For Everyone June 28, 2008
Posted by Zack in : Uncategorized , comments closedFish!Regarding the conversation we were having last month about whether large-scale, long-term social change is necessary… Here’s an example Elizabeth and I thought up while on a hike a few weeks ago:
[Update — we definitely didn’t think this example up. See Jamie’s comment below. Apologies for absent mind!]
We were talking about how that “teach a man to fish” adage is so attractive these days. “Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day; Teach a man to fish and he eats forever.” Teaching people to fish is great. But what if no one has access to the river? What about when the right to fish is controlled by some greedy landowner who, thanks to his ancestors’ violent behavior, was born into ownership of all the river banks?
Then what do you do? You can teach a man to fish, but he has no where to fish. It’s a very good analogy for the economic situation of most of the people alive today, who have no access to any means of making a living.
To make this problem simple and concrete, imagine a small island with only one fresh water creek. Imagine that a small population of farmers live on this island. They need the fresh water to irrigate crops—and access to it to fish.
Now, imagine that one person owns the creek from its source to the sea. There’s a history, of course, to how this guy came to own this resource. And it’s a violent and unjust history.
Imagine further that the island has gone through great political change since the days when the creek owner’s family took control. The island is now a peaceful democracy: it has a government with checks and balances, all ultimately responsible to the people. The owner of the creek is now a political equal with all the other inhabitants of the island in a one-person, one-vote system.
So here’s my question: Would it be so bad for the people on the island to peacefully take the creek back from the guy who thinks he has the right to own it?
Because of their democracy it would not be a violent act. But it would be an act of force—just economic and legal force though, not physical force.
I submit that this is the main question that Americans will have to wrestle with for the next 50 years. “Skeptics” and Theists will approach this question in radically different ways. Theists have religious traditions—such as the Biblical tradition of Jubilee for Christians—that call for the return of the creek to the people. Skeptics have nuthin’. They used to, in the socialist tradition. But that’s gone now.
Now, the skeptics just have various tax and regulation schemes to win back some limited access to the creek over the next thousand years. That’s so lame though, who’s going to spend time working toward that?
Therefore, the Theists, especially the Christians, are our only hope. Unfortunately…they are currently conflating political “force” (taking the creek back through peaceful legislative means) with violence. And so they’re totally opposed to taking back the creek. Instead they want to pray for the owner and reason with him.
Part of this story is that lot of the Claibornagains (An awesome term coined by Thom Stark) have some access to the creek themselves. And so they have this experience of providing access to others…e.g. forming communities in solidarity with the poor who, through connection to middle class people, then get job recommendations, bits of capital through mechanisms like the micro loans or relational tithe, etc… (You can find the same story on the secular left.) It is definitely a very good story, when it actually happens. And from the perspective of an individual participant, it can look pretty good because, in the best-case scenario, you can see a life or two being fixed up. And I’m not diminishing the importance of that work—in fact, person-to-person real work has to form the foundation for bigger policy work.
But meanwhile, five billion people languish with no hope in sight — and no connection to any rich American Christians, or anyone else, to allow access to the creek. Is the proper Rich Christian response really to say to that majority of humanity, “Just wait until one of us comes to befriend you” ? A (peaceful) political movement to grant access to the creek would lift billions out of poverty. Why not do it?
Does any of this make sense? Please tell me what I need to flesh out to make this make sense.