Many of us are disturbed by issues
of “social justice”—a term I bracket with quotation marks only because it means
different things to different users—having to do with large disparities
evidenced in the economic resources of our citizens. In the shorthand language of our political
discourse we identify some of the issues as income inequality, the living wage,
the minimum wage, equal pay for equal work.
To what extent is the State authorized to coerce “justice” in the
creation and distribution of wealth? To
what extent is it competent? A good deal of modern history, certainly since
the time of Karl Marx, has been driven by such questions. We have the hecatombs to prove it.
If we have no agreement on what a
minimum wage should be we seem to have none at all about a maximum wage. I was fascinated by a recent press report
from the world of art commodification. A
few years ago a group of art dealers paid less than twenty thousand dollars for a
Renaissance painting of Christ thought possibly to be from the “school” or
“workshop” of Leonardo da Vinci. Later
super-experts concluded that the artist must have been Leonardo himself. Very rarely do humanities professors make the
Market quiver, but this time they did. Sotheby’s, the famous auctioneers,
facilitated the sale of the re-evaluated painting to a Swiss buccaneer of the
beaux-arts named Bouvier for eighty million
dollars. Almost immediately Bouvier
flipped the painting, as though it were a rehabbed loft in Bushwick, to a
Russian billionaire collector named Rybolovlev for $127,500,000.
Now everybody is mad,
and the suits are filing suits. The art
dealers think they were stiffed for roughly fifty million. Ryboloviev makes a similar complaint since,
he asserts, Bouvier should have been operating as his agent in the original
purchase. Sotheby’s is aggrieved that
their probity has been called into question.
Fleming is mad because a beautiful painting of Jesus Christ as “Savior
of the World”, quite possibly actually by the hand of one of the greatest
Christian artists of the Renaissance, has become a talisman of obscene
wealth. Read the forty-fifth canto of
Pound: No picture is made to endure nor
to live with but it is made to sell and sell quickly, with usura, sin against nature.
Of course “Christian social
teaching,” though frequently invoked, is not exactly clear and
prescriptive. Jesus did say “The laborer
is worthy of his pay,” but what should that pay be? Since I was a child I struggled with the
parable of the “Workers in the Vineyard” (Matthew 20). A landowner hires men to work in his
vineyard. Some start out at the
beginning of the day. A few hours later
he hires some more, and so on throughout the day. But at the end of the day he pays each man an
equal wage—a denarius, the standard
daily wage of an agricultural worker—with no differentiation between those who
worked all day and those who worked an hour or two. The point of all this, according to Jesus’s
cryptic conclusion, is that “the last will be first, and the first last.” (My wife, a Bible scholar, tells me not to
fret about this, as it is almost certainly a posterior addition to the
parable.)
Naturally those workers who began
at the crack of dawn did not think this was fair, and I have never been able to
figure it out myself. In 1968 we were
living in the south of France, at Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, near to Petrarch’s old
retreat at the Fontaine de Vaucluse, when the Revolution exploded. The Revolution, for the youngsters among my
readers, was a bit of French student guerrilla theater that got out of
hand. Paris was the scene of most of the
action, but even the remote provinces experienced serious dislocations on
account of transportation strikes and, especially, the unavailability of
gasoline. The sister of the farmer on
whose property we were lodged had a large cherry orchard; its annual crop was the
chief source of her yearly income. The
Revolution created a crisis, since her fresh, ripe cherries could not be gotten
into the produce markets. The best she
could do was wait in vain hope that the strikes would end. When the fruit was over-ripe, she tried to
salvage something by selling the crop for a pittance to a nearby jam factory. She was so desperate for pickers that Joan
and I agreed to help out gratis. It was great fun but also hard labor, and
when I got tired I simply awarded myself a work-break. Several of the hired hands grumbled openly
about this; but I thought my response was invincible. They were being paid. I was working for free. The landowner in Jesus’s parable asks “Why be
jealous because I am kind?” But one
among the cherry pickers was not silenced.
I should not be allowed to work for free or to take unauthorized breaks.
All cherry-picking and cherry-pickers should be the same. Egalité
trumped Liberté, and to hell with
Fraternité.
