Wealth and poverty, two sides, same coin

The most recent edition of Harvard Magazine (Mrs. Discipulus is an alumna) contains a silly screed inveighing against income disparity. That's predictable enough. Contemporary liberals adhere to the ridiculous notion that your financial success is a net loss to someone who is less successful, even if that person is better off as a result. So the corporate shareholders who succeed in business and create jobs for working-class families are, in the twisted lib worldview, harming those very same working-class families for whom they are creating jobs and, therefore, wealth.

The HM author introduces a new term to summarize this concept: "relative deprivation." I quote directly: "The idea is that, even when we have enough money to cover basic needs, it may harm us psychologically to see that other people have more."

To articulate such nonsense is to refute it. However, liberal fascination with inequality (and attendant, maleable concepts such as "poverty") flows out of a much deeper metaphysical misunderstanding about the world in which we live. For whatever reason, contemporary liberals have it stuck in their heads that human conditions like poverty and wealth, sickness and health, pleasure and pain, are the really important things in life. This is a narrow, dogmatic view of life.

Mature, reasoning people recognize that the really important things in life are basic human goods, such as knowledge and beauty, and the great virtues, such as love and charity. The human conditions are merely the occasions -- opportunities, if you will -- to practice the great virtues and to enjoy the basic goods.

For this reason, mature, reasoning persons have the capacity to be truly joyful in wealth or poverty, sickness or health, pain or ecstatic pleasure. Liberals lack this capacity. Instead, they look around at the greatest, most just nation in the history of the world and complain that biology has left the genders unequal. They live in the most prosperous time in history, in the most prosperous nation on earth, but they are obsessed with the psychological harm that a middle-class college professor ostensibly suffers by watching his CEO neighbor drive to work every day in his Benz.

These are useful observations to bear in mind as we listen to "progressive Christians" in the coming months drone on and on about inequality in America. Having grown up the oldest of six children in a ten-foot wide trailer and having worked my way into the upper middle class, I look at inequality in the most prosperous nation in history as an amazing opportunity. So who is narrow-minded? The Harvard Magazine-Sojourners crowd, or me?