Mr. Zuckerberg's Ovation
Posted by Rebecca Teti in News on Tuesday, September 28, 2010 12:00 PM
The governor of NJ, mayor of Newark and founder of Facebook turned up on Oprah the other day.
They were there to talk about an exciting bipartisan partnership to improve public schools.
That’s worth knowing about in its own right, but not what actually caught my attention in this video.
Watch the whole thing for context (and you can find part two here), but the striking moment for me begins at 3:30, when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announces his $100 million challenge grant in support of the project.
He gets a standing ovation for his generosity.
Contrast that audience response of gratitude and admiration for the act of generosity with the political rhetoric we often hear about the wealthy “not paying their fair share.” It struck me that we treat individuals like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg very differently in person than when we’re talking about them as a class.
I found myself asking how many people clapping and cheering in that video also speak of “the rich” in their casual conversations as if all rich people were alike and wealth by itself made a person’s character suspect—as if no one could come by wealth honestly, use money for good, or acquire it without injustice to others.
Wealth and the ease that accompanies it pose moral dangers to the soul. It’s objectively harder to be humble when everything seems to depend on you. When you’re at the top of your game materially speaking, in a certain sense you can only go downhill, so it’s harder to believe in God’s goodness; and it’s difficult to enter into genuine relationships with other people when at the back of your mind is always the fear they only love you for your money.
In every human reality, however, there are particular virtues to be lived as well as dangers to be avoided, and liberality—the virtue which restrains the soul from attachment to money, and causes it to spend wealth very generously on others instead—is a virtue a rich man can aspire to in a way a poor man can’t. I can’t be “liberal” in this sense if I only have enough money to feed my children.
It is the love of money, not money itself, which is the root of all evil, according to St. Paul.
Poverty, likewise, has both hazards and rewards. It’s easier for a poor man to enter heaven, because the very nature of his life can be a daily confrontation with his weakness and need to depend on God. But the condition of poverty in itself is not virtuous—and to the extent it tempts us to grumbling, envy, or in extreme cases to theft or despair—it poses its own dangers.
In fact, St. John Chrysostom teaches that the basis for Christian social justice is the fact that people in anxiety over how to feed their kids have no leisure for prayer—so evangelization requires creating conditions in which people have enough wealth and stability to have leisure enough to pray. Chrysostom also teaches that our differences—including class differences—are willed by God so we will need each other and grow in charity.
Which is only to say that Mr. Zuckerberg’s standing “o” highlighted for me the good of treating people as individuals, and resisting the class warfare rhetoric that’s tossed around a lot during election years (in different respects from both sides of the political spectrum—the number of Congressmen whose rhetoric on C-SPAN is nothing more than denouncing the motives of anyone who disagrees with them is depressing!).
This is part of the principle of Catholic social justice known as “solidarity”—that we be mutually pulling for one another, not treating life as a zero sum game.
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