Pagan Gods Are Quick, Easy, and Disposable

How Ronald Coase's Theory of the Firm Explains Biblical Monotheism

Remember that it is your God who gives you the power to acquire might, in fulfillment of the covenant made on oath with your ancestors, as is still the case. If you do forget your God and follow other gods to serve them or bow down to them, I warn you this day that you shall certainly perish. (Deut 8:18-19)

Rav Naḥman bar Yitzḥak said to Rav Ḥiyya bar Avin: What is written in the phylacteries of the Master of the world? Rav Ḥiyya bar Avin replied: It is written: “Who is like Your people, Israel, one nation in the land?” (I Chronicles 17:21)

Outside the firm, price movements direct production, which is co-ordinated through a series of exchange transactions on the market. Within a firm, these market transactions are eliminated and in place of the complicated market structure with exchange transactions is substituted the entrepreneur-co-ordinator, who directs production. (Ronald Coase, “The Nature of the Firm”)

It’s easy to think that the sin of idolatry is simply the worship of numerically multiple gods. Likewise, it’s easy to think that the ethos of monotheism is simply the worship of only one God. But the crux of the difference between monotheism and paganism is not to be found in the numerical difference between 1 and n+1. Rather, the difference is qualitative. It has to do with why one would turn to only one vs. many gods in the first place.

A person who turns from god to god is using each god to achieve some end. If you can’t get your feed from Aphrodite, maybe Athena can help. If you don’t like Zeus’s opinion, get a second one from Hera. Easy come easy go. Greek Tragedy reflects a pantheon replete with enough diversity that you can pick your favorite god when convenient and abandon that god when convenient. In contemporary speak, paganism is the theological equivalent of “hook-up” culture. Now, perhaps it takes some trial and error to find the god you can commit to, and pagans eventually grow up and settle down into one god—the god of their place or country or ancestors. But this is not guaranteed and it’s not a requirement. It’s a choice. Paganism is tolerant, for better and for worse. The Frankfurt School philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, might say it is a form of “repressive tolerance,” but that argument is for another time.

The point of monotheism is that one’s relationship with God is not disposable nor is it interchangeable. It is also not instrumental or transactional. Although, God offers protection and blessing, the protection and blessing come as part of the package of long-term commitment. They come from life-long and generations-long investment, not one- night epiphanies or weekend retreats. The covenantal blessing can’t be itemized and unbundled like wifi, flight protection, and extra baggage allowance on a plane ticket. God’s blessing is an all-inclusive deal. Just as in a real relationship, you accept the relationship holistically, rather than haggling over every particular line item you wish were different. In business terms, God is not a contractor. And nor is Israel.

The pagan gods free-lance. The pagan gods hire and fire easy. They bill per hour. But the God of Israel has tenure even through the end of history. The economist Ronald Coase, who theorized the foundations of “the firm” can help us understand why monotheism often wins out. Firms are technically inefficient relative to contractors, but they make up for it by providing stickiness, trust, and reliability. You want people who show up to their jobs with loyalty and buy-in, not people who are constantly looking for better options and putting in a half-hearted job effort in the meanwhile. Job security is a tax firms pay workers for their commitment. A person on a yearly salary is less likely to quit their job than a person who is paid per hour or per project. The people of Israel are given a multi-millennia long contract, as it were. And God has to put up with Israel just as we have to put up with God because of “switching costs.”

I dislike that Apple keeps changing the chargers I need to juice my various devices, but I’m not going to stop buying Apple because then I’d have to deal with the loss of all my synced data, all my saved passwords, and all the time invested in learning to use Apple products. Apple isn’t coercing me—I’m free to leave—but leaving is energetically expensive. Likewise, God may dislike that the people are “stiff-necked,” but what can God do? Every people has its negative qualities. Every culture would “trigger” God. There is no perfect people. So God chooses the people that, given God’s need for some relationship, God can tolerate. We are God’s people and God is our God. The thing we have going for us is fundamentally that both we and God have chosen to commit to commitment, rather than to fly solo.

The insight that the monotheistic God isn’t simply numerically, abstractly one, but committedly ours, is philosophically articulated by Martin Buber, who suggests that we think of God not in the third person (I-It) but in the second person (I-Thou). It’s also articulated poetically and mythologically in the Talmud’s suggestion that God wears tefillin. Just as human tefillin features the Shema prayer which praises God for being unique, God’s tefillin features God’s own inverse Shema prayer which praises Israel for being unique. Why all this fanfare?

In Moses’s speech to the people in this week’s parasha (Eikev), he connects the sin of idolatry to the forgetting of one’s dependence upon God. Idolatry is connected to the belief that one might manipulate God or gods to one’s own ends. Idolatry is, at least in part, connected to a transactional mindset—one that see religious life as instrumental to some personal gain, be it material prosperity, emotional fulfillment, or spiritual insight. Idolatry means “using” God.

But just as we cannot or should not use God, God cannot or should not use us, treating us merely as a means to extend God’s dominion. A God who destroys each nation when it disappoints is as fickle as a people that flits from divinity to divinity. God wears tefillin to protect Godself, as it were, from the narcissistic tendency to see things only from God’s point of view. In the case of both God and the people, the aim is “self-transcendence.” A longstanding relationship enables the possibility of self-transcendence much better than one that is under continuous scrutiny.

As I wrote this week, God prefers the stiff-necked to the hard-hearted, because the hard-hearted cannot self-transcend. But the stiff-necked can. A stiff neck can be changed by habit while a hardened heart cannot. A covenantal relationship between one God and one people enables enables both self-understanding and error correction in a way that low-trust ephemeral relationships do not.

None of us can claim to understand the principles of divine justice or divine mercy. None of us can claim to understand how God keeps account of the world’s merits and demerits. Yet Coases’s theory of the firm illuminates the ways in which it is counter-productive to constantly keep score, especially when it comes to relationships nearest and dearest.

We read harsh words of Moses—words of rebuke—in this period known as the weeks of nachamu (comfort). The weeks of comfort are those between Tisha B’Av and Rosh Hashana. How can we take comfort in Moses’s words of stinging critique and forewarning? One hypothesis: God is not firing us.

We are stiff-necked, we are flawed, but we are loved. The monotheistic God’s vow to us is “until the death of history do we part.”

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh