Visions of a Just Economy
Conversation with Adam Clark
Peter talks with Xavier University theology professor Adam Clark, a leading voice in re-imagining all the issues facing urban America, about how consumerism has become our modern religion and what justice looks like in terms of different social, economic and political arrangements. Hear new ways of thinking about poverty, debt, African American culture, confronting today’s forms of slavery, and the place of religion and the faith community in reducing the costs of a consumer world.
Running time: 00:57:33
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Full Transcript:
Visions of a Just Economy:
Conversation with Adam Clark
June 7, 2016
Adam Clark is Associate Professor of Theology at Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio. Throughout the conversation, reference is made to Cincinnati’s Jubilee Circle, and its Jubilee Forum series.
Peter Block: I want to give context for why I think what Adam is, and what he talks about, is so important. There’s a whole public conversation about wealth inequality, social justice, economic justice. There are all kinds of programs. I was a member of the war on poverty in the 60s so that war’s been going on a long time. There’s also a great conversation about Black Lives Matter, about the end of racism, the existence of racism, Jim Crow, modern Jim Crow … All these conversations are swirling around us.
Most of the work on economic justice has been a failure, as far as I can tell. We’ve declared war on poverty, and now it’s growing. The middle class is disappearing and getting thinner. We’re constantly asking whether your children are going to be as well off as you are; we’re not sure. I draw from that that the way we’re thinking about wealth, poverty, the way we’re thinking about people on the margin, the way we think about racism –– whatever way we’re thinking about –– it isn’t enough. It’s not strong enough, clear enough, powerful enough. If we just keep advocating more programs, I don’t think anything’s going to change, even though every single program has a worthwhile intention and does good work and is worth sustaining.
When I hear Adam, the way he frames the questions of slavery, the way he frames the conversation of Jubilee, the way he talks about consumerism, there’s a modern religion and here’s a theologian. Adam’s a theology professor. I just find that his language and thinking takes me somewhere. It opens my heart and opens my mind and so, Adam, I’m thrilled to have you. Much of what we’ll be talking about is contained in two videos, where I interviewed Adam. They’re eight and 10 minutes long. They can be found on the restore-commons website. Adam, welcome.
Adam Clark: Thank you, thank you. Appreciate it.
Peter: Where would you like to start? Do you have any sense of where a good beginning would be, or would you like me to aim us?
Adam: That was a great introduction to our contemporary landscape, and I think may be a good place to start is just what stories are we telling ourselves? What is the framing story in which we find ourselves in?
I think we find ourselves, if we look at our political situation, in a narrative of decline. All of our politicians’ are talking about the decline of what’s happening here. In terms of the loss of power for the United States, either economic, political, even the Western world is in a narrative of decline, and a consequence of that is that caring for the poor is very difficult because our civic culture is pierced through or saturated with fear and mistrust.
It’s very difficult, if you’re in an alternative community that is trying to raise the question of “How shall we live together?” What are the best forms of arrangements and organizations, arrangements to live together? It’s a frightening thought, because the instinct with fear is to go tribal. Is to think “my group,” “my group.” To really think of a vision to unite us in ways that are healthy and holistic is a very challenging counter-cultural thing to do. That’s where the word jubilee comes in. It’s an attempt to try to be a ray of light that pierces through the darkness of fear.
Peter: That’s a beautiful beginning, so let’s follow your instincts. I like the question you had, which probably frames your work, if not your life, is “How shall we live together?”
Peter: Then, how do we unite us in a way that pierces this frame of fear and scarcity? You’re saying jubilee is a light on that. Why don’t you describe your notion of jubilee?
Adam: Jubilee is a biblical metaphor that really begins in the Old Testament. It’s a period of economic re-distribution when slaves are set free, land is returned to its original owners, and debts are forgiven. Those are the three central points of jubilee: being set free, land return, and forgiven debt. In Cincinnati’s Jubilee Circle, the focus has been more on the debt forgiveness part of it.
I should add, also, if you’re talking strictly scripturally, it starts out in the Old Testament, but Jesus picks it up and actually expands the concept of jubilee in the New Testament by discussing how jubilee is not just something that happens once periodically, but we should be in a perpetual jubilee. It was originally thought to be re-enacted once every 50 years. Jesus re-envisions it as a perpetual jubilee that we should proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
The question becomes how God is calling us toward new communal possibilities, where solidarity with hurting and marginalized people is the litmus test for the world we’re trying to bring into being, which is shot through with compassion. It’s a truly challenging moment to have that type of language.
Part of our challenge is trying to craft the public language to bring this together. Also, to practice a certain type of values that would lead us more to rely on one another than to be against one another.
Peter: I love that. We are in the business of crafting a public language to bring us together. That’s a great insight. We’re not in the business of starting more programs, investing more money, getting better measurement, better management, all that. That’s what we’ve been doing.
Adam: You’ve been a veteran for such a long time, you realize that a lot of those options are pretty historically exhausted. Like we have to think bigger, we have to think cosmic, and not just of parochial.
Peter: I like that, historically exhausted. It makes them a little bit more noble than my experience. I just think it doesn’t work. It’s just too exhausted, and we have to let go of it.
I’m interested in your ideas about today’s world, slaves set free. Talk a little bit about what that means to you, and how you think about what that would look like. Because we’re [past the mark of] the 400th anniversary of slavery.
Peter: Where does that take you? The idea that we say okay, we want to set the slaves free today, where would that take us, do you think?
Adam: Just for context, the whole idea of jubilee [in Cincinnati], I think, was lifted from Pastor Damon Lynch’s sermon where he talked about 1619 being the year he marked as the narrative origin point where African people were taken to the United States through slavery. Then, he was thinking, what’s going to happen in 2019? That’s 400 years, so we should proclaim that the year of jubilee.
In terms of that, we’re talking about freedom from oppression, particularly racial oppression, in the black community. We’re already talking about it, from that standpoint. Oppression is multi-dimensional. It’s not just racial oppression, it’s also economic oppression. It’s also psychological oppression.
One of the things I introduce in our seminar on jubilee is for us to think more definitely and seriously about economic oppression. Specifically, not just about trying to make money, but about the ideology. I called it a kind of consumerism, the ideology of consumerism. How that impacts the way we are oppressed.
The way we think is more of a challenge, than a solution. How do we think about jubilee, in light of the consumerism or what some people might call it neo-liberalism theology or free market idea? That to me functions, not just as an ideology on a political level, but at a religious level. I went so far as to call it a new religion. It’s probably the most dominant religion in the world. Because it’s not just production and exchange, if we talk about consumerism. We’re talking about how human beings produce meaning for their lives. How they produce their ultimate values. There are certain types of belief systems that we have with consumerism. There are certain types of historical dispositions we actually function upon.
When I think about that, that it functions as a religion, it is something that is even more dominant than Christianity and Islam. Because of the grand narrative about the meaning of history, it causes a certain type of God-like function, like the market god,. which is shrouded in mystery, and it has reverence. It has certain types of priests that come out of the Federal Reserve, and everybody listens to them. These are the centers of value and meaning in our culture. We need to lay our critical focus on how that operates to enslave all of us.
Peter: Is there a particular form or way it infects or enters the black community?
Adam: That’s a good question. Yeah, there are specific ways. Let me start with a grander thing, and then get to the black community.
Those of us who study this know that our practices of consumption are not sustainable. Meaning that we’re exhausting all of our resources. We’re exhausting the ecology of the planet. If we keep consuming at this level, we’re not really going to have a viable planet. Our practices of consumption are related to what some refer to as the politics of disposability. Meaning that, for us to maintain this certain level of wealth and power in our side of the world, we have to make people on the other side of the world, or on the other side of our community, disposable. Because we’re going to extract for this.
Peter: That’s a powerful idea.
Adam: If we really are talking about a new set of values where each one is sacred, then we have to try to undermine this politics of disposability, which our practices lean toward. In the black community, I think that what has happened, especially after the Civil Rights Movement, that a lot of the focus has been on just trying to lift the barrier so that African-Americans can be on par with whites. We want parity.
What has not happened is to recognize that the procedure that whites have been doing is not enough, that their models are not healthy models to sustain. That’s even happening in the developing world. Like what’s happening with China and emerging nations, like they’re trying to follow the American model.
We need a new model. The critique hasn’t gone far enough. I’m talking about the main critique. There have also been people on the radical margins who have made these types of critiques before and been sustained in that, but the most dominant thinking has been about parity. It’s been trying to keep up with the Joneses. If they have two cars, we have two cars. If they have a bigger house, we’ve got to get one too. If they get a swimming pool, we’ve got to get a swimming pool. We haven’t sufficiently critiqued the very paradigm which started it all. That’s where we need to do some new thinking. We need to think of more healthy paradigms for human life.
Peter: That’s beautiful. We don’t realize that Jones no longer has a car in their garage and a chicken in their pot, living the middle-class life. Basically, we’re saying, “You want to keep up with the Joneses? Well, the Joneses are in trouble.”
What I was thinking is that in slavery, which began as an economic venture, what was extracted from African-Americans was free labor. Every time you extract from the people on the other side, our viability, our way of living, is then dependent on some people being poor, on free labor, free minerals, tax breaks on moving to town. What you’re saying is equality is no longer a viable goal, that we have to stop the extraction process. The politics of disposability is what you’re trying to do something about.
That’s an important conversation, especially when you’re saying we’re crafting a public language. You talk on a tape about who tells the story of history.
Talk a little bit about place. Tell me about the land being restored, what comes to your mind when we talk about welcoming back in and restoring the land that people once had. Where does that take you?
Adam: That’s a very radical point. What I think about, especially from an African-American perspective, is the subdued conversations about reparations. People don’t like to say “reparations” –– a lot of people on the left –– because they see it as a divisive issue, so let’s just talk about repair.
They talk about justice as repair, not just as even Stephen. How do we repair? Malcolm X, whose birthday was just noted a couple of weeks ago, said, “Look, a man sticks a knife into my back nine inches and I pull it out six inches, that’s not progress.” Progress is taking it all the way out of my back, mending the wound, bringing me back to wholeness and health. A parable of the African-American situation is thatit’s nice they’ve lifted it a little bit but it still hasn’t been repaired. Going back to the jubilee concept of returning land to the original owners, that, to me, talks about a certain type of acknowledgement of the wound and the repair of that wound. To think about that, not just verbally but also materially: How do we move to materially repair the wounds that we caused? That, to me, would be kind of a modern translation of return to owners.
Peter: That triggers for me, in the Old Testament, land was a productive asset. It wasn’t literally an acre. To me, when I think of the land being returned, it’s about ownership. The phrase “helping people have an economic ownership” ownership of the economic assets of the neighborhood. What I can imagine is not literally “I’m going to give you land”; it doesn’t literally mean I’m going to write you a check. It just means we want to do something about our economic condition. We have to distribute ownership and there are ways to do that. There are cooperative types of ownership. There’s communal ownership. There are all kinds of trusts. This could be done collectively. It’s not just saying to someone, “Okay, here’s some land for you.” The land, in today’s world, is really entrepreneurial possibility, enterprise. You begin to own things.
Adam: I agree. Let me just say this in terms of the context here.
There is no worth payment for what happened to African-Americans. There’s no amount of money, there’s no amount of resources. Let me just start with that. Even the type of lives lost, the treasure, the ideas. In Ta-Nishi Coates’ book, Between the World and Me, he uses the term plunder to talk about that. He says that one of the things people mistake about segregation is that they think segregation was just separation, racial separation. It wasn’t just separation, it was separation to plunder a community. Plunder is an analytical concept that he uses throughout the text to really talk about what’s happened. Like you’re extracting resources for centuries. Not just during slavery but during segregation and during red-lining districts.
Also, taking from the communities. Over the Memorial Day weekend, we were also noting black Wall Street, Tulsa, Oklahoma, where you had an affluent black community that was bombed by whites because of a lot of jealousy and envy. You could never get that back, all that kind of inter-generational wealth that was destroyed through looting and bombing. This was in 1921. The first American city that was ever bombed by other Americans was a black city.
My point being that there’s not going to be enough material resources to totally repair. We’re talking about approximation. Reinhold Niebuhr said, “There’s two things: there’s perfect justice and there’s relative justice.” What we’re talking about here is that we can’t reach perfect justice so we have to talk about the relative, which at least approximates what might happen. I think your idea about control, economic control, is a good one. It’s a helpful way to try to get there, in terms of what does it look like in 2016 to control the resources in your own community? How can you actually start that? That’s where we need some thinking about how to implement that.
Peter: That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to aggregate some capital, use it for loans, and aim it at the uncollateralized, and that’s the providential part of our community. It’s not all African-Americans; it’s Appalachian, it’s Latino. We are saying, “Why don’t we help that population gain control over their own economic lives?”
I’m tying together what you just said, which are thematic facts of plunder. I think the religion called the consumer economy is almost more powerful because it’s less dramatic. You’re saying it’s a form of plunder also, aren’t you?
Adam: Yeah, it certainly is. It is certainly based upon that. Think about the Native American. We haven’t mentioned the Native Americans, right? There are so many historical silences.
This is where story becomes really important, the story that we tell ourselves. We’re telling ourselves a story like “Make America great again.” That’s an appeal to a certain type of power, a loss of power, we need to have that. What does it mean?
It’s based on a kind of mythological notion of American innocence. That America is innocent and strives to be good and powerful, based on innocence. It silences a certain bloody history that precedes our very development. Part of what’s happening now –– we have so many different voices who are becoming public –– is that all these different types of people and communities are starting to say, “Look, we want to be included in the narrative. We want to be publicly acknowledged.” Therefore, you have a situation where sometimes people reduce it to just political correctness or identity politics and that type of thing. There are certainly some misuses of that. Also, what’s really being screamed for is a story that includes all of us. Like there needs to be that. Because what happens is that when people’s names aren’t recognized within the narrative, then they don’t feel part of the collective whole.
Peter: They’re not visible. They’re treated as problems that need to be fixed. In the tapes, you talk about omnipotence and omnipresence. I think those are powerful ideas.
Let me give you some notes I took from your tapes, which I just found fascinating. One is omnipotence, omnipresence, the other is that the Bible, in a sense, is really a real estate document. You say something like that and I think I know it’s true, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Adam: What I was talking about is how consumerism is a religion, how it posits a market god that is omnipotent, meaning that it defines what is real. It has the power to make something out of nothing. Just like any monotheistic faith. Therefore, anything that can be bought has a sticker price: air, water, land, bodies, souls, minds. We can talk about real estate. We can also talk about what’s unreal. Again, the market god can say, “Your story is unreal because there’s no value in it.” There’s no material value, so it can silence people as well. That’s one of the things about the omnipotence of this thing and its omnipresence, meaning that it’s not in a particular place. Historically, religions are attached to a sense of place, a sacred place –– for Christianity, it’s Jerusalem, and for Islam, you have Mecca.
What’s so remarkable about the consumer religion is that it’s not attached to any place. It’s all over the place. Any place is interchangeable with another. It really confirms homogenized global culture. Because particularity is inconvenient.
Therefore, Cincinnati is going to look like Cleveland. Cleveland is going to look like Columbus. Columbus is going to look like Chicago. Everything is going to look the same, because all the malls are going to be the same. All the chain stores are going to be the same. The religion is something that thrives in homogenizing global culture in that it doesn’t allow for distinction. Also, it punishes people. It can ex-communicate you. Things like North Korea can be ex-communicated from the idea of global culture. Like Iran, if it doesn’t follow the agreement. It can lock you out through policies of international agreements.
Finally, to your last point about real estate, there’s a fancy name for communion, in theological parlance, it’s called “transubstantiation” –– it’s a big word. All that it means is that when you take communion, the wine and the bread become vehicles for the holy. Like the wine and the bread, within Christianity, are seen as vehicles to express what’s holy. What I said in terms of the way the market religion functions, as a religion, is that land becomes a vehicle for what’s holy in the market religion, which is real estate property. It becomes sacred in the market economy way. Meaning it becomes property, real estate.
Peter: That’s so powerful. I want to stop in a second. You said that in the commodification of the consumer religion, everywhere you go is the same. There is no place that has a memory or an identity. It’s Holiday Inn, saying, “Come to us, because every Holiday Inn is exactly the same.” You say that particularity, uniqueness, identity are inconvenient. This is powerful stuff.
Another thing I thought was powerful, and this is where I think race doesn’t matter, is that the consumer religion says, “Spending is a means to happiness.” Here’s how part of the religion, part of our being seduced, is that now the consumer world has defined what constitutes happiness or even happiness as a worthy goal. Could you talk about that a little bit?
Adam: Consumerism, as a way of life, is a goal that becomes personal happiness and pleasure. The goal is personal happiness and pleasure. It promotes the belief that ownership of things requires spending money, so that to be happy, you have to spend, spend, spend. You’re in the constant activity of consumerism. There’s really no end to this. There’s no limit to how much consumption. There’s no upper end to it.
Peter: There’s no such thing as customer satisfaction. Every time I buy something, I go home and I say, “I want another one or a bigger one.”
Adam: Right. Because it’s the activity itself, it’s not the thing itself. It’s the activity of consumption. You’re constantly anxious about the next, the more. We don’t see that as a modern disease, it’s like a disease of affluence. It’s the disease of the more. We’re never happy. We need pills or all these recreations to offset this kind of disappointment and unhappiness with this.
We don’t realize we’re caught in a certain way of life that doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t work for us. Really, that’s what the real whole thing is, that these stories that we tell ourselves that we’re caught in, they don’t make us safe or happy. They really don’t.
They de-value our traditional institutions and our traditional ways of looking at our lives. Even our ancient wisdom. Universities used to be a place to cultivate human beings and thinking. Now, if you ask a student why they came to college, they’ll say to get a job. They treat the university like it’s a job placement program, not as a place to cultivate the intellect and the soul. We don’t have that sensibility anymore, and it’s getting less and less a place for that. Earning a degree is more important than learning itself.
It’s kind of fearful because you have people who have the ability and the means to go to college, but the dominant consumer reality they have is that the idea of success and making it has really little to do with how much you learn or how much you grow. It has to do with how much you have.
Peter: Maybe the big issue of college debt isn’t that young people have debt, it’s just that it didn’t feel like they got anything of value for it. They can’t find a job. If I went to college to get a job, the job wasn’t there. Even though they’re still advertising.
Somebody has a question, Adam. Let me read it. “Can you address community, as being essentially anthropocentric. In what ways is place grounded in our connection to the non-human, as also community?”
Adam: Wow, that’s a very good question.
Peter: That’s why I gave it to you.
Adam: Yeah, I think we do have to expand our idea of community, especially in light of our ecological degradation. Really to think about ecology in the way that we are interconnected. The pope just came out last June with an encyclical talking about our common home. He calls for a new inter-ecology. Meaning that we cannot survive thinking of our lives as being apart from the ecological world. They are inseparably related.
In African thought they call it the community of life, that we have to think of life as communal in orientation. That we have to think about the inter-relatedness of all things. Not just all humans, in terms of that. That’s a big picture, kind of macro view of things. What’s happening now is that our sensibilities run so counter in our culture, where it’s so counter to that sense. I’ll take one example.
We don’t even know what real food is anymore. Even what we eat. If I give people the difference between orange juice from a carton and fresh squeezed orange juice, like a kid, they won’t know the difference, or grape juice, or anything like that. We don’t know. What happens is that we’re so much into the spectacle of the picture, we don’t have real encounters with each other and with nature.
Part of what we need to do is have real encounters. We don’t encounter each other. We encounter each other with screens, we don’t have face to face encounters with people anymore. Our capacity for encounters has been degraded. Part of what we need to do is to have real encounters. That’s what our educational and religious institutions need to work on.
Peter: I’m going to keep on with things that are striking me, until we get some more comments. I think what you’re saying is that the consumer ideology, without customer satisfaction, the commodification of land, is a question of what we are fighting for. I was just going to say some things, then you pick up on them later.
Peter Koestenbaum (caller): The comment I wanted to make is about the general atmosphere of this conversation.
I think that we’re dealing here with an individual, whose focus, his soul, is somewhere else besides himself, it’s on another human being. I think to go around in the world, not just looking at yourself, not just being concerned with yourself, but to being actually focused on someone else or on people, in general, is an unusual experience. It’s the opposite of consumerism. It’s a feeling that pervades all of these conversations. I think it’s a place to come to get some comfort, you might say. To feel heard, to feel acknowledged, as a human being. There’s somebody there who cares about somebody else. That feeling of focusing on the other, on the dialog with another human being, is a marvelous experience that is pervasive, in all of these conversations. It’s like going to another country and feeling at home. May I contribute that?
Peter: Thank you very much. Do want to reflect on that, Adam?
Adam: I think we are too self-focused. Pedro Arrupe, who was the superior general of the Jesuits, talked about how the challenge of our contemporary world is to be a person for others. It’s not like we’re a person for ourselves, but to be a person for others. In the Bible, it’s about love: love God and neighbor. They are inter-linked. As a matter of fact, we show how much we love God through love for neighbor. Which takes us out of our narcissistic focus on self. Really takes us to caring for the other. I think those sensibilities are really within our tradition. They’re counter-cultural sensibilities. They’re not the dominant sensibilities of our culture.
That’s part of what we have, and we have these institutions to form these counter scripts, which are certain spaces where we can develop or cultivate these new models of community. Hopefully, when we start having these contrast communities, at a kind of micro level, then we can keep forming and forming and form like a critical culture, which can transform the dominant culture, in and of itself. We need to start where we are, and not be overly concerned about what other people are not doing. Just focus on what we are going to do.
Peter: And do it together.
Kelly Placer (caller): In terms of consumerism, I think that my reference point with anything I normally do with it, less is more. Unfortunately, when you think about consumerism, we’re living in an era where individuals are looking at more, instead of less. They just want to consume, consume, consume. They’re never happy. No matter how much they acquire, it’s still not enough. I do believe that less is still more. Even though, we’re dealing with the issues in terms of individuals who have to be acknowledged up front. In terms of having to be noticed all the time, I believe it’s the individuals who do more work who are actually the ones who work behind the scenes. The faces who are in the public, those are the individuals who just have to have the acknowledgement. Unfortunately, they’re not doing the work. I think that if we focus on self less, and community more, then we’ll be better, overall. I really enjoyed the conversation, so I just wanted to offer that comment.
Peter: She has got a name for your next book: Self Less, Community More. Questions you have on what Kelly said?
I think Kelly is right on point. I mean this seems to be a running theme. It’s actually not just a theme in our contemporary world. This is an ancient theme that goes back to our origins, especially our modern society.
I don’t want to get academic, but there’s a guy named Rene Descartes. “I think therefore I am.” The Cartesian model of what a human being is that a human being is primarily thought. That reduction of our humanity to what we think, not what we feel or not other kinds of sensibilities. Thinking is that everything is subordinate to reason so that all Western thinking has been about the idea of enlightened self-interest. It’s rational to go into, to follow your self-interest. There is a certain type of common-sense logic to that, throughout Western development. It’s modeled in Adam Smith, the economic model, the political models. Now we’re coming to a point where that’s being utterly exhausted. We’re starting to realize that we live in scarcity. We live with lots of limitations. We need to think about how are we going to live togetheri, without killing each other.
That idea of enlightened self-interest has not really reduced the problem of war and violence in a way that was originally thought. We need new way of framing stories. One possible model came with Dr. King: the story of the beloved community. He based it on the biblical idea of the kingdom of God. What is kingdom of God going to look like in the modern culture? King had this metaphor about the beloved community. That we need to support, not just associations between people but loving relationships between people. That most of our modern freedoms are defined by not so much freedom to do something, but freedom from something. The idea is that once we get freedom from something, what are we going to do? The idea, for King, was to be about being more loving towards our neighbors. Be more loving towards individuals.
Loving is not just a personal sentiment where you have to feel good about everybody –– that’s impossible. What he meant by this was more a relational aspect. He meant agape love, God love. I’m going to be loving toward my neighbor because of God’s love for them. That means to be respectful, that means to be honest. That means to be truthful. That means actually to be fair and generous –– that kind of thing. It doesn’t always have to mean that you have to have some type of personal good feeling. I think that’s what gets us stuck. That we have this kind of romantic notion about that.
Peter: That and ideas of charity and philanthropy. I think that’s why the Economics of Compassion, the Jubilee Forums, things we’re doing in Cincinnati want to bring an economic dimension of what a beloved community is about. A beloved community is where everybody has some control over their economic lives and participates in the economy. That’s just never happened.
Walter Brueggemann talks about the Jews and says, It took them 400 years to go cross the river. Part of this was they couldn’t imagine an alternative world. I know you comment on slavery of the imagination. Could you talk about that a little bit?
Adam: I’ll bring you back to a biblical story. In Exodus, once Moses took the Hebrews out of the slavery of Pharaoh, he started to realize, when they’re out in the wilderness, that it wasn’t just that Pharaoh externally enslaved them, that Egypt wasn’t just something they ran from. Egypt was in them. It took them 40 years in the wilderness to get to their Promised Land. Because empire was still a part of them. What happens in any type of slavery is that we underestimate the psychological weight of being a slave for so long. That’s happening now: We live in a world where it’s easier to imagine what a nuclear disaster looks like than it is to imagine the end of capitalism or consumerism.
We can’t even imagine what that would look like. We’re in a place now where it’s harder, especially if you’re on the progressive side, to imagine what a viable alternative world would look like than it is to imagine the end of existence itself. That’s because we don’t really have prominent resources that are stirring our imaginations to think in alternative ways. It’s the kind of slavery that’s so dreadful, not the external chains on us, which is bad enough, but it’s really the kind of moral and spiritual chains on our heart and soul.
Peter: We have one more caller.
Mika (caller): My comment is just about the idea of the cooperative economy: If anyone can speak to the basic concept that something like how a Community Blends work in our community. Xavier University, I think, has something to do with that. If these are successful models, how can we duplicate more of those?
Peter: That’s a great question. I do think, in terms of saying how to help people on the margin have an ownership stake in their communities, the cooperative model is very realistic. Adam, you have some thoughts about that?
Adam: In general, on the idea of wealth sharing, I like to tell people that as in the Bible, preachers like to say 10%, give 10% for tithing, that type of thing. Actually, if you look at the New Testament, in the Acts, it was all of their possessions. They were trying to form a new community, just not to form a “church.” The idea of wealth sharing is a deep biblical principle. Jubilee fits in line with that. In terms of our modern-day thinking about wealth. Peter, I think you’re much more familiar with Community Blend and those co-ops than I am.
Peter: I would tie that to the slavery of the imagination. We think that if we’re going to help people on the margins, we need to do it through charity, through philanthropy. We need to “lift them up.” I want to imagine a world where “poverty” and “poor” are no longer in our vocabulary. Because of what you said earlier, I was thinking, we not only commodify real estate, but we also commodify people, when we describe them according to their average annual means. I try never to call or think of people as being poor again. As soon as I use that word, it means they’re broken. It means they’ve failed in the consumer world.
We have to close soon, but I want to ask you to help us with one more word, which is repentance. Because I think the way you think about that is very valuable, then we’ll be done. Could you do that, Adam?
Adam: I will. The way I think about it is that the starting part for any kind of radical change has to be deep repentance. A kind of acknowledgement. Repentance is not so much just feeling sorry, but the turning away from. We have to acknowledge where we’re at, that we have not been doing all the things we should be doing to create the community that would be well pleasing. So that repentance is an acknowledgement of that, and also a turning away from those practices and trying to turn toward something bigger, more beautiful, and grander that we want and deserve. So that repentance, to me, is the starting point of transformation.
In the Bible they talk about discipleship. Discipleship: all that means is a learning of a way of life. Most of us are disciples of the religion of consumerism. We’ve learned this type of way of life. We’ve learned it very well. What’s the next way of life that we are going to be discipled into? In Christianity we talk about the kingdom of God. We talk about beloved community. Are we going to be discipled into it? It’s not something that is just natural, that we’re just born into, or that we have instincts for. We have to be discipled into it. We need people who are going to be models, the leaders, the exemplars of that. People that we need to lift up, in order to enter into a new story. That’s why we have leaders and sages and people who model to do that.
We don’t have to do it all at once. I think from mustard seeds spring new ways of life. We need to be thankful for the mustard seed and not be discouraged by looking for the big project.
Peter: I would just reinforce that by saying I think the new models are all around us. We just have to find them. It’s not like we even have to invent them. I think discipleship, for today, could be just to look around and find those models that are imaginative alternatives and they’re right there.
I want thank you, Adam. With one specific thing I’m grateful for, that I also heard. That is, I like your kind of action plan. Action, for you, is to think on these things. I think what you do is you activate and shift our thinking in the way you frame things, almost offhand. They’re somewhat on the small scale. I just think that’s a great gift. I thank you so much for this time together.
