Passing Gas in Reverse

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“Avarice is the sphincter of the heart.”—Matthew Green, c. 1730

“Greed is in, guilt is out.”—Anonymous, 1987

CLEMSON, SC—(Weekly Hubris)—2/14/11—Speakers of Hindi have an idiom that, loosely translated, means, “If a fly falls in a miser’s cup, he will suck the insect dry before tossing it aside and drinking his tea.”

I have a relative whom I’ll call “Diamond Jim.” Like his Indian cousins, Jim has never been suckered by man or insect. After Jim’s brother-in-law died, he loudly announced that the family was invited to his up-market restaurant. So we went and ordered freely because Jim had flashed a half-million-dollar cashier’s check at the funeral when rummaging through his shirt pocket for a phone number. (You should also know that Jim is known in the family for wearing a Rolex and a Timex on the same arm. He wears the cheap watch exposed at his wrist and the $10,000 Rolex above his elbow under his sleeve in the event that he is robbed.) As the waiter appeared with a stack of separate checks, Diamond Jim dropped a twenty on the table and slipped out the back door.

There are many ways to justify greed. You can call it “enlightened self-interest,” “wealth creation,” or “profit-seeking.” You can defend it as the healthy expression of “animal spirits,” in John Maynard Keyes’ famous phrase, but most any way you phrase it, it often reminds me of the municipal ducks at a Myrtle Beach amusement park. On any given summer evening, several hundred people buy food pellets to feed the ducks in the park’s pond. When one container runs out, other children will start throwing food from another location. Usually, the municipal carp are first on the scene but, within seconds, the ducks paddle up. Undeterred by the convention blocking their way, the ducks scramble over the backs of the carp to reach the food before it hits the water. It’s not an appealing sight, and embarrassed parents are quick to hustle their kids off to the merry-go-round.

Writers as different as Robert Burton and Baruch Spinoza agree that avarice is a form of madness. “Moral insanity” is the way one contemporary writer defined this cardinal sin, because there often appears to be no rational explanation for it.

Why other than due to a complete mental collapse would an acquaintance give up all rights to her four daughters and her comfortable home of twenty years in exchange for three million Euros and a Mercedes in a divorce settlement? Had she been willing to settle for half the money, she might have retained rights to see her children. A perverse grasp tighter than bark on hickory is the only explanation I have. Since the settlement, this woman has cruised the seven seas so often trying to escape her demons that pursers and crewmates from Singapore to Miami call her by her first name.

Another acquaintance (I’ll call her Sue) with a full military pension and Social Security has a habit of going to lunch with a group of friends and announcing that she isn’t hungry. When the food arrives, Sue grazes off the salads and desserts of the others. Once after she’d ordered a meal of her own, she picked up the three-dollar tip my wife had left. She then put down a five in front of her plate and pocketed the three. I’ll leave the math to you but, clearly, this shell game wronged my wife. I’d be tempted to write it off if I thought the woman was suffering from innumeracy, but Sue used to work for the German railway system and spent her days selling tickets and making change in a busy Frankfurt terminal. Often a traveler would race up to her window, throw down a twenty-mark bill, and breathlessly announce his destination. Knowing the train left in seconds, Sue would make change for the twenty using two-mark coins rather than the five (the coins were once very close in size, shape, and color) and pocket the three-mark difference. If anyone accused her of “coiniverousness,” she would apologize by saying she was in such a hurry to accommodate the customer that she’d made an honest mistake. The final straw came when Sue asked an aging, wealthy friend if she would include her in her will. Surprisingly, the request was honored. Today Sue is in line to inherit some very nice costume jewelry if she lives long enough to collect it.

If all our friends had arms as short and pockets as deep as the people above, I’d be a very cynical man. But Ilse, my German mother-in-law, who died recently, has restored my confidence. In 2001, shortly after she received a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, she asked her son, her executor, to take her to the courthouse. There she stipulated that she wanted birthday and Christmas money delivered to her children, their spouses, her grandchildren, and her great grandchildren for as long as she might live or her savings last. Her reason: “The shroud has no pockets.” Of course, neither she nor anyone else had any idea how much money she or her caretakers might need before death overtook her. Nine years later, she died content, we all hope, that no milestone had ever been overlooked: enough to warm the Grinch’s heart with enough heat left over for Scrooge.

My wife and I have often wondered where her mother obtained such counter-intuitive wisdom, for she was not a bookish woman. Instinctively, she understood that the person who hoards the egg in order to preserve its perfect shell will starve. So will the children, and Ilse was not going to let that happen. She had not survived two world wars without learning a few things.

Biologists have speculated that greed is a grotesque splinter from the tree of self-preservation. “Self” for the healthy individual is broadly defined to include family, friends and, in some cases, a favorite athletic team. But occasionally the system becomes clogged and begins operating as if there isn’t another entity worth helping on the planet. For Ilse, greed was the alien. Her altruism was stuck in the open position, and she did not know how to shut it down even if it meant she might be left penniless. Ilse’s golden years turned to copper, but rather than have them deteriorate into lead, she took legal action. There are 18 people who were beneficiaries of her selflessness, and every one of us, even the four who never met her, will pass on the story of her example.