Who Needs God?(adapted from 'The Collapse of Communism')

An American couple I know adopted a young boy of three or so from Rumania, one of those orphans brought up mass-production style, never held in human arms, fed by a bottle attached to a mechanical apparatus. Isolated from human closeness and all moral training until he left the orphanage, the child is grown now, handsome, smart, winning in his ways--but absolutely incapable of forming a human relationship, only capable of seeking his own will and his own pleasure. He fears close contact with adults, only pretending to affection as necessary. Cleverly narcissistic, he lies, steals, cheats, whatever he needs to do to obtain what he desires. And all the while, smiling, he charms people by his seemingly open manner.

He has already been arrested once for shoplifting, and his teachers at school, for a time in love with him, have reluctantly had to report the times he has stolen things from his classmates. This engaging boy has learned precisely how to deceive. His parents, serious and devout people, are in despair about his behavior. For he is heading for self-destruction and may, they fear, charm innocent and inexperienced people into accompanying him thereto.

It so happens the adoptive mother of this boy is an accomplished free-market economist. And she explains that the totally self-centered impulse that moves this child, the preoccupation with his own physical self-interest, at the expense of all other more noble interests, is remarkably like what the economists conventionally discuss as "economic self-interest." She has even written a lecture to this effect, daring other economists to tell her in what respect the conduct of this narcissistic young man differs from the behavior of their theoretical "economic man."

This challenge infuriates the economists, she has found, but they only sputter and do not answer it. When they have had time to reflect upon it, however, they may find that, more than they explicitly recognize in their published theories, the "rational man" they assume to be acting in their theories is not simply a calculator of self-interest but in fact a highly developed humanistic person, of Jewish and Christian provenance or some correlative tradition. For when they write "rational" they also mean "law-abiding" and basically "honest" "trustworthy" and "morally reliable." They emphatically do not mean a crook, cheat, liar, manipulator, or narcissist with whom it is impossible to have a human relationship.

For economics to work, a deal has to be a deal. A partner one cannot trust brings a high cost in efficiency and a high probability of eventual disaster. For capitalism to function, it requires persons who live out a far richer morality than is exemplified by that unfortunate orphan raised mechanically, evacuated of all moral and emotional sense and made into a pure rational calculator of means and ends.

This child is incapable of internal self-government. He gets what he wants by vectoring around any resistance he meets, like a robot bumping and bouncing along his way. He lives, in short, in a world essentially like the one in which the Communist rulers of his homeland professed to believe we all live--a world of pure materialism with no God and no transcendent right and wrong.

In this child's native Rumania, atheistic Communists set out to eradicate centuries of learning, habits, and traditions. The government aimed to erase "bourgeois culture"--religious morality, privacy of property and thought, individualistic behaviors. In the process, it dulled the most distinctive human mark: the primordial endowment of each citizen with a creative and accountable soul.