A reader files this in our “What shall it profit man to gain the world and lose his own soul?” department:

You see Michael Lewis’s terrific piece on the Irish economy? He’s so good:

This graf caught my eye:

How did any of this happen? There are many theories: the elimination of trade barriers, the decision to grant free public higher education, the persistent lowering of the corporate tax rate, beginning in the 1980s, which turned Ireland into a tax haven for foreign corporations. Maybe the most intriguing was offered by a pair of demographers at Harvard, David E. Bloom and David Canning, in a 2003 paper called “Contraception and the Celtic Tiger.” Bloom and Canning argued that a major cause of the Irish boom was a dramatic increase in the ratio of working-age to non-working-age Irish brought about by a crash in the Irish birthrate. This had been driven mainly by Ireland’s decision, in 1979, to legalize birth control. That is, a nation’s fidelity to the Vatican’s edicts was inversely proportional to its ability to climb out of poverty: out of the slow death of the Catholic Church arose an economic miracle.

Lewis says in the very next sentence that even the proponents of this theory admit that it can’t explain everything. Still, I think it’s entirely possible that it can be true. The intrinsic immorality of contraception does not mean that contraception cannot be a means to wealth. Of course the more subtle point is that Ireland’s new wealth and the Irish people’s gross mismanagement of it has now destroyed their country. So they’re left flat broke, and without the Church, which they cast aside, as a moral guide. The story is rich with painful irony. One should avoid drawing easy and self-justifying moral lessons from this; after all, the Church in Ireland did a good job of wrecking itself and its authority by the way it abused the people’s trust, re: the sex abuse scandals, etc. The larger lesson I take from this is a terrible cautionary tale about morality, the corruptions of riches, and the difficult transition to modernity. Anyway, what an incredible story. If it profits a man nothing to gain the whole world at the price of his soul, how much worse is it for a man who, having made that bargain, then proceeds to lose the world?

I’m always reminded of Uncle Screwtape on the *real* nature of Faustian bargains:

Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable. An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula. It is more certain; and it’s better style. To get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return—that is what really gladdens our Father’s heart.