In his Wall Street memoir, Liar’s Poker (1989), Michael Lewis recounts his time selling bonds for the now defunct investment bank Salomon Brothers. At the time, Salomon billed its trading floor as a near-perfect meritocracy. As Lewis saw it, however, the only merit relevant to the firm was the ability to make lots of money. Honesty, respect for colleagues and customers, and decent behavior in general — such things were not so much despised as they were relegated to utter irrelevance. Writes Lewis: 

Some of the [bond traders] were truly awful human beings … They harassed women. They humiliated trainees. They didn’t have customers. They had victims. Others were naturally extremely admirable characters. They inspired those around them. They treated their customers almost fairly. They were kind to trainees. The point is not that a [successful trader] was intrinsically evil. The point is that it didn’t matter one bit whether he was good or evil as long as he continued to swing that big bat of his … Goodness was not taken into account on the trading floor. It was neither rewarded nor punished. It just was. Or it wasn’t.

The Salomon Brothers depicted in Liar’s Poker is an admittedly extreme example of a culture that values only “results” (in this case, revenue). But Lewis’s memoir feels like only an exaggeration of how the world basically works, rather than a fabrication or an anomaly. Fairness, respect, kindness and decency are all very nice, generally valued, and widely praised — but they are ultimately secondary to those behaviors and attitudes that make money, win elections, forge alliances, neutralize threats and so forth. “Goodness,” by itself, just isn’t going to cut it. It isn’t going to get you promoted on the trade floor. It’s probably not going to get you named Person of the Year. And it’s certainly won’t keep Vladimir Putin’s tanks out of Ukraine. 

“The Wrong shall fail / The Right prevail / With peace on earth, good-will to men.” So wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on Christmas Day, 1864, as the American Civil War raged on. In fact, the right did end up prevailing — that is, the North won the war the following year, but not because of the righteousness of their cause. Rather, the Union won because it held massive advantages in manpower and especially in industrial capacity over the South. Being on the side of the angels is great, but it’s not going to do much for you if you don’t have the firepower to back it up. 

That tens of millions of people were still celebrating the birth of Jesus in 1864 (as they are now), is testament to his having profoundly altered the course of human history. There is no doubt that Christianity has reordered the values of western civilization and beyond over the last two thousand years. At the same time, the eschaton has not arrived. The old logics of power, wealth, status and security hold enormous influence over our lives; indeed, it is difficult to see how we can survive as individuals and nations without pursuing these things to some degree. The basic rules of the game have not changed that much since before the birth of Jesus: If you can be good, so much the better — but at the end of the day you had better produce, or you’re not going to make it. 

But the Christmas story itself challenges this seemingly inescapable logic. When the “Word became flesh and dwelled among us,” he came as a baby. In the manger, the incarnate God could not make or do anything of value; he certainly had no big bat to swing. “The desire of all nations” was born like the rest of us, tiny and helpless. Here was Goodness itself, in human form, and “it just was.” It was a Goodness irrelevant to the rest of the world — the glad tidings of great joy did not meet Caesar’s ears — but in reality the goings-on of the world were of secondary importance compared to it. 

When Michael Lewis wrote that goodness “just was” on the Salomon Brothers trading floor, his point was to highlight its irrelevance in the “real world.” But it turned out that the truly ephemeral thing was Salomon Brothers itself. Salomon Brothers fell, as will every other human institution in the course of time. But Goodness is eternal. 

God is very much aware that we’ve got to make certain things happen in order to stay alive (see Mt 6:32), and it is a praiseworthy and indeed deeply Christian thing to work towards making the world a more humane place to live for everyone. On the other hand, the world will always demand performance in some way or another. There will always be a large swath of people who can’t make the cut, and an equally large swath of people who do, but find themselves exhausted in the process. For these people there is solace. God’s love is completely free from the apparently inexorable human logics of performance-based rewards and punishments. God’s incarnation as a powerless baby shows us that “results” are not the fundamental reality. The fundamental reality, in fact, is the Goodness that Just Is, and he is a person we can know.

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