The modern world is forever calling things “inevitable” that are self-evidently not. It is “inevitable” that rent will go up in a certain neighborhood, given the presence of a new business or the rehabilitation of an old house nearby. But rents have never gone up, or down, in the history of landlording. The medievals spoke of fire having a natural desire to rise, of earth having the natural power of falling, but rents are without any buoyancy or gravitas beyond what we give them. Still, in every neighborhood you’ll hear a landlord saying, in all seriousness, that “rents are going up” like so many hot air balloons — he, borne away by them.
I would hardly deny that a landlord may be constrained to raise rents in order to meet rising costs elsewhere. He may also raise rent simply because he believes he can get away with it. But in neither case is he a siphon for Market Forces. The Invisible Hand is invisible for the embarrassing reason that it does not exist. A man may suffer constraints or chase incentives as he pursues profits, but he does not do so under the unbearable weight of Fate, as if fulfilling an eternal sentence given to him in Hell. Fate is something human beings make by being stupid and slavish. God made no such creature.
Likewise, the inevitability with which new technologies replace old technologies is not inevitable at all. It hinges, at every moment, on the free choice to make them and use them, a choice which many, like the Amish, make in the negative. And if the profusion of our technological devices were such an inevitable affair, why is so much money spent marketing them? The replacement of the moon with the sun come morning-time seems as “inevitable” as anything can, but it would hardly seem so if dawn only broke on the condition that so many blood sacrifices were offered and so many human lives were devoted to the promotion of the sunrise.
We could forgive such a silly society, but how will we forgive our own? For we see, laid out in the light of day, the whole billion-dollar contraption by which technologies are advertised and older tools are rendered silly and suspect. We see entire lives devoted to convincing others to take up this or that machine — and yet we still speak of the transition from phones to smartphones, from local production to mass production, or from small business to big business, as an inevitable working out of technological history that somehow operates apart from our actions and decisions.
It is rather convenient for the wealthy that the ways they get rich are called inevitable; rather inconvenient for the poor, that they are only ever aided by unpredictable acts of kindness. That new iPhones will be sold is as assured as the earth turning and that ownership will increasingly turn into rent is a material transformation akin to a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. The ironclad laws of nature and economics seem to have been written for the benefit of the wealthy. Only one theorist pronounces anything like the inevitability of the poor becoming rich and the rich being sent away empty, and her confidence does not stem from any force of the Market or material condition favorable to the proletariat, but on the free activity of God.
And it is in light of Mary’s economic thinking that we might consider the economy of the monastic vow of poverty. All the talk of the price mechanism and the profit motive is silenced by this vow, which feels the push of the invisible hand — and tells it to push off. The man vowed to Poverty is living evidence that a man devoted to profits need not be; that his excuses of “rising rents” and “rational self-interest” are lame; that he labors, not by Fate, but by his own will. It is no accident that the West was drawn out of its paganism, its pessimism, and its fatalism, by men and women sworn to live as reminders that, after all, we can do what we want: give everything away, abstain, or even die, rather than bow before the inevitable, which henceforth stands revealed as anything but.