4. Money Taboo – Filthy Lucre

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In Chapter 29, The Fundamentals of Good Behavior, of her Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home (1922), Emily Post advises that “A very well-bred man intensely dislikes the mention of money, and never speaks of it (out of business hours) if he can avoid it.” 80 years later (July 2005) great-granddaughter-in-law Peggy Post updates this advice in Don’t be gauche: Polite ways to talk money.

Where did this American money taboo come from?

Not all American ethic groups share this taboo–I know from personal experience that American Jews do not. After my parents were divorced, my father remarried a Jewish woman and I came to live with them and my two Jewish step-siblings in an affluent, over 80% Jewish town in Long Island, New York. I attended high school there and later attended college at State University of New York at Albany (SUNYA), a school demographically more diverse than my high school, but still significantly Jewish. Most of my friends and boyfriends were Jewish; I converted to Judaism before marrying a Jewish boyfriend I met at SUNYA and we raised our kids in the Jewish faith. Coming from a WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) background, I was in a position to compare cultural differences and observed (with individual exceptions on both sides) nearly opposite attitudes about money, including the importance of discussing how money works and of mastering concepts of personal finance.

The New York Times Sunday Book Review piece Jews and the Burden of Money by Catherine Rampell about Jerry Z. Muller’s essay collection Capitalism and the Jews outlines the development of this expertise and was particularly illuminating for me in connecting the financial illiteracy of the wider culture with a historical pattern of anti-Semitism:

For centuries, poverty, paranoia and financial illiteracy have combined into a dangerous brew — one that has made economic virtuosity look suspiciously like social vice.

Wait a minute, how does economic virtuosity become equated with social vice? Rampell explains that Christians were forbidden to lend money at interest–to make money from money itself–but Jews were permitted to do so:

This early, semi-exclusive exposure to finance, coupled with a culture that valued literacy, abstract thinking, trade and specialization (the Babylonian Talmud amazingly presaged Adam Smith’s paradigmatic pin factory), gave Jews the human capital necessary to succeed in modern capitalism. It also helped that Judaism, unlike many strains of Christianity, did not consider poverty particularly ennobling.

For Christians, lending money at interest was a vice, and Jews were the money lenders. Think of Shakespeare’s character Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. To this day, the Roman Catholic Church officially forbids usury, but the money taboo I experienced growing up–not discussing money–has its origins in a kind of Victorian Protestant self-disgust with its own capitalist work ethic (see a related up-to-date version of disgust here). Christopher Herbert’s “Filthy Lucre: Victorian Ideas of Money,” Victorian Studies 44.2 (2002): 185+, graphically depicts the Victorian dilemma:

A pious man, Paul says twice in the First Epistle to Timothy, must be “not greedy of filthy lucre,” for “they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition” (1 Tim. 3.3, 8; 6.9). The Victorian worship of money, rooted though it is in Protestant culture, is shot through with the dread and aversion that such passages enjoin upon all faithful believers. If money is a divinity, it is a “forbidden” one–one tabooed for human contact as a source of pollution. Hence the profusion in Victorian popular literature of moralized tales of misers and hoarders, greasy bloodsucking lawyers and usurers, and similar exemplary types whose morbid craving for money is figured as a disgusting perversion, often with overtones of sexual depravity.

The article goes on to discuss Charles Dickens’ novel Little Dorrit, as an example of Victorian popular literature dealing these “degenerative personality disorders” and the development of the money taboo as a kind of antidote:

The exact converse of the society mania, according to Little Dorrit, is a stringent system of avoidance and repression that expresses itself in the form of a panicky dread of indelicate references to money matters, or of even indirect contact with the taboo element of poverty. [...] Such a logic works like a consuming passion among the rich in Little Dorrit, necessitating nonstop recourse to what Dickens names, in a whole lexicon of terms for this apparently central, defining function of respectable Victorian society, “genteel mystifications,” “Circumlocution,” and “varnish.” [...] What Frazer would later identify as the principle of taboo is almost the dominant one in social life as portrayed in Little Dorrit, and no other behavior is more central to this society than that of refusing to be cognizant of unseemly, potentially distressing realities.

Mr. Merdle (the name itself a play on excrement), a rich financier who comes to financial ruin and ends his life by suicide, confirms the “irreconcilable moral contradictions” in the world of Little Dorrit:

This condition, Dickens argues, is intrinsic to Britain in the 1850s, where the capitalistic cult of money-getting and the Christian cult of the holiness of the poor and the blessedness of the state of poverty coexist. In such circumstances, that which we worship, gold, and that which we most despise and feel most contaminated and sickened by, excremental waste, are bound to seem at times like one and the same thing; rank odors will pervade the cultural atmosphere; and the feeling of nausea will be chronic.

Best not to talk about it.

Tagged as: Concepts