The Market and the Family of God

Sometimes people balk at the idea of a society based on “abstract,” “cold,” and “impersonal” rules. Why not, they say, run society like a family? The church is the family of God, and after all, no (good) father charges his children for food or diapers. A well-functioning family runs on a principle of deliberate action for another’s sake. Markets run on one’s own interests, and in the marketplace we’re all strangers, even if members of the same church! Why don’t we reject the market and embrace families and small communities? Why not discard the market for the intimate model of the apostolic church?

Intimacy, unfortunately, is costly. There is only so much we can know about so many people. Anyone who is married with children knows how hard it is to get along with the people you love most. The farther you get from people, the harder it is to get along with them based on intimacy and the more important it is to rely on rules. In a small family, I can be flexible with my wife and child because I know them better and love them more than anyone on the planet–and there are only three of us. It is much harder to rely on an “intimate” model with a class of forty strangers, and if we had to make each relationship with our students as close and finely-tailored as our relationships with our families, we would never get anything else done.

There are many reasons for the difference between what economist F.A. Hayek called “the extended order” (society) and “the intimate order” (families, for instance). Mundane morality governs the market; it’s the first century B.C. Rabbi Hillel’s version of the Golden Rule: Don’t do to other people what you don’t want them to do to you, largely because you can’t know that many people that well. When we rely on abstract rules and principles, it is easier for them to take care of themselves and the people they love, just as it is easier for you to take care of yourself and your loved ones if you can buy a Thanksgiving turkey at the grocery store instead of having to raise, slaughter, and clean one you raised yourself. 

It’s easier to know what your family members want and how to give it to them, and the fact that their well-being matters to you gives you an incentive to do it well. Even then, we often make a proper mess of things. We’ve all discarded garish gifts or returned gifts that didn’t fit. If we can’t get gift-giving right for the people we know best and love most, what makes us think we will get it right for a Chinese farmer who doesn't read or speak our language and who comes from a very different cultural background?

Abstract rules come to the rescue. They provide the American businessman with both the knowledge and the incentive to serve a Chinese peasant he’ll never meet—and may never know exists. Maybe our businessman buys his family a video game console manufactured in China. Some of what he pays for the console gets paid to Chinese factory workers. These workers use their earnings to buy groceries, which provides the income the farmer from the previous paragraph needs to care for himself and his loved ones.

It isn’t like people haven’t tried to run countries like big families. History is littered with failed utopian experiments ranging from small communes to grotesque adventures in mass murder under communism. Sometimes it works on a very small scale with small, tight-knit, homogeneous groups of people for whom their communal identity is essentially their whole identity (the Hutterites or the Early Church, for instance). Ironically, though, efforts to run nations like they are really big families explain why the Chinese farmers we will never know are so poor.