A St. Nicholas Day Message: Conscience and Money

Here is a St. Nicholas Day thought by my Dutch-born mother, writing 50 years ago, when the family was in Montreal because my father was working there for the U.N. Given the way that the 21st century has opened, with the dot-coms, Enron, Global Crossing and Global Warming, and now the spreading subprime-mortgage problems, the issues she was raising are in stark relief.

A ST. NICHOLAS DAY MESSAGE: CONSCIENCE AND MONEY
By Hilda van Stockum, December 6, 1957

It strikes me that the whole area of finance has imperceptibly crept outside the boundaries of moral awareness. People tend to think in terms of profit and loss, not in terms of good and evil. Yet nowhere is ethical consideration so necessary. How much of our life is dominated by buying and selling, how much is being changed by modern trends in manufacture and trade… yet no one seems to think it necessary to ask: “Are we furthering the right principles?”

I was looking at an American television program for children one Saturday morning, and I was struck by the bad quality of the program itself, full of improbable bad guys and improbable good guys, much too exciting and violent. Ten minutes were devoted to a lighting of a dynamite fuse about to blow up a sleeping boy in a cave, before the galloping horse was allowed to come to the rescue. It was interlarded with drooling appeals to children to ask their mommies to buy them succulent lollipops or chocolate bars or ice cream cones, while some smug child was licking at the aforementioned article with tempting expressions of pleasure.

The thought that came into my mind was: “This is not fair!” I saw the harassed housewife, trying to make ends meet and keep her children away from the dentist or doctor, besieged by the little horrors with cries of “Ah mom, give me a sucker or chocolate,” and finally succumbing from sheer weariness, to the detriment of her purse and her child’s health.

I felt it was hitting below the belt to address the modern barrage of advertising to little children, the most suggestible creatures in the world, without the sense to resist. There is a strong mother instinct that wants to make children happy, but should this be exploited for the purpose of financial gain?

Yet many people, when I talk about this, say: “I don’t see what morals have to do with it. It is good business."

Now I do not deny that business is a good thing. But how can it remain a good thing without morals? Is it really irrelevant HOW we spend or earn money?

Irresponsibility usually leads to chaos, and then order has to be brought in by force. I think it would be to the advantage of businessmen and housewives alike, if they gave a thought to the moral side of money.

If we appeal always to the weaknesses and vices of the public in our advertisements, we are necessarily going to increase these weaknesses and vices. Some Martian visitor to this planet might get a queer idea of our civilization by reading the appeals in our ads. He would think that the only thing Canadians care about is to smell nice, to attract the opposite sex, to rival the neighbors and to eat quantities and varieties of food.

Luckily, of course, advertisers are not completely successful. But is this trend to try to make the poor hardworking father spend the money he needs for the rent on a new car or a new refrigerator a healthy trend?

In a sense, how we use our money determines not only our own lives but those of others too. If we wish for foolish, vulgar or ugly objects, and make others want them, a certain number of people will spend their lives making them. What we ask for, will be supplied. What we make, others will be induced to ask for. But is there no place in these transactions for a thought as to their usefulness, or moral value?

This is a very complex and difficult question. What one person considers good and necessary, may be despised by another. There are no hard and fast rules. But I do suggest that this side of the matter is worthy of attention.

I think we all have a responsibility, whether we like it or not. We will be answerable one day, I believe, for the way in which we spent our money, or caused others to spend it. I don’t think one needs to be puritanical to feel there is room for improvement.

Perhaps some day the irresponsible use of money will seem as strange and outdated to us as slavery seems now, and we will have learned to restrain our profit-making to what is legitimate and generally beneficial. Meanwhile, all one can do is throw out a hint here and there for other, cleverer and wiser people to pick up and work out.