Digital technology has flattened space so much that McLuhan’s vision of a global village has become a reality. There is nowhere too far away. What happens at the other end of the world immediately affects us. On a micro level, people can be in direct and immediate audiovisual constant contact with their loved ones. Medical specialists can direct the most complex operations from their office thousands of kilometres away from where the operation is happening.
But not everything is so rosy.
Today the obscenities that happen in one country are immediately communicated worldwide. Worse still, our contemporary warped value system communicates obscenities as if they are glamorous occasions that one should feel privileged to witness. Today we can once again repeat St Paul’s words: they boast of what they should be ashamed of.
One such recent obscenity was the spending of the eye-watering estimated sum of at least €550 million on the celebrations of the marriage of Anant Ambani to Radhika Merchant.
This obscenity is condemnable in itself but becomes more distasteful as it happened in India, a country where, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), one in every six persons are undernourished.
According to the World Inequality Lab, income inequality in India is, in fact, worse than it was under British colonial rule. I don’t know about income inequality in Malta at the time of the British colonial rule. However, government statistics tell us that income inequality today is worse than it was 10 years ago.
In this respect the difference between India and Malta is quantitative more than qualitative. In both countries – and many more – the underpinning ideology is that making money is the measure of all things, the ultimate distorted justification of human actions.
Such an attitude is an obscenity that one should not be proud of as it is, in the words of Prathyush Parasuraman writing in Frontline Magazine, a sign of the disappearing moral compass in our culture. So instead of being awed by such acts, people should adopt the attitude proposed by Jemina Kelly in the Financial Times (July 21, 2024): Stop worshipping at the feet of the wealthy.
Rummaging through comments in the social media I frequently met three ‘justifications’ for Ambani’s extravaganza and the perverse model and ideology that underlines it. These are: It’s his money, he does what he wants with it. He is employing many people so that’s good enough and we should be grateful. He gives charity so we should be thankful.
Acclaimed American cognitive linguist George Lakoff in his book Don’t Think of an Elephant (2014) shatters to smithereens the capitalist dogma that the public owes something to the private. Lakoff rightly writes that public taxes provided public resources like education, hospitals, roads and bridges, an army to protect the country, and a parliament that enacts laws.
“Without such public resources there could have been no satisfactory private life and no functioning business community,” writes Lakoff.
The same sentiments have been expressed by US Senator Elisabeth Warren. During her 2012 election in Massachusetts for the Senate she said:
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.”
Maltese Catholics should militate against the economy of exclusion, the new idolatry of money- Fr Joe Borg
Mariana Mazzucato, professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL), and one of the pope’s favourite economists, in her book The Value of Everything (2018), challenges the economic thinking – even on the popular level – that success in business is the result of individual efforts or genius. She shows that such successes could not be possible without massive public investment in research and education.
What Laker, Warren and Mazzacuto write applies to Ambani and millionaires everywhere, including Malta.
The belief that “it’s his money and he does what he wants” is anathema from a Christian perspective. Christianity teaches that people are not the absolute owners of their wealth; they are stewards obliged to use it for the common good and in line with the universal destination of goods.
In his book Let Us Dream, Pope Francis criticises the neoliberal current which excludes debate about the common good and the universal destination of goods to instead promote the efficient management of the market and an economic model based on profit.
In his encyclical letter Fratelli Tutti, Francis states that “the marketplace, by itself, cannot resolve every problem, however much we are asked to believe this dogma of neoliberal faith” (para. 168). Neoliberalism proposes the theory that when the glass is full, the extra produced will spill over or trickle down to the rest of the population. Francis says that, on the contrary, when the glass is full, capitalists enlarge it so that nothing or just a pittance spill over.
Ambani is a charitable person, some say. Humbug, as Scrooge retorts. This is a disgusting position that justifies leaving the poor under the table picking up the crumbs. The poor have to be around the table where decisions are made.
We don’t need charity, but an economic model based on the full respect and observance of the universal destination of goods and on true solidarity. In Fratelli Tutti, Francis acknowledges that solidarity in several quarters “has become a dirty word, a word that dare not be said” (para 116). He then adds: “Solidarity means much more than engaging in sporadic acts of generosity. It means thinking and acting in terms of community. It means that the lives of all are prior to the appropriation of goods by a few.” (para 116)
Maltese Catholics should militate against the economy of exclusion, the new idolatry of money; and the financial model that rules rather than serves, a model that has unfortunately became mainstream in our country.