Money and Its Image Problem; D. Lapin

A frightening change during this period has been a war on the wealthy conducted in response to the public perception that some how the rich got that way by stealing from the poor. This perception includes the no tion that wealth-producing activities are faintly unseemly and that economic activity causes rather than cures poverty. There is a way to restore the prestige of business success that requires a return to tradition. In order to examine it we must first analyze the nature of money. Decades before our computer-controlled "virtual laboratories, " Einstein created his famous "thought experiments." They al lowed him to solve problems for which actual laboratory experiments would have proven too expensive, if not impossible, to conduct. Rather than measuring gravity in an elevator dropping down a three-mile elevator shaft, the great physicist showed that we can just as well, and a lot more safely, analyze the situation from the com fort of our desks.

In the social sciences, too, we can make excellent use of thought experiments. Let us Rabbi Daniel Lapin, president of Toward Tradi tion in Seattle, serves the Pacific Jewish Center. He is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and at the Jewish Policy Center in Washington, D.C. conduct a thought experiment to see if we can understand the origins of our own cal endar. The protocol proceeds as follows. We deposit a young boy and girl on an otherwise-deserted tropical island. Taking care that they have enough to eat, we set up concealed surveillance equipment and ob serve their development. After a century or two, they will have increased their numbers substantially. By now a full-fledged society, they remain oblivious of any other people or any human history. However, they will certainly notice periodicity in the heavens, eventually de veloping a calendar. After further centuries of experience, they will most likely discover that the solar year contains 365V4 days, in the same way that prolonged scrutiny of the skies will eventually yield them a lunar month of about 30 days.

However it is highlyunlikely that they will adopt a seven-day week. Not only is there no visible astronomic seven-day cycle, but seven does not divide evenly into 365, or into 30, which makes it an illogical choice. They would most likely establish a five-day week, as this would make each year a calendar replica of the preceding one. Why, then, do we have something as confusing and artificial as a seven-day week when switching it to five would make so much sense? Only because we retain a primeval, collective memory: that long ago, God initiated a seven-day cycle as a kind of 365 366 THE FREEMAN • JULY 1994 divine circadian rhythm. It is hard otherwise to account for the wide acceptance of the seven-day week. As the seven-day week is the product of a collective memory of a religious tradition, so too is money. While our clandestine survey will reveal the islanders bartering with one another, it is less certain that they willmakethe leap of assigningvalue to disks of metal. That, in all probability, would not happen on our island, as·indeed it failed to happen in many parts of the real.world. Most populations that were isolated from Bible based religious tradition failed to make the leap from barter to coins and capital.