasters" more than with the really dreadful calamities of the world. Francis knew that the only way to release us from our self interests would be by a strategy of dispossession that took us each and every time by vow to the "lowest point"/ the marginal side of things. And it is from that liminal place that we would see clearly the whole grand scheme of things, a justice more freed from our self interested needs and biases.

Francis provides a dynamic that Smith did not pursue but which could have more securely anchored his economics.