The Ascent of Money, The Pound of Flesh and The Third Way Response

Father John Jimenez has worked in ministry, education, and community service across the San Francisco Bay Area and abroad. He began his path after earning a BA from San Francisco State University. He later completed a secondary school teaching credential and a Master of Divinity from St. Patrick Seminary in Menlo Park. Since entering the priesthood in 1998, Father John Jimenez has combined pastoral duties with classroom teaching and parish support throughout the Archdiocese of San Francisco.

Father Jimenez’ early assignments included serving as parochial vicar at St. Pius Church in Redwood City and at the Church of the Visitacion in San Francisco, as well as a period of missionary work in the Diocese of Torit in Sudan. After returning to the Bay Area, he held a range of roles, including chaplain at San Francisco General Hospital, mathematics teacher at Castlemont High School in Oakland, and parochial vicar and teacher at St. Peter Parish and School from 2008 to 2014, then as pastor and teacher at St. Charles Borromeo Parish and School from 2014 to 2017, then as chaplain and teacher at Riordan High School 2017 to 2020, then helping at Church of the Visitacion, and currently is helping in Cuenca, Ecuador at Seminario Leon Magno and Parroquia Santa Teresa de Jesus.

In a recent essay, "the Ascent of Money and the Pound of Flesh", Fr Jimenez summarizes Nal Ferguson's with allusions to venture capitalist Marc Andreeson's recent essay detailing positive aspects of tech innovations through history, while Ferguson brilliantly makes the analogy of historical finance innovations with anthropologist Bronkowski's "The Ascent of Man", from early civilization when humans settled and grew crops, and kept an accounting for trade on stone tablets and the first use of language, to Fibonacci's number theory and the use of Sanskrit and Arabic to simplify and improve the number system, and more accurate, through decimals, accounting system that allowed the rise of the Medicis and the first banking system, particularly a more extensive sym of loaning money (even fractional reserve), fiat money even, that allowed a multiplier effect in economic growth and tech innovation that feeds each others growth, and in general, a rising tide lifting all boats.

Yet, Ferguson does describe the essence of Shakespeare's point in "The Merchant of Venice", that ultimately a system of debt risks collapsing unless there is a "Pound of Flesh", the story where a merchant lends money for Antonio's friend to win over the beloved and Antonio helps by borrowing money, the ships that he owns as collateral, and "his own flesh", his life, if the loan cannot be repaid.

The story illustrates at the local level that a debt system can only function when the risk ensued, if there is no payback of the loan, is enforced by the debtor losing all that they have, even their life, "contracts enforced", or even, the role of mafia hitmen. Ferguson does point out the orgin of the Medici's as loan sharks.

Add to this David Stockman's insight in his essay "War Machine's Echoe Chamber", war has been the loan sharking hitman of the rise of empires, loans allow economies to grow and innovate, but war becomes the method of imposing the currency of the dominant power on those colonized, controlling production, wages and prices.

As an example, Ferguson describes, at the war and supply level, the rise of Napoleon and hsi defeat at Waterloo by Ellington. The ideology of the French Revolution of "Liberte" evolved into a cabal holding onto power through the constant threat of arrest and violence (the guillotine), and found that expanding this violence into empire building, fiat money finance military expeditions and opening new markets and colonies.

Ferguson then describes the rise of the Rothschild Banks, in centers of trade throughout Europe, especially London, were in key positions to take advantage of the changes in prices in supply lines and in currencies, to finance their innovation, and their banks be the first globalist empires, Especially Britain, able to expand it's economic power through it's colonies, the enforcement of which, the pound of flesh, being it's conflict with the rise of Germany, which became World War I, which has set the geopolitics of today.

The folly of ideology and empire is expressed in three Beethoven symphonies, The Third, which expresses hope in "Liberte" in Napoleon's coronation, The Fifth, the realization of the horror of the war machine that war is, and the moral decision to oppose, at a deep, existential level, and The Seventh, the Allegretto, looking at the fields of the dead at Waterloo, the peasants, soldiers and villagers, who paid the price for empire and ideology.

In response to this devastation, and the conjunctional role of technology in displacing peasants and families in the 19th century, Pope Leo XIII wrote "Rerum Novarum", which illustrates principles found in Aristotle, of power distributed and decision making at the local level, and the primary role of family, and guilds of workers and craftsmen to set fair prices and wages, local credit unions for enterprises to grow (and not money accumulated into a few hands to corner markets and fuel empire building), all of which can be found in Revelation in how our Lord was born at Bethlehem and grew up in Nazareth.

Yet WWI, which has set the geopolitics of today, only repeated the same empire/pound of flesh mentality, and the suffering of peasants, families and villages caught in the middle. So, many more came to realize Pope Leon's insight, which could be called Distributism: Hillarie Belloc, GK Chesterton, Dorothy Day, Alexander Chayanov, Karl Poyani, Wendell Berry, Pope Pius XI and Pope John Paul II.

For a summary of these ideas, and how they were lived in the 20th century, Allan Carlson's "Third Ways" (ISI Books) gives a good description of what has been done and what is possible, so that there are no more Waterloo wastelands. Let TS Eliot's "Wasteland" be our motivation to live Bethlehem and Nazareth.

Contact

Father John Jimenez
San Francisco, CA USA