A Revolution that needs a little more hope October 25, 2007
Posted by Zack in Missouri , trackback
Progressives (Christian and secular) have lost faith in humanity’s ability to intentionally manage our economies.
I’m not talking about central planning, but I am talking about collectively guaranteeing that everyone in the world has access to means of making a good living that’s sustainable and doesn’t destroy the earth. That’s just not an acceptable goal anymore for respectable progressives.
We’re comfortable with the idea of society guaranteeing bare essentials like water access, education, healthcare and a few other baseline services. We’re comfortable with the idea of society creating incentives against socially or environmentally harmful economic activities and in favor of desirable activities. But when we think of society, say, providing the resources to completely overhaul a polluting industry and making it happen, we think of Stalin. Or at least we think that such an ambitious project would be doomed to fail spectacularly. Don’t we?
One hundred years ago, and for hundreds of years before that, progressives had complete faith that it was possible for humans to build and maintain a far, far better economy than we have today. They expected that, by the year 2007, there would be no poverty, no preventable illness, no illiteracy and no war. They were divided about how to get there—incrementalism, violent revolution, non-violent/democratic revolution, spontaneous/anarchist revolution, etc—but they all believed it was humanity’s job to make it happen.
Yesterday I got a remarkable reminder of that optimism while spending some time with Walter Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis. It’s a 100 year old book from one of the leaders of the Social Gospel movement.
In some ways, it’s written with the same purpose as the other book I’ve been reading, Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change. But the difference in tone caused by the difference between the two worlds in which Rauschenbusch and McLaren worte could not be more stark.
Reading Rauschenbusch, you can feel how the whole world around him was on fire with change and hope. As bad as things were for the billion or so suffering poverty, a worldwide movement was in full swing to change everything. It was a real, practical movement with mass parties, some in power, and examples of societies all around the world leaping forward in development through various means—some lead by the movement, some desperately trying to stay ahead of it. Despite periodic setbacks, the direction was clear. And the endpoint was just as clear: no, not a Utopia, merely a world without poverty, unnecessary illness, illiteracy, etc…
Where Rauschenbusch wrote with the tone of being one voice in the cacophony of an already-500-year-old revolutionary movement, McLaren has to write—on his economic topic—with the tone of a lone voice in an almost silent wilderness.
Where you can feel Rauschenbusch’s confidence in humanity’s abilities to solve it’s economic problems bursting onto every page, McLaren can only offer beautiful but consciously irrational hope. He advocates resistance because it’s the just thing to do, but can promise nothing. At the start of a critical chapter named “A Revolution of Hope” he offers:
Can the suicide machine [of our economic system] really be stopped?…
The simple answer is that nobody knows. (p. 269)
There’s a new edition of Christianity and the Social Crisis out in print—peppered by (mostly condescending) essays from present-day thinkers. You can also download the full book for free thanks to Google books because it’s now in the public domain.
I clipped some interesting bits for you from Google books and put them here. Please take a look.
Tags: Brian McLaren, Christian Socialism, Everything Must Change, Walter Rauschenbusch
Comments»
On the first sentence of your post, “Progressives (Christian and secular) have lost faith in humanity’s ability to intentionally manage our economies.” I once heard Slavoj Zizek, contemporary philosopher, point out that it is easier for our society to picture the downfall of the entire human race than to envision restructuring our economy.
“I’m not talking about central planning, but I am talking about collectively guaranteeing that everyone in the world has access to means of making a good living”
Without central planning, who exactly is going to “collectively guarantee” and “intentionally manage” economies?
With central planning, how do you overlook the overwhelming evidence of the past 100 years that the greater the degree of central planning, the more it leads to death and destruction- consider Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and even FDR, who centrally planned America into prolonging the depression and into WWII.
Progressives who have lost faith in humanity’s ability to intentionally manage our economies are probably rationally responding to the evidence. All of good will want a better life for everyone on the planet but let’s not even considering going back down the dead end and deadly road of intentionally managing economies.
Tom (and Zack) -
I don’t disagree that central planning is a key mode of “collectivey gauranteeing” that everyoe has access to a good living. And there are huge problems with central planning. Fortunately, I think most of the problems can be mediated by turning back to the *local*. Only in our locality can we know and be known by our neighbours - people, wildlife, the land. And it is probably only this knowing / being known by that can prevent the Tragedy of the Commons.
I reccomend the author Wendell Barry for more on living locally.
This little thread is a great example of how progressives are stuck with two inadequate purist ideas about how to change the economy. The only alternatives we seem to be able to imagine are Stalinist central planning and localism.
This is a big topic — and I’ve been trying to find a way to initiate this discussion at length with some batch of progressives.
I’d argue that today we are embracing localism as a fool proof, safe answer to all our problems with the same naiveté with which progressives used to embrace central planning.
Until folks actually witnessed the results, they said, “What could go wrong? It will all just be so much easier if a central planner who represents the public good works it all out.”
Now we say, “What could go wrong if we all just turn inward and take care of our local communities and forget trying to plan anything regionally, nationally or internationally?”
Ericka, I know you’re not arguing for pure localism to the exclusion of any action on the part of regions, nations, etc…. Nevertheless, inward and local are almost the ONLY direction in which progressives are willing to look these days for answers.
But even before humans had nations, they were already deforesting vast regions of the earth and destroying whole ecosystems—we did that locally. I shudder at the thought of humans now with modern technology, acting only locally, without coordination at higher levels.
More relevant though is the question of how we transform the economy we have into something more efficient, less destructive and more equitable. If we only act at the local level, how can we transform whole multi-national industries? Locally we can NAG them, protest against them and whine about them. Through our NATIONAL governments we can locally apply pressure and make a little bit of change every now and then.
Yes, we have to keep our local perspective too. We shouldn’t go up and become the same corrupt, detached national leaders that we have today. But only powerful and organized national and international governments and institutions can transform whole economies. Don’t you think? If that’s so, then we need to take responsibility for politics at the national and global levels as well as the local.
I say, do both: Think Globally, Act Locally. AND Think Locally, Act Globally!
Any discussion of economies needs to include considerations of scale. (Large-scale capitalism is fundamentaly different from small-scale capitalism) I would suggest that the two authors referenced in the blog post had different experiences of the scale of the systems where they felt they and theirs were effective change agents.
Also, I imagine the elder author had a mental cause-effect picture that included an omnipotent diety. Just guessing on this point though.
I’d also like to point out that anyone who lived through or after the birth of nuclear warfare must have a different perspective on how cosolidated power works. Maybe not though. It may be that as the average human consciousness has changed to have more global awareness, the level of possible violence has grown in scale. So perhaps the fall of Rome was that age’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Zack,
As you’ve been trying to point out, I think again that the church has a good answer to the problem of the local/global dichotomy. We’ve always believed that the “church” is to be understood in two senses. There is the “universal” church of which all Christians are a part and the “local” church, which consists of the members of a particular congregation. So, by its very nature the church (universal and local) is an institution that forces its members to think and act both locally and globally.
I’d suggest the ideas in Peter Barnes’ “Capitalism 3.0: Reclaiming the Commons” as a good foundational component for bringing a healthier balance to our capitalistic economy, including at the national level. I posted some excerpts from Peter’s book (and a link to a free downloadable version) in an Open Left diary:
http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=460
Seems to me that the idea of a Commons for which we share responsibility and derive abundant benefits is one that both secular and Christian progressives can embrace. Whether we call it “God’s gift” or “nature’s bounty,” the sense of appreciation, humility and responsibility this idea can engender is very much the same.
And the idea of setting up “trusts” seems to be in harmony with a belief that God has entrusted us with his creation, and the related moral sense–that believers and secularists can share–that we have a fundamental obligation to care for the resources upon which future generations will depend.
McLaren’s question about the “suicide machine” of our economic system reminds me of Dorothy Day’s comment that “most of our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.”
I’m no economist — far from it — so I have little to offer in the way of new solutions other than to suggest we take a fresh look at the Acts of the Apostles, particularly that overworked second chapter, and consider whether there might be some kind of inherently Christian economy that we could begin to “live out” from within the church, one that would stress commonality, equality, meeting needs instead of wants, and caring for the poor.
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