Seven Sins: Greed is good, bad, and neutral, says Rahul Oka

Down To Earth (DTE) speaks to scientists and authors to take stock of what we know so far about the emotions of pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth; the historical debates around them and the critical gaps in our understanding.

In the fourth part, DTE speaks to Rahul Oka, an associate research professor at the University of Notre Dame, US, and an economic anthropologist. Oka’s research interests include development of socio-economic systems, and evolution of inequality and conflict.

Q. Anthropologists define greed differently than an evolutionary biologist or a psychologist. Why is it so?

A. This is one of the biggest issues. If you take five academics and ask them to define greed, they might come up with 10 different explanations. There are questions on whether greed is a deontological phenomenon, meaning if greed should be defined without any context or without any look at its consequences. And the opposite of deontological is consequentialist, which is if greed should be defined by its consequence.

A particular behaviour might seem greedy to some, but if the consequences are not negative, would it still be greed? It might be seen as ambition, too. It might be seen as something that we now value in our business executives. Gordon Gekko, a fictional character appearing in the popular 1987 movie Wall Street famously said greed is good. That particular mantra has basically been part of the early modern era.

My paper “Greed is good, bad, and neutral” precisely breaks it down into this particular idea that greed is good because it enables economies to develop by harnessing people’s individual innovations and group effort. Greed is bad when what is being extracted overpowers the things that are sustainable. When you look at Indian or European soils, we are looking at basically 1,400 years of continuous extraction and growth of urbanism.

In India, we are seeing the decline of small towns. Big cities are expanding to gargantuan unsustainable levels. Small towns are declining, and so people are shuttling between villages and big cities. And this is something that has been developing for 500 years. We have come together to generate this system that is now a global phenomenon.

Even in the US now, as the population grows and its demands grow, small town farmers and the small towns themselves decline and most of the land is bought up by agricultural corporations, causing intense pressure on groundwater and land. This is essentially creating tremendous environmental problems.

Now, the question is, can we define greed as just this deontological process that exists without any context, or do we look at the consequence?

Q. Most major religions view greed as something negative. Were there exceptions to this in not just religions, but also in philosophical schools?

A. Charvaka [a philosophical system of thought that emerged in ancient India emphasised materialism to understand and live in the world] had some different ideas. Just like the Hedonists in Greece at the same time, the idea that Charvaka evolved was that there is no such thing as moksha [liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth]. Charvaka negated the authority of the Vedas. Charvaka would say: Even if you go into debt, if your children have to pay your debts after you die, it is okay.

This was very different from Brahmanical Hinduism, where there was a push against the traders because they were thought to be greedy and parasitic. We use the term kanjoos to indicate their miserly nature. Trader communities like Marwadis or Chettiyars moved around and did not have a home base to stay and do their business. This made them the perfect outsiders, the scapegoats. You create this social causation narrative of the greedy person.

Q. When did this sort of shift begin in the world, from looking at greed as something negative to something that is more complicated?

A. The shift actually took place at the same time, in the 16th and 17th centuries, both in India and in western Europe. The Islamic world, on the other hand, was very trade friendly. It was geared towards encouraging and protecting commerce through the legal system.

Until the 14th century, the centre of European economic activity was the Mediterranean region, especially the Italian city-states. They were commerce-based. But in the 15th century, a shift takes place, where suddenly the centre of economic activity in Europe shifts to northwestern Europe, to Belgium and Holland, where traders were put in charge of charter cities (specific areas that are granted a special jurisdiction to create a new governance system). These were not new. Charter cities arose in the ninth century in Europe. In central Europe, they were institutionalised under what is called the Magdeburg law (gives the privilege of self-government). These were cities meant to protect commerce and comme-rcial specialists from predation by political elites because traders are easy to go after. They have money. You can imprison them. So these cities were built.

In India, we had the same kind of cities even two centuries earlier. The Nagarams and the Patnams were basically trade cities that were given by the Chola kings and the Chalukya kings to merchants so they would essentially build these cities. When the Islamic rule came to India, you did not really need charter cities to create commerce. Every city could be commercial because Islam was more commerce friendly.

But Europe saw a fight between religious elites, political elites and the economic elites. And it is around the 15th or 16th century that you actually start to see economic elites controlling vast amounts of capital because the shift from the Italian region to the Belgian region was the shift from commerce to finance. And finance is what trumps everything.

The shift was happening in India around the same time. There is a story from the Mughal Empire during the time of Akbar. The emperor’s ships were blocked because the Portuguese barricaded the port of Surat. Akbar’s mother was on the vessel, wanting to go to Mecca. The Mughals had their own sea admirals who were the Siddhis of Janjira. In the Mughal system, they can be the admirals of the Mughals, but they are also their own separate agents. So they had deals with the Portuguese. Even though they could have told them to shift, and the Portuguese would have listened, the Siddhis stayed out of the fight. They knew that Akbar had no power on the sea to punish the Siddhis and the Siddhis could not be defeated because their fortress was impregnable.

Finally, a Hindu trader (whose name we do not know) came forward and he said, “I’ll solve the impasse.” He told the Portuguese, “If you let the ship go, I would adjust the interest rates and lower it by 1-2 per cent.” He informed Akbar that the problem had been solved. In return, Akbar gave the merchant a lot of tax breaks. This was the first time in the history of the world that a trader actually solved an impasse that a grand Mughal could not. This is the time that you start to see the shift that is taking place almost concurrently in India, western Europe and everything in between, where the trader actually becomes a person who is not just economically powerful, but politically and socially as well. Suddenly people of trading families were being appointed to positions in the court. They were given charge of fiscal policies of the state in the Mughal Empire.

But the shift was not just in India. The world economy was unleashed. For whatever good or bad, it unleashed the early modern economy, where the state kind of took a step back and deregulated a lot of economic activity, gave tax breaks, legal protections, and so on. It unleashed so much activity, so much innovation.

Q. Has greed evolved in the recent past?

A. In the late 1990s, Bill Gates was hated for making Microsoft Windows programme the default one on personal computers. In 2005-06, Gates was somebody who was accepted positively for his charity. We see a lot of elites in the West contribute to science. That idea of generosity is actually a very old anthropological concept, where you can gain social capital by giving it away. When you are seen as a generous person, you gain social capital. And so it is the opposite of greed.

One of the biggest problems with Indian business elites is that they are some of the least philanthropic people on the face of the planet. We wonder why universities do not do well. We have people who go to our universities, make lots of money and they never give back. We seem to be producing students who will move to the US. It is like the Indian outlook has not changed since the 16th and 17th centuries.

(as told to Rohini Krishnamurthy)

This is the fifth of an 18-part series.

This was first published as part of the cover story of the 16-31 May, 2024 Print edition of Down To Earth