The Invisible Hand is Giving Us the Finger

I'm not a big fan of capitalism -- not because it doesn't work, but because it works marvelously for a small group of people, works passably for a larger group of people, and completely screws everybody else. The legacy of colonialism and exploitation in the West means that we've been able to gank the system so that the first two groups are overrepresented in our sample. Capitalist nations are prosperous not because capitalism works universally but because we've been able to make capitalism work in our favor at the expense of others.

Poverty is a very real problem, even in America, but it's easy to point to places in the world that are much worse and say "See? Our way is better!" -- only because we've been able to essentially offshore the lower strata. The capitalist system demands a continuum of relative wealth, and our ability over the past couple of centuries to make sure that the bottom of the heap exists somewhere else is hardly a credit to the system itself which -- in case this isn't obvious -- is structurally unjust. The figure of wealth is only meaningful to us against a ground of poverty.

Defenders of capitalism will point out that wealth is not a zero-sum game, and they're right; however, this defense conveniently ignores the nature of market economies, especially with floating point currency. Wealth is relative, and this requires winners and losers. For some to be rich, others must be poor as a point of comparison. "A rising tide lifts all boats," but this ignores the people slaving away at the bottom of the boats, languishing below the water line regardless of how high the tide might be. The implicit promise -- that allowing some to be ridiculously wealthy is good for all of us -- has failed to materialize. Trickle down, my ass.

Capitalism purports to be a meritocracy. It is supposed to favor the industrious, the virtuous, the strong. It is the grotesque love-child of Nietzsche and (Weber's) Calvin in which the Übermenschen are characterized by the Protestant work ethic. But that's not what happens. Capitalism favors those who already have capital, or who are either lucky or smart enough to work the system to get it. By way of a very simple example, I can inherit a million dollars, invest it at 10 percent, and make six figures by doing nothing. My money "works" for me. I do not have to be virtuous, industrious, or even very smart. And the issue here is not inheritance, it's that I can make money just by having money.

Or I can be hard-working and intelligent, but born into poverty and not manage to be one of the fortunate Horatio Alger rags-to-riches stories. How many kids have to not make it out of the projects for us to celebrate the one kid who does? It is precisely because such a one is an exception that the story is compelling to us. More to the point, perhaps: someone can work in finance, creating new ways for people with money to get more money simply by having money and make ten or even a hundred times what someone with comparable intelligence and self-motivation might make teaching first graders how to read. Capitalism makes these scenarios possible. It guarantees that such scenarios are possible. Attempts to cover this up or explain this away are just so much capitalist theodicy.

Inasmuch as capitalism is the economic sea we're swimming in, I don't fault people, nor do I feel guilty myself, for treading water or even paddling a little bit. We're all complicit -- all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, so to speak -- and one of the salient features of global capitalism is that there is effectively no outside. Everything's for sale, and even resistance is commodified. Some people's response is to duck below the radar as much as possible, to live in the negative space of empire. Some of them have books you can buy on Amazon. I'm not saying they're hypocrites; I'm just pointing out that there is no outside. No matter how much you might be able to go off the grid personally, there's something about the movement you're a part of, or what you stand for, that's eventually going to make someone some money.

[See part 2.]

Jesus Loves the Little Children (and I'm trying)

It's VBS week at the church, and VBS is a major production here.

Major. Production.

And I hate it. I hate the cheesy music, and the cheesy dramas, and the costumes. I hate the way everything else gets put on hold so we can have cheesy music and dramas for (mostly) middle-class white kids, many of whom already belong to another church. I hate the disruption of my writing schedule and the expectation that I'm just as excited as everyone else.

Needless to say, I'm nursing a bit of a bad attitude about the whole thing and I'm trying (mostly successfully) not to let that show. It's just one of those major ruptures in my attempt to pass as an evangelical, and I think I hate it, at least partially, because it makes me mindful of that gap. If I'm honest, it exposes my hypocrisy. I think VBS is a waste of time and resources. I think it's hopelessly hokey and I'm kind of embarrassed to be a part of it, yet somehow I justify my involvement with adult version we call church.

I sometimes dream of an exit strategy from evangelicalism, but that might not happen, inasmuch as we're embedded in this milieu. My kids love church -- hell, they even love VBS. My assumption is that it is annoying but harmless. Where I struggle is with the possibility that we're trapped in a cycle of enabling, perpetuating a kind of complacency. Kids are coming to Jesus! And we're even helping out some poor people! And this, of course, is the best we can do until Jesus comes back.

I don't believe that at all. I don't believe it's the best we can do, though I'm not doing any more than that myself, and I don't think Jesus is coming back to fix things. We fail to fully address the tragedy of the human condition because we have an out. This is bogus. I know this to be bogus. And I prop it up with my involvement.

I'm torn between the cynicism of thinking the whole schtick is just a waste of time because in the end we just die and the cynicism of thinking people might as well cling to their illusions -- I just provide the soundtrack. I feel like I'm part of the Titanic band, playing "Nearer My God to Thee" as the ship sank. Throw in a depressive episode that I refused to really recognize until it was over and it's been a pretty bad week. Fortunately, I'm feeling better but that doesn't make the other stuff go away.

I can survive by pretending that theology doesn't matter. That our complicity in a socioeconomic system that seems to be perfectly designed to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few while guaranteeing poverty for many (with a nice, soft, squishy, complacent middle holding things together) doesn't matter. If I spin things to myself the right way (and of course I always know I'm spinning; life was easier, if more dangerous, when all of my projects of self-delusion were subconscious), I'm just participating in other peoples' meaning-making. I can be okay with that. Except I have limits. And I'm at least smart enough to recognize that if all I ever do is help people (including myself) feel okay about where they're already at, I'm perpetuating a status quo I claim to hate.

I confess I'm a bit smitten with the theological musings of Slavoj Žižek. Žižek says some stuff that is batshit crazy, and I think he says it for precisely that reason. He's not really a theologian in any kind of confessional sense (actually he's an atheist) but a philosopher -- and he's very, very odd. Hard to watch on video odd. Not sure I ever want to meet him in person odd. But the overall shape of his theology I find fascinating. John D. Caputo sums it up this way:

Following Hegel, Žižek denies the distinction between the immanent and economic Trinity, between the generation of the Son and the creation of the world. For him, the absolute in itself (Father) negates itself in order to empty itself without remainder into the world (Son), of which the Christ is a singular sign, constituting a kind of first death or kenotic emptying of the Father/God. That negation is in turn negated in the Crucifixion, in which nothing less than the God(-man) himself dies, which allows the emergence of the collective "spirit". The supreme moment of dark lucidity is Jesus's lament "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" At that point, the horizon is wiped out, and the cold black truth is exposed that no one (save ourselves) is coming over the horizon to save us, that we are sustained by no overarching cosmic support. We are on our own. Just as in psychoanalysis, Žižek says elsewhere, the treatment is over when the patient realizes there is no "Big Other" (God or Man, Nation or Party, Father or Big Brother, Lacan's symbolic order or what Derrida called the "transcendental signifier"). [From Caputo's review of The Monstrosity of Christ.]

I was working toward something like this a couple of years ago here. I might temper Žižek with Caputo's own "weakness theology," and maybe scoop up some Philip Clayton along the way. I'd also toss in the Jewish mystical concept of Tzimtzum -- the idea that creation took place through God's contraction of Godself, a primordial divine kenosis at the very heart of creation.

Thus, the trajectory of self-emptying, from Incarnation to the Cross, is revelatory, not of a divine plan in which everything comes out okay, but of the Void itself. The Christ-event reveals to us the true nature of God as Emptiness, all the way down. [The thud you just heard was Mike Morrell falling over as he reads this. Pay it no mind.] Caputo argues that God is not a being who does things, but the name that we give to "a promise, an unkept promise, where every promise is also a risk, a flicker of hope on a suffering planet."

Where does that leave us? Same place we've always been: experimenting with ways to organize ourselves, trying to find something that works for all of us. It's a problem that is not so much awaiting a final solution as it is generative of possibilities, all of them provisional, some better in a given time and place than others. What we're doing now is not working, and it doesn't matter who's in charge. I no longer have the luxury of believing it's magically going to get better someday, and I certainly don't think it's going to get better by singing love songs to Jesus.

But I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do that would be genuine. More to the point, I don't know what to do that doesn't feel like a futile Quixotic attempt to find the Answer. I don't know what to do that isn't in danger of becoming an idol to itself, or just another thing that I used to believe in.

So This Is Blogging...

I got my bachelor's at a pretty conservative Bible college, which probably explains a lot, including why there's a kind of secret bond among those of us who attended and are now (let's just say) in a different place. Several of these people read this blog -- or they used to, before I fell off the face of the earth.

I can't remember if chapel was mandatory or just regulated by peer pressure. It seems to me it was mandatory, at least in theory. Each semester we got half a credit of "Christian service," part of which was being involved in some sort of ministry, or at least helping little old ladies cross the street, and part of which was chapel attendance. Lord knows what kind of mischief we might have gotten into if we didn't get our assess to chapel twice a week.

Still, there are always people who played the system. For every rule in the student handbook, there were at least three people willing to help you break it. Depending on the rule, there might even be people willing to sell you the means -- or be the means. For other rules, there were loopholes to exploit.

At any rate, some people got reputations as chapel-skippersl. I was always too chicken, but there was a guy on my floor, an upperclassman, who never went to chapel. He was a fun guy, actually, who liked Rush (the band, not Limbaugh), was a decent guitarist, and seemed like he'd be a frat guy if he went to a state college. He was constantly joking with the younger guys on the dorm floor in a big-brother kind of way, or maybe in the your-best-friend's-big-brother-whom-your-mom-thought-was-a-bad-influence kind of way, or somewhere in between. I'm pretty sure he drank, and I'm pretty sure there were goings-on with some of the coeds. He preached on the weekends.

I don't know that his lack of attendance ever caught up with him in a meaningful way. It was widely known on campus that he never went, but we never got wind of any kind of repercussions for that. And then it came time for his senior sermon. Graduating preaching majors either had to give a senior sermon or they had the opportunity to do so, I'm not sure which. Either way, most of them did, and our chapel-skipping friend was no exception. He showed up dressed nicely in a suit most of us had never seen. In fact, I don't think I'd ever seen him in anything but shorts and an AC/DC t-shirt.

He stepped up to the pulpit, looked around the room with a grin that would have put Zaphod Beeblebrox to shame, and said:

"So this is chapel..."