KEY POINTS:
Greed is good, greed is right, greed works, greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all of its forms has marked the upward surge of humankind.
So declared Gordon Gekko, the character played by Michael Douglas in the film Wall Street,
addressing a group of shareholders of a company about to go to the wall. Greed, Gekko is convinced, will not only save the company whose shareholders he addresses, but will save the nation of America itself.
It was a film about unscrupulous corporate dealing. People in real life don't really think or behave like that, do they? Or at least only that minority do, who sail close to the wind in their financial dealing, people like Bernard Madoff now under house arrest in Manhattan for allegedly orchestrating a US$50 billion ($87 billion) fraud.
But as we all wonder about what the impact of the current global financial situation on our own economy is yet to be, I find myself also wondering about the extent to which such attitudes have infected our world view.
How often have we seen the cycle of amusement at extreme examples of wealth giving way to an intolerance with it?
Madoff is an extreme example of how business leaders go from being glamorised to demonised, and deregulated environments give way to cries for reform.
No doubt the multimillion-dollar salary packages and the private jets of the American motor industry CEOs would once have made them the friends of senators and presidents and the envy of others. But now in an endeavour to gain government financial assistance to keep their industry alive, the jets are in their hangars and the salaries are down to $1 for the coming year.
It's hard not to call that greed. And people in America have turned on that kind of lifestyle and reward, and have low tolerance with governors who allegedly try to sell the vacant senatorial seats of newly elected Presidents.
Of course, we are all good at identifying those more extreme forms of greed and expressing our amazement and disgust at them. We are not always so good at seeing the same things in ourselves. The highly overpaid corporate fat cats are the easy targets.
Isn't the residential property bubble the result of ordinary people pushing for a few tens of thousands more dollars to sell a house in the right school zone?
And wasn't the temporary success of the finance companies based on us ordinary people squeezing another percentage or so beyond what the banks could offer us in spite of the risk?
Sadly the greed we so readily identify in the very public figures and institutions is present in us also.
So let's return to Wall Street, but to the real one this time. What is the mood there at the moment? In a recent interview, James Cooper, the rector of Trinity Church, Wall Street's Anglican parish, describes it as "anxious and reflective ... with people confronting their worst fears about their vanishing financial security and livelihood".
And what does the church have to offer to that, Cooper was asked? He says it is the comfort of the Christian tradition that God is with us. That won't prevent the impact of all that is coming, but it means that God is in the midst of it, whatever happens. The loving presence of God is always in our lives.
That is the message of Christmas, that God is with us. Christians believe that in the human Jesus, all the fullness of divinity came to dwell. The material and the spiritual were shown not to be separate worlds but intrinsically joined. The divine entered human life and experience not just for a time but for ever.
Life then is essentially spiritual and not material, and so people are more important than wealth.
The assumption that economics and market forces are autonomous and not subject to moral judgment must be challenged. A system based on the assumption that it is beyond such judgment will always be unstable. At a time when financial institutions and industries are seeking government support to survive, there is an opportunity to insist on much higher standards.
But that insistence depends on people articulating the kind of values they expect. A vision that cannot look beyond the next half-year profit line is not enough.
We have opted for a way of celebrating Christmas that largely focuses on buying and giving, and we are used to the mad panic of retail activity as we rush to buy, buy, buy in December. That has been noticeably absent this year, and the retailers will be feeling it.
Bad as that will be for them, it might reveal for us that the Christmas spirit is about deeper things, not dependent on spending money we have on goodies we don't need that go out of fashion not long after they have been unwrapped.
The Christmas vision is one of peace and goodwill. But that will not somehow magically fall on us from above. In the various ways that we will celebrate Christmas I hope that we will find real joy.
I also hope that we will find a fresh determination to create together a world in which there is no more room for greed. Because in fact, greed is never good.
* Ross Bay is Dean of Auckland's Anglican Cathedral of the Holy Trinity.
