AVARICE


Avarice, greed, is an ancient concern of humanity.

The Greeks told a tale of Atalanta, a young woman who challenged her 
suitors to a race. If they outran her, she would marry them. If they failed, she 
would kill them. Hippomenes outwitted her by placing three golden apples 
along the way. She stopped and admired them, and then picked them up for 
her own. While she was pausing at the third golden apple, Hippomenes 
caught her and took her in his arms. Not only was the race lost by her desire 
for gold, so ultimately was her life as the marriage proved to be a disaster for 
both of them.

Avarice, the love of gold and all that glitters, the desire for wealth, an 
inordinate love of things, is an ancient concern of humanity.

The Greeks valued proportionality, what Aristotle called “The Golden 
Mean.”  Avarice knows no limits. It keeps on grasping for more things, more 
wealth, more power. The Greeks condemned greed because it distorts our 
humanity.

In the Christian scriptures, Jesus tells the rich man that the way to be saved 
is to sell all he owns and give it to the poor. Jesus teaches that “the love of 
money is the root of all evil…for you cannot serve two masters, God and 
mammon.”  Jesus does not condemn wealth—he has friends who are quite 
well off—but he does condemn avarice, the inordinate love of money and 
wealth and things.

The early Church Fathers did condemn wealth, claiming that all money-
making was avaricious, damning business enterprises as a diversion of the 
soul from spiritual concerns.

In 600 CE, St. Gregory jotted down a list of what came to be called the 
Seven Deadly Sins—anger, envy, lust, gluttony, pride, sloth together with 
avarice. 

Avarice is an ancient concern of humanity.

Should it be our concern?

Former Treasury Secretary William Simon thinks not, claiming that “greed’s 
not a pejorative word.”  

William Safire calls avarice  “a virtue…the best engine for betterment 
known” to us. Only the greedy can help the needy. Only our capitalistic 
system of encouraging everybody to look out for themselves can “enrich us 
without impoverishing our neighbor.”  
 
But even Safire says “I recognize that there can be too much of a good 
thing.” Too much of grasping hungrily for more and more and more is not a 
good thing, even in this economic conservative’s mind. 

Theologian Walter Wink thinks there is already too much grasping. “Our 
entire social system, has become an ‘economy.’; no earlier society would 
have characterized itself thus. Profit is the highest social good. Consumerism 
has become the only universally available mode of participation in modern 
society.” 

So junior high students in Woodside, California, are taught a course on 
“How To Be a Millionaire.” 

So Jacquelyn Allen-MacGregor, while a United Way executive, steals $1.9 
million to satisfy her love of expensive show horses.

So weapons manufacturers stand up to Donald Rumsfeld and force him to 
put back into the federal budget weapons systems that are known to be 
useless.

So Saline’s Lisa Bonder, a successful and well-to-do tennis pro, demands 
$320,000 a month in child support from billionaire Kirk Kerkorian.

So states drop taxes and add lotteries to raise revenue, luring the money for 
the tickets by the promise of huge returns, the odds against which are 
themselves huge. 

So a few years ago several crew members of the Enola Gay, the bomber that 
dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, begin marketing souvenirs like 
t-shirts, coffee mugs, caps , and books to commemorate the event.

So millionaire baseball players sell their autographs.

So following the Persian Gulf war of 1991, numerous associates of President 
Bush—his sons Neil and Marvin, James Baker, John Sununu and others—
use their contacts with government leaders in Kuwait to broker hugely 
profitable deals for the companies they represent. General Norman 
Schwartzkopf, offered the same opportunity, refuses, saying, “American 
men and women were willing to die in Kuwait. Why should I profit from 
their sacrifice?”

So we  now know too well the names of Enron, Global Crossing, Tyco, 
WorldCom,. Arthur Andersen, Imclone, and Kmart, companies whose 
leaders made away with millions and tens of millions while the employees 
and stockholders were left holding the bag. 

So we have become too familiar with the names and the antics of Ken Lay, 
Dennis Kozlowski, Samuel Waksal, Gary Winnick,  Bernie Ebbers, and 
Charles Conaway, individuals who were caught rigging corporate systems 
for their benefit even as their companies collapsed.

Max De Pree, the former head of office furniture manufacturer Herman 
Miller, calls all of this “natural, sinful greed.”

As one woman says to another in the cartoon by Dd, “It’s taken me a while, 
but I can finally see the value in having tons of money.”

In America, that is part of the Dream. That is what makes millionaire tv 
shows so popular and lotteries of all kinds and romantic novels and films 
about the rich. It is what drives most of us in our society towards the 
accumulation of things—in my case, books and tapes and with no effort 
whatsoever clothes. It is part of the mythos of our culture to want to have 
tons of money with which to buy tons of things

Americans are unusual in this only in the vast wealth that we have created. It 
is part of the mythos of the human race to want to be rich. Remember Tevye 
in Fiddler on the Roof asking “would it spoil some vast eternal plan if I were 
a very rich man?”

Or consider how many people in other lands want to come to America where 
“the streets are paved with gold,” or alternatively allow their countries to 
become copies of America, with American tv shows and American products, 
all directly or subliminally nurturing dreams of wealth. 

Avarice is a worse problem in our land than in others only because of our 
material success. 

Should we be concerned about avarice? Yes, we should.

A major reason to be concerned is the growth of huge income disparities, 
which in turn lead to lives so different that one group cannot talk to the 
other.

The New York Times reported a few months ago that the 13,000 richest 
families in America now have almost as much income as the 20 million 
poorest. The average income of these 13,000 families is 300 times that of an 
average middle class family. 

Corporate executives who buy $6,000 shower curtains, $15,000 poodle-
shaped umbrella holders, and $2 million Sardinian birthday parties for their 
wives, who have as Jack Welsh had a $2.5 million expense account for 
household necessities for life will not be able to understand the struggles of a 
Ruth Shaver who was laid off her job at Safeway after 22 years because a 
Wall Street raider bought Safeway and dumped the debt load of the stores (at 
one of which she worked) so that her $12.06 an hour wage was reduced to 
$5.70 an hour in her next job and she lost her credit rating and her car. 

Does it matter that the rich understand the poor? 

It does. Alan Paton, the great South African writer of the mid-20th century, 
tells us why. “A man who earns a quarter or an eighth or a twelfth of what 
you earn is not just a poor man; he is another kind of man. You cannot make 
common cause with him; you cannot cherish any common goal with him; 
you cannot share a common love of country—unless under the influence of 
some transcendent love. He is alien to you. Although he is poor, you fear 
him, even hate him. You form the habit of referring to him and those like 
him as ‘they.’ There are many nasty words in the English language, but none 
is nastier than ‘they’.”

Avarice undermines community.

We need to be concerned about avarice as well because it is morally wrong. 

Gandhi wisely observed that “the earth provides enough to satisfy every 
person’s needs, but not for every person’s greed.”  

Greed is wrong because it deprives others of what they need. It is wrong 
because it unfairly allows someone not deserving of so much—who is? who 
could be?—to have too much.  

It is wrong because avaricious behaviour always involves using other people 
as means to our ends. There is no deeper moral principle in our society than 
that people should always be respected as ends in themselves.

Avarice is a moral failing.

Greed is wrong psychologically as well. Greed by definition is insatiability, 
the incapacity to be satisfied no matter how much you have,

Jules Feiffer has a cartoon that shows a woman with a distraught face, 
saying, “I want!” She repeats this several times with increasing desperation, 
until a horde of things is brought to her and dumped at her feet. She studies 
this pile of things, then jumps on it and declares, “I don’t like it.” 

If greed animates our lives, then we will be perpetually unhappy no matter 
how much we have. Insatiable desire more than contentment becomes our 
lot.

As Bertrand Russell observed, “It is preoccupation with possessions more 
than anything else that prevents…(us) from living freely and nobly.”

Avarice is as much a concern in the 21st century as it was 3,000 years ago. 

Why is this so? What are the sources of the greed that troubles us? 

One source is our need of pleasure and power.

Every person prefers to be comfortable, to be well-fed, well-clothed, well-
housed to being hungry, in rags, or without shelter.

Every person also wants to demonstrate some power in life, control over 
some aspect of human affairs or skill in some task.

Often pleasure and power are found in the same experience.

We can grow food for our family and for our friends and then prepare it for 
eating in ways that are tasty and tempting. There is power in this as not 
everyone has the interest or the patience to treat food lovingly.

We can learn to play a violin and hold an audience mesmerized, as Yitzhak 
Perlman can do. His gift and hard work give him power and, as anyone 
knows who has seen him play, great pleasure as well.

These are positive ways of striving for pleasure and power.

There are negative ways of doing this as well.

We can pursue pleasure to the point of death or foolishness. We can overeat 
our way into poor health. We can smother ourselves with clothes we have no 
time to wear. We can buy houses in many different locations which we 
cannot enjoy for more than a few days a year.

We can seek power without regard for morals. Dictators like Josef Stalin did 
exactly that, destroying everyone who stood in his way, even those whom he 
only imagined as enemies. Tyrants exist in business, in educational 
institutions, in politics, and in religious organizations.

The larger and wealthier the society is in which we live, the more 
opportunities to satisfy our love of pleasure and power in both positive and 
negative ways. No society has ever offered its citizens so many chances of 
finding happiness in pleasure and power nor is any society less satisfied than 
ours. We seem never to be content with what we have or what we are doing 
but always trying to gain more, to reach for a more exciting experience, to 
learn something new that will be more satisfying to us.

A minor but very annoying illustration of this is found in the numerous 
promotions for upcoming events that are interwoven constantly into 
televised sports contests. There is a steady stream of blurbs about future 
games, movies and shows. We are reminded frequently of news programs, 
all of which will carry the message of dissatisfaction. That same message is 
what all commercials are about: buy because what you have is not good 
enough.

The need for pleasure and power is a potent source of the avarice in our 
society.

A second source is the uncertainty of life.

We all know that it is an illusion to think that bad things cannot happen to 
us. Human life does not have security. We are fragile, limited in vision, and 
mortal. To live is to be unsure of what will happen.

To live as we do in a time of war and terrorism and economic instability is to 
live with a heightened sense of uncertainty. Like millions before us and 
millions today, we could lose our job, our home, the things that surround us 
and give us pleasure, the money we use to pay for life’s necessities and for 
life’s luxuries. 

It has happened before. It is happening now. It could happen to us.

Life is uncertain.

Will Durant has written perceptively of how uncertainty has left its mark on 
our species: “Greed, acquisitiveness, dishonesty, cruelty and violence were 
for so many generations useful to animals and men that not all our laws, our 
education, our morals and our religions can quite stamp them out; some of 
them, doubtless, have a certain survival value even today. The animal gorges 
himself because he does not know when he may find food again; this 
uncertainty is the origin of greed…This natural greed…still appears in the 
insatiable acquisitiveness whereby the fretful modern man or woman stores 
up gold or other goods that may in emergency be turned into food.”

Accumulating things is one greedy reaction to the uncertainty of life. 
Spending as much as you can is another.

The cartoon by Lewis shows an old man dying in his bed, saying to the 
woman by his side, “I should have bought more stuff,” as though shopping 
might have warded off his mortal condition.

“Shop till you drop,” we say, as though shopping by itself, regardless of our 
need for the things we buy, can bring calm to our souls. Having a lot of 
things can make us feel momentarily as though we are exempt from nature’s 
sway. To live in a comfortable home and to eat delicious food and to have 
the trappings of life that we enjoy around us and to drive a nice car and to 
have money to go to museums and theater and to take trips can help distract 
our attention from how little control we really have over our lives. 

Itis a temporary benefit. If we use it too often, we end up with an 
accumulation of goods that are of no real use other than to have them. 

Ultimately goods fail us because the truth is that life is uncertain. Rich or 
poor, we get sick, we lose elections, we are embarrassed, we die.

An important factor in avarice is a deeply rooted and realistic insecurity 
about the nature and outcome of human existence.

A third and more specific source of avarice in our land is the American 
experience.

Columbus got money for his historic voyages from Ferdinand and Isabella 
because they thought he might discover a shorter route to the Indies and the 
wealth that would bring to them. The Pope immediately took charge of these 
two continents as though no one was living here and divided the resources of 
these lands between Spain and Portugal.

Colonies were established in the Americas by English settlers and Dutch and 
French mostly as commercial ventures, while slave labor was introduced 
because it provided cheap labor. We slaughtered the native peoples and stole 
their lands. The great entrepreneurs of the late 19th century were rightly 
called “robber barons.” Con-men have been in abundant supply throughout 
our history. 

Benjamin Franklin wrote of enlightened self-interest being the basic moral 
code of our society. Some have been enlightened, but others have just been 
self-interested. 

Because we perceived that the continent belonged to Europeans not the 
native peoples, we created a myth of an endless supply of land and 
resources. John Cotton’s famous phrase describing the exile of Roger 
Williams from the Massachusetts Bay Colony expresses this: “He has been 
enlarged out of the colony.” (emphasis by KWP)

In the same year that we declared our independence, Adam Smith wrote 
WEALTH OF NATIONS, outlining the free market system that has become 
our god and our mantra.

Religion lent its support to this movement towards a free market system. 
Protestantism was the dominant religion of our land, and as Max Weber 
showed us a century ago, the Protestant ethic and the ethic of capitalism are 
close kin.

Unlike earlier Catholic teachings about business and money, Protestant 
teachings honored making money as a sign of God’s grace. The Parable of 
the Unjust Steward, who having been fired quickly makes a profit by selling 
off his master’s loans at bargain prices and is then praised by his master for 
his cleverness, and the Parable of the Talents, in which the servants who 
make money with their money are praised and the one who hides his to be 
sure he won’t lose it is condemned, became defining texts for the Protestant 
understanding of economics.

America became a model capitalist and Protestant country, the LAND OF 
DESIRE, the title of William Leach’s book about “merchants, power, and 
the rise of a new American culture.”

That new American culture is described by William Safire, in his “Ode to 
Greed.” He writes that ‘by hustling to improve our station, by indulging the 
desire for necessities that becomes a lust for luxuries, by competing to make 
our pile bigger, we engage in the great invisible handshake that enlarges 
pies…the cure for world hunger is the driving force of Greed.”

No society in the history of the world and no society anywhere in the world 
today offers such a plenitude of opportunities for greed as ours does. There 
are so many things. There is so much money. Expatriate J.P. Donleavy 
remarked on a visit back that “like anywhere greed, lust , and envy 
make…(the United States) work. But in America it is big greed, big lust, big 
envy.”

America is the land, psychologists tell us, where children who won’t keep 
their rooms neat are probably awed by the prospect of trying to put the 
stupendous number of possessions they have into some kind of order and 
keep them that way. 

Even those of us of ordinary means can quickly fill up our lives with things, 
what George Carlin calls “stuff.”

“…stuff is important. You gotta take care of your stuff. You gotta have a 
place for your stuff. Everybody’s gotta have a place for their stuff. That’s 
what life is all about, tryin’ to find a place for your stuff! That’s all your 
house is: a place for your stuff. If you didn’t have so much stuff, you 
wouldn’t need a house. You could just walk around all the time.

“A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. You can see that when 
you’re taking off in an airplane. You look down and see all the little piles of 
stuff. Everybody’s got his own little pile of stuff. And they lock it up! That’s 
right! When you leave your house, you gotta lock it up. Wouldn’t want 
somebody to come by and take some of your stuff. ‘Cause they always take 
the good stuff! They don’t bother with that…(junk) you’re saving. Ain’t 
nobody interested in your fourth-grade arithmetic papers, National 
Geographics, commemorative plates, your prize collection of Navajo 
underwear; they’re not interested. They just want the good stuff; the shiny 
stuff; the electronic stuff.

“So when you get right down to it, your house is nothing more than a place 
to keep your stuff…while you go out and get…more stuff. ‘Cause that’s 
what this country is all about. Tryin’ to get more stuff. Stuff you don’t want, 
stuff you don’t need, stuff that’s poorly made, stuff that’s overpriced. Even 
stuff you can’t afford! Gotta keep on getting’ more stuff. Otherwise 
someone else might wind up with more stuff. Can’t let that happen. Gotta 
have the most stuff.”

America is the land of stuff, a land that produces a gargantuan quantity of 
things which we must buy and sell or the whole system will collapse. It is a 
system featuring the greatest production ever known to humanity, and a 
system that causes us to have too much stuff in our lives. It is a system that 
encourages us to be acquisitive. 

In one sense,  greed is not really a matter of conscious design. It is more a 
case of simply living and breathing the abundant wonder that is America. 

Yet now we know things we did not know before. We know how 
desperately poor much of the world really is. We know the measure of 
hunger and disease and stunted life. Yet we continue to drain the resources 
of other lands, use the cheap labor of other countries, and now proclaim that 
we have a unilateral right to change the governments of other nations when 
we do not like them.

That is avarice, covetousness, greed.

The American experience is a third source of avarice in our lives

Our need of pleasure and power, the uncertainty of life, and the American 
experience all push us towards a greedy way of life.

For those who find this exhilarating and worthy, who agree with Mr. Safire 
and Mr. Simon that avarice does not belong on the list of deadly sins, then 
sit back and enjoy because you are living in the right place at the right time.

For those who are made uneasy by the greed of our society and by our own 
personal ways of being avaricious, there are some things that can be done to 
help offset the ill effects of avarice.

First, we can learn the lesson of how important the general welfare is. Adam 
Smith is a good teacher. 

Adam Smith believed that the purpose of a business was the general welfare 
of the society, not the personal enrichment of the owners and managers of 
the company. He wrote that “the wise and virtuous man is at all times 
willing that his own private interest should be sacrificed to the public 
interest of his own particular society—that the interests of this order of 
society be sacrificed to the greater interest of the state. He should therefore 
be equally willing that all these inferior interests should be sacrificed to the 
greater society of all sensible and intelligent beings.” 

Capitalism’s first voice believed that money-making is secondary to the 
common good. We could begin individually and collectively to live by that 
insight.

Secondly, we can learn the lesson of wise stewardship from business leaders 
of the past. 

David Callahan wrote a book about the 1949 Harvard Business School class, 
pointing out how different they have been from today’s corporate leaders. 
They rejected the pursuit of quick wealth and spent a lifetime earning their 
money. They did not become celebrities but worked with others as team 
leaders. They lived modestly. They saw business success as keeping people 
in their jobs not downsizing to boost earnings or satisfy the demands of a 
take-over artist. They believed that it takes a lifetime to learn how to become 
a good CEO.

Max De Pree was that kind of CEO at Herman Miller. He capped his salary 
at 20 times what hourly workers made. He made sure that every employee 
could buy into the company. He kept his own perks to a minimum. He 
thought of himself as leading a team, every member of which counted.

In our own stations in life, we can follow that example.

Thirdly, we can learn from those who have gone before how to live without 
greed. Henry David Thoreau, with his spartan and isolated life, may be too 
austere for most of us to follow, but Ted Williams was not. John Underwood 
wrote of  Williams: “The controlling factor for a man who has “money 
enough” to do what he wants is the will to resist the time it takes to make 
more. This, especially, was true in Williams’s case, because he never really 
wanted what “more than enough” bought.  (It would be recognized as an act 
of lunacy in today’s overinflated market, but he actually asked for—and 
got—a pay cut before his last season with the Red Sox because he said he 
hadn’t hit up to his standards the year before.) He knew what he needed 
because he had it measured, but enough was always enough, and he was thus 
able to flaunt a lifestyle that ‘big shots’ (his words) could not afford: 
unpretentious.”

We can all learn to set reasonable standards of when enough is enough.


Erich Fromm wrote of the importance of striving to be much, not to have 
much. That is surely what the Unitarian Universalist religious message is 
about: trying to be better persons so that we can help to make a better world. 

Part of our heritage is a commitment to work for that day when no one in 
this land or in any land will be poor in the things that are necessary to life 
but all will be rich in the qualities that make life decent and rewarding. 

To long inordinately or insatiably for such a goal is an avarice worth 
embracing, a greed for love and justice with which no human being could 
rightly quarrel.


Copyright 2003, Kenneth Phifer 

All rights reserved.



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