The Economic Decoding of Religious Dogmas

Ranking World Religions in Terms of Economic Consistency

Paul Fudulu

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787149663
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Institutions & Organizations

This book proves that each religious dogma, in any of their components, contain in an encoded manner a specific ranking of human comprehensive mega-objectives, implicitly, a specific preference for absolute wealth or, in a more common parlance, for the objective of economic performance. In turn, that specific preference, under ceteris paribus condition, determines the share of believer's general resources which is channeled to economic performance.An in-depth or correct understanding of a religious dogma, which makes sense for terrestrial social realities, is impossible without a specific model of decoding. Additionally, such a model is simply impossible within an orthodox Western, that is, non-transcultural perspective. There is no accident that all Western efforts to decode religions, economic or non-economic, have failed. Understanding religion based on its face story is very precarious, if not even dangerous.

1

THE MODEL

1.1. THE GENERAL POWER PERSPECTIVE

1.1.1. Weberian Rationalism¹ or the Rationalism of Absolute Wealth

If we accept that capitalism is an efficient institutional setting in terms of absolute wealth,² Weber’s idea that its adoption by Western countries is due to a special Western rationalism allows us to embark on the same present course of Western economic (but not only economic) theory: The objective, or the end, of absolute wealth or economic performance is the only megaobjective of all cultures or is a transcultural megaobjective and, consequently, the only possible way to learn something about why some countries are rich and most others have stayed poor for centuries is to look into the means of generating absolute wealth. Let me pinpoint the falsehood and difficulties of such a course by making special reference to Weber’s rationalism.

In brief, the logic of Weber’s idea of Western rationalism as a partial determinant of modern capitalism is that a certain type of religion — that is — Protestantism, especially English Puritanism as derived from Calvinism — is based on a type of rational behavior that favors formation of the capitalistic spirit and the type of economic system which has prevailed in Western countries in the modern age. This effect of Protestant rationalism on “modern capitalistic culture” or “what today is called progress” was unintended, derived from “purely religious characteristics,” and must be based on some biological or anthropological feature of Westerners (Weber, 1985, p. 30), because “we find again and again that, even in departments of life apparently mutually independent, certain types of rationalization have developed in the Occident, and only there” (Weber, 1985, p. 30).

With Weber, in order for economic rationalism be adopted successfully, individuals have to have “the ability and disposition … to adopt certain types of rational practical conduct” which depend heavily on “magical and religious forces” because they have been, especially in the past, “the most important formative influence on conduct” (Weber, 1985, p. 26, 27). At the same time, according to Weber, the cultural determination of capitalism is weak enough that it might very well have been developed in China, India, or Islamic countries, in the modern era or also in antiquity.³

The fundamental (rather implicit) assumption in Weber’s model is the validity of a generally and uniquely desired human megaobjective or megagood, which in this way becomes some kind of transcultural good: The megaobjective of absolute wealth. If this were not the case, talking about the failure of some countries to develop capitalism would make no sense. Because it is the case of a single megaobjective, adopting the efficient institutional setting — capitalism — is not a problem of choice, but a technical problem, or a problem of identifying and being able to adopt the proper means for a single human megaobjective. Thus, when some collectivity appears to have failed to adopt the proper efficient setting of capitalism, one runs into a problem which cannot be solved except by a discipline such as “comparative racial neurology and psychology.” It is a direction which some economists like North (2005) — who seems to have followed Weber’s suggestion very closely — have taken.

1.1.2. Why Employ Two Megaobjectives?

In this book I take an approach which is thoroughly different from both the Weberian and the one belonging to orthodox economic theory.⁴ The analytical power of my approach shall be tested by its ability to generate a model that abandons the implicit assumption of the irrationality of most peoples of this world over a time span of centuries. My approach accepts the reality of different cultures, or the reality of a continuous variation of human fundamental objectives, of which absolute wealth is only one. Its following presentation will combine an explicit exposure with an implicit one by relating it to Weber’s model.

Anyone living for some time in a culture other than a Western one observes that people are relatively more interested in the megaobjective relative power, and will more readily trade relative power positions or status — which is a good derived from relative power — for absolute wealth. This fact alone could recommend relative power as a megaobjective on equal footing with absolute wealth, that is, as a substitute for absolute wealth⁵ (which is perfectly consistent with the possibility that each of the two megaobjectives be a means in relation to the other). The hypothesis of a single megaobjective and ignoring the megaobjective relative power is equal to ignoring the past and present experience of all cultures of the world.

But well-known philosophers, economists, and other social scholars also acknowledge relative power as the other fundamental human objective, such thinkers include Adam Smith,⁶ John Stuart Mill, Thorstein Vebelen, Thomas Hobbes, Francis Fukuyama, Helmut Schoeck, Mauk Mulder, and Geert Hofstede. The abandonment of the idea of relative power as the other human megaobjective was caused by a great cultural transformation of current Western countries and the subsequent culture blindness⁷ affecting most Western economists. It did not take long for the bad effects to emerge. Leaving aside that the assumption of absolute wealth as a unique human megaobjective puts economic theory at odds with some other sound social disciplines — at least anthropology⁸ and political science — it also produced “theories” which replaced one unknown for another and had basic internal inconsistencies.⁹

1.1.3. The Anti-Entropic Perspective on Individual Maximization

The best argument for employing a model which allows for two megaobjectives or megagoods — absolute wealth and relative power — consists of the anti-entropic nature of the living world. Economic theory is about a limited existential reality — the human species — that is itself incorporated within a larger area: The living world. It implies that the principles which govern this larger area should be fundamental for economic perspectives or, in other words, economic principles should not be situated opposite the former. While the universe as a whole moves continuously toward a higher level of entropy, living organisms, including human beings, have an anti-entropic movement which is based on sucking low entropy from the outside world. It is in this way that the living world speeds up the anti-entropic movement of the universe or, in other words, the living world submits itself to the law of increasing entropy.

A more accurate description of living organisms’ functioning should acknowledge the maximizing or economic principle. In this way, to the anti-entropic movement is added the principle of maximizing the negentropy. Living organisms fight their entropic degradation by sucking low entropy from their outside world. That is why the level of control of an organism over its external reality — including the members of its own species — is a measure of its success in fighting entropic degradation, and maximization of this control is considered equivalent to negentropy maximization. For the human individual the level of this general anti-entropic control constitutes what I term general power.

Accepting that the species is not the maximizing unit or, more exactly, it is not the accounting unit, but the individual member of the species is, it is necessary to divide the human individual’s outside world into two components: One consisting of everything except the human species (the living and inert world), and the other consisting of the human species itself. It is the individual’s different behavior toward these two components influenced by their effect in terms of negentropy absorption, which imposes such a division. Sucking low entropy by trapping members of the human species has to be reduced to a great extent, or even completely abandoned, due to its high opportunity cost (caused by the high power equality among human individuals) and the sizeable overlapping of human identities (the identity unit is much larger than the metabolic or physiologic unit). Consequently, members of the same species have developed among them more friendly behavioral patterns that are less likely among individuals belonging to different species.

The general level of control developed by one human individual over his external human and non-human reality, termed his general power, should be broken down, according to the aforementioned division of external reality, into relative power — the individual’s ability to control and exploit the other members of the human species, and absolute wealth (the ordinary concept of wealth without any relative position or power aspects) which is the individual’s ability to control and exploit whatever external components remain. It is for this reason that confining the maximizing principle, in an implicit or explicit form, to just the megaobjective absolute wealth constitutes a fundamental error of economic science and other kinds of social sciences. This narrow view succeeded with the support of ideological factors and cultural blindness. Even in the case of cultures focused on the megaobjective absolute wealth, (as is the case in Western societies), the aforementioned hypothesis significantly decreases a theory’s descriptive ability and leaves social scholars with the alternative of falsifying results.¹⁰ Moreover, orthodox economic theory does not limit its descriptive capacity to Western societies, but claims universality.

1.1.4. From Megaobjectives to Ordinary Interests

The anti-entropic perspective on life, and considering the individual as the cost-accounting unit, entails accepting with relative ease the two megaobjectives, absolute wealth and relative power. But this easily can be looked at as a hard-to-accept oversimplification when one has to explain evolution from these two megaobjectives — which should have simultaneously been humanity’s initial objectives — to the numerous daily interests we deal with. How, then, could we explain the evolution from those primary objectives to interests such as sports, dance, art, fashion, and so on?

Some of the explanations offered by famous scholars suggest that such a reconstitution is possible and logically quite solid. Let us take, for instance, the explanation suggested by Veblen (1899/1992) in relation to a passion for sports. The first sport practiced by humanity was hunting. This was an activity that simulated war by changing the enemy and the stakes, while employing the same set of techniques and abilities. The zero-sum game characteristic of war has been overtaken by all sports and in this way the megaobjective of relative power has been preserved by sublimation. Humans are passionate about sports because our lives started, and have to a large degree been defined, by the objective of relative power. With sports, this objective is accomplished in a less costly way than, for example, war. We accept the positive effects of sport activities on health and physical capacities, but the main purpose remains to win or prevail. Thus, in sports, the main objective was, and still is, that of relative power.

I can further illustrate the evolution of the megaobjective relative power with the passion people have for dance as suggested by Freud. To reconstitute this evolution one should understand that dance is derived from humans’ interest in sex, which itself is related to the objective of relative power. Freud focused on reconstituting the relation between dance and sex. In dance, fundamental aspects of sex are sublimated and socialized; those aspects are nothing more than specific ways to express man’s relative power over woman. The failure of many social scientists to understand these connections, or even the fear of attaching frivolous overtones to them, are proof of the great success of these activities in masking the brutal character of the objective of relative power with which life is so deeply associated.

In short, this approach to human interests as expressions of the components of external reality based on which we trap low entropy and maximize the negentropy of our own structures, leaves no room for features such as vagueness, arbitrariness, or lack of internal logic. On the contrary, human goals look well-structured in a pyramidal architecture and as we go up there is remarkable stability: We end up with only the two megaobjectives of absolute wealth and relative power. All other more or less ordinary human goals are components or aspects of these two comprehensive ones.

1.1.5. The Inverse Correlation between the Hierarchies in Terms of Opportunity Costs and Preferences¹¹

The inverse correlation between opportunity costs and preference rankings of the two comprehensive megaobjectives, absolute wealth and relative power, is fundamental to the analytical model I used to study the consistency between religious dogmas and economic performance. It is for this reason that such a study is impossible within standard economic theory. The aforementioned correlation makes it possible to decode religious rules and institutions in terms of preference rankings of the two megaobjectives and, ultimately, it enables describing the preference for the megaobjective absolute wealth as the fundamental determinant of economic performance. It is this last possibility that allows transformation of dogma components into economic consistency criteria, which underlies the analysis presented in this book.

The economic behavior of a living organism consists of sorting, choosing or selecting among various components of the external world which are sources of low entropy. Maximizing trapped low entropy requires ranking those components in terms of efficiently employing rare resources. To this purpose, living organisms should trap those external components providing the greatest amount of low entropy for each unit of rare resources they command. This ranking in terms of efficiently trapping low entropy has been vital for living organisms; the first mechanism they developed to signal and record these rankings was the preference or satisfaction mechanism. Within this mechanism, trapping low entropy brings about an “entropic feeling” (Georgescu-Roegen, 1976, p. 56) or satisfaction where intensity is directly related to the efficiency of the trapping.

The preferences are nothing more than subjective signals recorded by involuntary, subconscious mental processes which depict the ranking of outside world components in terms of the efficiency of low entropy trapping. It is for this reason that the preference rankings are inversely related to the rankings in terms of opportunity costs. Ultimately, all rankings in terms of opportunity costs and preferences of all outside world components can be narrowed down to rankings of the megaobjectives absolute wealth and relative power. The reason for this is that the two megaobjectives are exhaustive in that they cover the whole external world of each individual. Therefore, the megaobjectives should be employed in the definition of cultural preferences: Cultural preferences, economically defined, consist of the emerged preference ranking of the megaobjectives absolute wealth and relative power as representative of a community.

Because humanity is continuously creating new objectives or goods and it takes some time for preferences to be formed, the preference rankings cannot necessarily cover all worldly components one individual faces at each point in time and, consequently, not all human activities can be depicted in terms of satisfaction maximization. By the same token, the explanatory power of the hedonistic principle is limited. The fundamental orthodox economic idea that satisfaction maximization can explain all human behavior is inherently wrong. Veblen reached this conclusion as far back as 1898 when he noted that psychology had abandoned the hedonistic principle, while the economists remained attached to it. It is this same wrong idea of taking satisfaction as the ultimate comprehensive human goal that is responsible for orthodox economists’ failure to conceive a theory of preference formation, economically define culture, and understand its fundamental role in economic performance.

1.1.6. Rules and Institutions Defined in Terms of the Megaobjectives’ Opportunity Costs

The description of the preference for the megaobjective absolute wealth as being characteristic of a religion and, in this way, the description of its consistency with economic performance, crucially depends on the possibility of defining religious rules and institutions in such a way that allows their conversion into preferences for the megaobjective absolute wealth. The general power paradigm makes possible a genuine and all-inclusive definition of rules (implicitly those of institutions) as patterned opportunity costs for alternative activities or facts which individuals face and, ultimately, for the m...