Sex, Economics, and AusterityBy Jeet Heer The American Prospect http://prospect.org/article/sex-economics-and-austerityMay 7, 2013 [Excerpt]...Historically, attempts to prohibit sodomy (defined broadly as non-procreative sex) have had an economic dimension as well as a moral one. Economics, for the ancient Greeks, was household management (oikonomia being the Greek counterpart to our word husbandry). While the pre-Christian Greeks didn’t have any notion that homosexuality was sinful, they did develop the idea there was a tension between sodomy and the procreative goal that they saw governing proper household management.By remembering how the Greeks saw economics, we can make sense of the curious argument made by Aristotle—that usury was similar to unnatural sex, a case of money being generated by interaction with an outside party rather than the growth of a household through the fruitful union of husband and wife. In the Politics, Aristotle argues:
“There are two sorts of wealth-getting, as I have said; one is a part of household management, the other is retail trade: the former necessary and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another. The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of any modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.”
Aristotle’s linkage of non-procreative sex with usury profoundly influenced Christian thinkers. Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologica codified the fusion of Aristotle with Christianity, argued that:
sodomy and usury were both “sins against nature, in which the very order of nature is violated, an injury done to God himself, who sets nature in order.”
Echoing Aquinas, Dante placed sodomites and usurers in the same circle of Hell in the Divine Comedy. In his 1935 tract Social Credit, Ezra Pound, whose obsession with...economics took him down many historical byways, argued that:
“...usury and sodomy, the Church condemned as a pair, to one hell, the same for one reason, namely that they are both against natural increase.”
There is a flipside to this tradition of seeing sodomy as the enemy of the natural economy of the household: The counter-tradition of liberal economics founded by Adam Smith challenged the household model by seeing economics as rooted in the free trade of goods between households and nations. Precisely because Smith was more receptive to previously condemned or taboo economic activities like trade and manufacturing, he was also more open to sexual liberalism.Smith’s friend Alexander Dalrymple is now thought to have written an anonymous tract, Thoughts of an Old Man (1800), recalling that the founder of modern economics believed that “sodomy was a thing in itself indifferent”—a radical thing to say even in private at a time when sodomy was a capital offence, condemned by church and state. Interestingly, Smith was more reluctant to challenge the traditional prejudice against usury, although his students would conclude that the normalization of usury was the rational outcome of Smithian economics.Smith’s new and somewhat inchoate ideas were pushed further by (Jeremy) Bentham, who in an unpublished essay observed that sodomy “produces no pain in anyone” but “on the contrary it produces pleasure.” Pain and pleasure were key categories for Bentham as he developed the philosophy of utilitarianism, which argued a new goal for society: "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.”It’s no accident that in 1787 Bentham wrote a Defense of Usury, which tried to convince Adam Smith to take a more benevolent view of the hitherto morally sanctioned economic activity. On the subject of both usury and sodomy, Bentham’s inclination was to take Smith’s liberal impulses to their logical end. Bentham was in favour of consensual adult acts (be they sexual or economic) that led to greater happiness, whether they violated pre-existing taboos or not.... [End Quote]***For further research on usury’s connection to sodomy:Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Notby Michael Hoffman***