Dirty Money?

            Two recent news items have come together in my mind and forced me to think about the idea of filthy lucre.  The first is actually an anecdotal report from a friend of mine who recently spent some leisure time in Greece.  Through a friend of a friend she was invited to join a crowd of the glitterati for a day or two’s island-hopping aboard a huge and expensive yacht belonging to an international celebrity.  Among their hops was an island where an even richer guy has developed a commercial playground offering a kind of permanent “spring break” venue for Euroyouth: a sort of Coney Island as designed by the Magus—thousands of scantily clad, boozed up kids “dancing” in a shallow pool.  The second episode, this one prominent in the press, was the effort by protestors to force the Louvre to remove the name Sackler from the wing of the museum the Sackler family largely financed.  Some of the Sacklers, who have been huge philanthropic donors, especially to museums, have amassed a fortune in the pharmaceutical business on the sales of Oxycontin.

            Is there such a thing as “dirty money”?  The term “filthy lucre” is after all biblical.  Milton called gold the “precious bane,” or poison.  There is a long history of very rich people with troubled consciences trying to make symbolic restitution through charitable bequests.  This practice has undoubtedly on more than one occasion been encouraged by the charitable recipients.  One of the great gems of Italian Gothic art is the Arena Chapel in Padua, famous for its Giotto frescos.  This building is also known as the Scrovegni Chapel.  The Scrovegni family was alleged to have made its fortune out of usury.  Usury was the lending of money at interest.  Though now called “the American way of life”, it was regarded in the thirteenth-century dawn of contemporary banking practice as a horrible sin.  It is believed that a Scrovegni heir undertook the chapel project in hope of expiation of the sins of his sire.  The Franciscans, whose iconography provides the decorative scheme of the chapel, were particularly ferocious in their denunciation of usury.  Somewhat later in the fourteenth century Chaucer’s venal friar encourages money gifts as actual evidence of repentance.  “For unto a povre ordre for to yive”—thus does the poet ventriloquize the friar’s thoughts—“is signe that a man is well yshryve”.  There is a very fine Victorian church in a small city in the southern English Midlands.  It has a proper ecclesiastical dedication to some saint or other, but it is known locally as “Phipp’s Fire Escape”, Phipps being a local beer baron who had bankrolled the new building in response to charges from Temperance agitators that he was largely responsible for the scourge of working-class alcoholism in the area. 

filthy lucre in an old Dutch misericord

            At least two distinct questions are raised by these anecdotes.  One of them—can financial contributions to worthy causes expiate the unworthy means by which the money was accrued?—is a theological question I lack the competence, no less than the inclination, to approach.  The second, fully relevant even in our relentlessly secular age, is this: Is there such a thing as dirty money?  This seems to me by no means a question easy to answer.  We might begin in the manner of Aquinas by arguing that there must be dirty money since, in the account of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus, the ecclesiastical authorities refused to accept for the Temple treasury the thirty pieces of silver thrown down by the repentant Judas because it was “the price of blood”—literally the statutory financial recompense for manslaughter.  The consensus of early philosophers and theologians alike, however, was that things, inanimate objects, were morally indifferent.  A knife could be used to cut a loaf of bread or to cut a man’s throat—the morality of the action was determined by the use to which the knife was put and the human volition animating that use.  The ecclesiastical authorities who would not put “the price of blood” into the Temple treasury were willing to use it to purchase land for the burial of paupers.

            Here the examples of my opening paragraph become relevant.  I presume that neither yacht owners, nor playground developers, nor the manufacturers of Oxycontin have done anything illegal.  But whereas the most conspicuous private consumption of the super-rich elicits at worst private disgust, the public philanthropy of the Sacklers becomes the occasion of international protest.  As an avid museum-goer, one of whose favorite venues is the Sackler Museum of Asian Art in Washington, I am extremely grateful to be able to see, along with any other interested art lovers, beautiful things that I would never have the opportunity to see were they to be monopolized by rich collectors.  The Sacklers could have spent that money on a yacht or a Greek island, or probably a small flotilla of yachts and a small archipelago, for their own private use and enjoyment.  There would have been no protestors in Paris, or, I dare say, anywhere else.  The public use to which they put a large chunk of their private fortune seems to me unequivocally to be preferred, from the moral point of view, to any number of private uses they could have chosen.

An unpleasant thought from the Scrovegni Chapel

            There were huge intellectual changes between the time of the Scrovegnis and the beer baron Phipps.  But even in Victorian times many people believed in a version of the Last Judgment, and acted upon that belief.  They sought a “fire escape” through conspicuous public good works.  By the time of Jay Gatsby,  one of our earlier and distinctively American start-up legends for whom a strange romantic yearning has replaced traditional morality, protocols of social snobbery might make one eager to conceal the sources of one’s wealth, even if they were legal.  "I was in the drug business and then I was in the oil business. But I'm not in either one now."  Still I find it hard to credit the idea of dirty money.  I have a few twenty dollar bills in my wallet.  I have no idea whether their last temporary users were stick-up men or sex traffickers.  Obviously, I hope not, for aesthetic reasons if no others, but the bank-notes themselves are indifferent tokens in a conventional sign system.  They have no moral status independent of the use to which I put them.