It is said that ‘the economic man and the sensual man are insuppressible’. In other words, human beings must make both love and money, these being unstoppable drives. But whereas we celebrate love in song and poetry, we could never sing a paean to money. For love is associated with glamour, romance, ecstasy; money with greed, avarice, dishonesty. Love is reaching out to another, money is drawing tightly into oneself, with only a stack of banknotes or a pile of gold coins for company.

Indeed, the most repulsive—and at the same time pitiable—portrait of a human being must be that of the miser, a Scrooge or Silas Marner bent over his hoard, the thinness of his body, the pinched features of his face exactly reflecting the wasteland of a cankered life. When he dies at last, unable to take his wealth with him, he hears the taunt of a last laugh: ‘The shroud has no pockets!’

Wall Street has become synonymous with unbridled greed, and its most famous movie denizen Gordon Gekko, with the suggestive reptilian name, has become a symbol of a totally subverted moral system with his proud proclamation, ‘Greed is good.’ But nobody can disagree with the singer Lisa Minelli, when she belts out exuberantly ‘Money makes the world go round’, or with the novelist Somerset Maugham when he says wryly, ‘Money is like the sixth sense without which the other five are useless.’ And no Singaporean, in a conspicuously materialistic society, disputes the validity of the sardonic quip that this secular multi-ethnic society does have a common religion after all—moneytheism.

I once offered proof of money’s supremacy over even sex itself, through a light-hearted doggerel:

Here’s a riddle which is not at all funny,
Which is more important—sex or money?
Sex, of course, sweeter by far than honey.
Wrong. Ever gone a week without money?

So what exactly is the money impulse that can provoke condemnation at the same time that it is wholeheartedly embraced? Out of the welter of contradictions surrounding money, it would be useful to tease out a few sobering facts and observations:

1. Money is NOT the root of all evil; greed is. Although money takes its place among those products of civilization that have come to symbolize civilisation’s ills, the most conspicuous being the gun and nuclear power, these are ultimately neutral objects that can be put to good or bad use. Money can become the most sinister servant if it serves a greedy, unscrupulous master.
2. Money becomes evil when it becomes an end in itself, no longer a means to achieve something. That is the special disease of misers who may not be greedy but who have come to rely on the mere sight of the heap of gold coins, or the large bank account getting larger, as the supreme solace in life.
3. Money becomes, not an evil but a matter of real regret, when it is rated above family unity and harmony, as seen in bitter legal battles where family members take each to court over property. The more the value of houses and flats increases in land-hungry Singapore, the more frequent and intense are these battles. It is a sad truth that money has given the lie to the old adage of blood being thicker than water; it has become much thicker than blood.
4. Money in the hands of those who are not averse to using it for others’ benefit, is boon, not bane. Philanthropists who make millions and then make donations to support projects to reduce hunger among children, cure river blindness, build schools to educate an entire generation of children who would otherwise be condemned to child labour, provide education to women to enable them to escape the shackles of poverty and oppression, enable countries devastated by natural disasters to get back on their feet, are the very saviours of the world, doing for countries what their own governments are unable or unwilling to do. I am thinking of Bill and Melinda Gates, the world’s Philanthropic Couple Number One who may just single-handedly succeed in eradicating malaria from a whole continent.

Money doesn’t deserve that terrible label that the Bible has attached to it for hundreds of years. ‘Filty lucre’? No, the filth comes from elsewhere.

---

About Vignettes...

A continuing flow of little, readable pieces that will constitute what I feel is an important 'legacy of values' to leave behind. Read more about Vignettes...