The Christian Case for Class Stratification

Chapter 13 of The Information Class

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I want to turn now to the moral case for class stratification. But public moral analysis of anything is difficult and not very fruitful in our society because there is no agreement about what might be called “meta-ethics,” or the foundational beliefs about what ethics is and how its content can be discerned.

This problem was most lucidly diagnosed by Alasdair MacIntyre in his 1984 book After Virtue. As alluded to previously, this meta-ethical incoherence tends to give all moral debate in our society a shrill, interminable, and arbitrary character. To this we'll return, since it forms an important part of the history of the information class, and indeed is its Achilles heel.

For now, I'll adopt the expedient of building two separate moral analyses on two different meta-ethical foundations: first, Christianity, still the majority religion with profound authority for tens of millions of Americans; and second, the theory of social justice of John Rawls, probably the single most important moral and political philosopher for secular liberals.

Those don't exhaust the meta-ethical possibilities, of course. But if I can get the Christians and the Rawlsians on my side, that would go a long way towards establishing a broad base of support for the principle of class stratification. Actual persuasion isn't so straightforward as that, of course, and my real hope is to inject a position into the discourse with strong argumentative credentials, not immediate mass conversion.

The Christian case for class stratification is based mainly on the parable of the talents.

I'm a Christian, and I want everything I write to be biblically accountable, though usually I'd keep the biblical compatibility checking to myself. But this topic warrants being explicit about the biblical warrant for my position since it relates so strongly to ethics.

Christianity is in many ways more democratic and egalitarian than other faiths and cultures. A clear teaching of the common descent of the human race rules out any essential racial hierarchy, and the good news of the Gospel is for all peoples. A certain Jewish racial supremacism that might plausibly (though wrongly) be inferred from the Old Testament is clearly erased in the New. There's no inherent caste system built into human nature, as in Hinduism, nor good and bad karma inherited from past lives, as in Buddhism. And while the New Testament is written in a spirit of spiritual focus and social and political quietism to the point of casually upholding the pervasive slavery of the times, Jesus and the apostles had no slaves, and urged no one to acquire any, and as soon as the Church had enough power, it set in motion society's slow evolution towards becoming the world's first post-slavery complex economy. Islam, by contrast, was built from the beginning on mass enslavement.

Moreover, Christianity appears to condemn the rich. Jesus's chilling dictum that “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:24) does not stand alone. In the parable of the rich fool, the complacency of the rich is condemned, and the parable of the rich man and Lazarus condemns their cruelty in keeping what they have for their own enjoyment when so many are in need. The early Christian community in the book of Acts shared everything, and Ananias and his wife miraculously perished as punishment for holding something back. The epistle of James has fierce words for the rich as well. On the other hand, the infant Jesus was visited by the Magi, apparently wealthy kings, and the wealthy Joseph of Arimathea provided Jesus's tomb. So not all rich characters in the Gospel narratives are bad. Still, it seems overwhelmingly clear that the Gospels don't endorse a stratification of living standards, with some living in luxury while others look on enviously from their destitution.

At the same time, the New Testament understands that people differ a lot in what they have to give.

First, in 1 Corinthians 12, St. Paul discusses spiritual gifts in the church, emphasizing that different people have different gifts, and the gifts are distributed by the Holy Spirit, but the church is unified like a body, and members need to recognize their need for one another, just as the members of a body need each other. The gifts discussed in this passage are spiritual gifts, such as prophecy and miracle working, not secular occupations. Still, it's notable that this spiritual specialization within the church is not regarded as a function merely of individual choice, but comes from a kind of external allocation. The metaphor of members of a body naturally cross-applies to the secular economy as well.

But most relevant is the parable of the talents.

In that strange story, told in Matthew 25 (a similar parable is told in Luke 19) a nobleman goes away to a far country to receive a kingdom and return. While he is away, he distributes treasure among his servants, to use while he is gone.

The first servant gets five “talents,” which non-allegorically means five of a large unit of money. The second servant gets two talents, and the third servant gets one. The first servant invests the five talents and earns five more. The second servant, likewise, invests the two talents and earns two more. But the third servant, afraid of losing the one talent, buries it under the ground, so that he can give it back intact to his master when he returns.

The lord is pleased with the first two servants, and rewards them with five cities and two cities, respectively, but he is angry with the third, and punishes him by ordering him bound and cast into outer darkness. The version in Luke has ten servants, which each got one mina to invest, earned different returns, and were rewarded with cities in proportion, except the one who failed to invest and was punished. And a different parable in Luke, which, however, is also about servants being entrusted with goods while their masters are away, concludes with the salient words: “to whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required: and to whom they commit much, of him will they ask the more” (Luke 12:48).

What does all this mean?

The word “talent,” in English, along with similar words in other languages, is derived from the parable of the talents, and expresses a particular interpretation of the parable, wherein talents represent natural aptitudes or propensities to acquire skill. There's a bit of truth in that, but it can mislead. A major theme of my youth was that I felt, and was encouraged to feel, a strong biblically-based duty to seek to discern what I was naturally good at, and then work and practice and study in order to perfect those forms of human excellence of which I was most capable. But that's not obviously the proper or straightforward interpretation of the parable. The talents could be many things, from simply money, to spiritual gifts, to friends, to power, to reputation, to opportunities. The point is to do good with all these good things that we happen to possess or enjoy.

If anything, I think the most compelling interpretation of the talents is that they represent class.

The trouble with interpreting the “talents” as aptitudes is that it might imply that people have a Christian duty to turn aptitudes into skills at great labor and expense, when a practical assessment of their situation and prospects would indicate that they can't afford such labor and expense, and are unlikely in any case to have opportunities to use the skills thus acquired. By contrast, class encompasses a person's situation and prospects. It includes a lot of other things too: aptitudes to some extent, since both nature and nurture tend to endow members of a class with certain aptitudes, but also money, connections, reputation, power, and opportunities. And the takeaway, if you read the parable of the talents as advice on how to adapt morally in a class-stratified society, is that people who come from favored classes ought to use their advantages to accomplish more in the service of God and their fellow men. To whom much is given, of them much is expected. Noblesse oblige.

Our age, with its egalitarian sensibilities, is likely to ask why the nobleman didn't divide his treasure equally among his servants, rather than giving one of them much more and another much less. In the parable, it's not clear why. But in real life, it's clear that some enter life better endowed than others with all sorts of good things, and why a lot of that is inevitable.

More disturbing is that the servants who began well off do the best with what they have, and the one who is lazy and gets punished is the one who began with least. The Gospel of Matthew even has Jesus draw the chilling conclusion: "For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away” (Matthew 25:29). A conclusion less suited to please egalitarians could hardly be imagined. And yet life often works out that way.

In light of other Gospel passages, again, this should not be read as a parable in favor of the rich. Those who have, to whom more will be given, are certainly not, in general, those with big, fat bank accounts, or mansions and fancy cars. In this life, to be sure, the rich often get richer while the poor stay poor. But that ends with death. And in the kingdom of heaven, in eternity, it is the meek, the poor in the spirit, those who mourn and ensure persecutions, who are blessed. It is those who are rich in virtue to whom more, especially more virtue, will be given.

And virtue is often correlated with class.

Unfortunately, there do seem to be a lot of people in this world who just never had a fair chance to learn to be good, and who go from bad to worse. Let's help them if we can. But we should also keep giving our children as much virtue as we can, and if such good parenting keeps defining and reinforcing a class identity, so be it.

The parable of the talents provides a kind of biblical warrant for class stratification, but it comes with a condition. Privileged people must use their privileges to do more good, not just to please themselves. As the Spiderman motto puts it: “with great power comes great responsibility.” The master expected the servants to be brave with what they were given, to invest, and to achieve an increase.

For people of the information class, “love thy neighbor as thyself” should not mean “give your neighbor's children equal opportunity with your own.” That's not feasible, and might do harm if the opportunities are abused. Rather, pursue an elite vocation which involves service to your less fortunate neighbors, and raise your children to do likewise. For information class elites, the way to practice the Golden Rule is intergenerational noblesse oblige.

At the same time, the New Testament gives no warrant for people to care more about their own class, or their own country, more than others. You're supposed to act as if you love all your neighbors every bit as much as you love yourself. Perfect universal altruism. You may not desire for people of other classes exactly the same things you desire for yourself, for people differ, and what would be fulfilling and beneficial for you might bore them. But you should desire their good as much as your own, and work for it if the opportunity arises. And part of being effective, powerful, influential and successful is that the needs of many others are more acute than yours and you often have the means to help. So the more successful you are, the more “love thy neighbor” should direct you to serve others rather than yourself, although sometimes that service will take the form of pursuing an excellence that they don't understand. That's where noblesse oblige comes from.

Incidentally, I think a modern instance of the servant who buries his talent in the ground is academics who devote their lives to nothing but publication in academic journals. The journals are a sterile bubble. There are better things to do with a first-rate brain.