“Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round.”
Adolf Hitler[1]
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My sleep is broken at 7:00 a.m. by a gentle tone pulsating from the cell phone on my night table. This cell phone increasingly functions as my alarm clock, and in my groggy morning stupor I glance at icons on the screen to find out today’s weather forecast. Breakfast is spent scrolling through a series of texts that arrived overnight, and as I race out the door with coffee in one hand and my smartphone in the other, its screen reveals Google map directions to a morning meeting.
Over the course of the day, I will receive somewhere around two hundred emails, texts, and calls on my smartphone. It has become an indispensable part of my day. It guides me to my next location, tells me when the bus is coming, plays songs, takes pictures, connects me to hundreds of people, channels news headlines, sports scores, and the stock market, even tracks my pace when I’m jogging. In addition to my cell phone, I also own a camera, an iPod, a DVD player, a television, and a laptop.
The small device that causes my cell phone to vibrate is called a pinhead capacitor. About the size of my pinky nail, it also regulates voltage and stores energy. These capacitors are found in essentially all the electronic devices in my home. They’re made from a mineral I’ve never heard of called coltan, which is found in large quantities in the Congo.
To mine coltan, men, women, and children dig large craters in streambeds or chip away chunks of rock, scraping away the dirt from the surface and then sloshing the dirt around in washtubs, which allows the heavy coltan to settle at the bottom. Workers use magnetic tweezers to extract the mineral, which makes its way to trading posts in neighboring countries for export to the global market. International mineral trading companies in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. import coltan, which then passes through the hands of processing companies and capacitor manufacturers. Once processed, the refined metals are bought by electronics manufacturing companies such as Nokia, Compaq, Dell, HP, Ericson, and Sony, who turn it into usable components for electronic devices.
Working conditions for coltan miners are severe, and at times deadly. Militiamen armed with AK-47s force laborers, including children as young as eleven, to work long hours each day, and collectors often cheat the miners out of their profits. Coltan is extracted in a ‘craft’ manner, using small tools available locally, such as spades, hoes, and iron bars. “In some circumstances, the use of explosives is common,” according to a report, “resulting often in a high death toll among the diggers, soldiers, and the local community” either from the explosives themselves or associated respiratory problems. [2] Add to this the danger of landslides and collapsing mines, and the picture is bleak. But the working conditions of coltan miners are not the only problem.
The global demand for coltan fuels a bloody civil war in central Africa, one that has claimed six million lives to date. A UN report claims that all parties involved in the Congolese civil war have been involved in the mining and sale of coltan. [3] The multimillion-dollar trade of Congolese coltan and other natural resources by foreign armies, rebels, and militias fuels the conflict by motivating armed groups to wage war, and by providing them with the cash to do so. “There’s no question that the minerals fund armed groups in the largely lawless region,” writes a CNN reporter. The Enough Project, Global Witness, UN reports, and others have documented extraordinary human rights abuses associated with the incredibly lucrative mining industry. “The general use of violence against communities includes forced labor, torture, recruitment of child soldiers, extortion, and killings by armed groups to oppress and control civilians,” reports the Enough Project. In the context of a Congolese war in which warlords use terror as an essential weapon to ensure control of regions where international companies mine for valuable metals, sexual violence is especially horrendous. “Competing militias rape in order either to drive communities out of contested areas or else as a means of controlling or subjugating those living in the areas they control.” [4]
The impact of coltan mining on biodiversity and soil and water quality is devastating. Much coltan is mined near national parks, and some workers rely on poaching to eat. Kahuzi Biega National Park, home of the mountain gorilla, has suffered particularly from coltan mining. Widespread hunting has driven lowland gorillas and elephants to the brink of extinction, and massive deforestation from mines and airstrips, as well as water pollution from mine tailings, has killed off all edible wildlife in the park. The ecosystem has been effectively plundered, according to a UNEP report. [5]
When I upgrade my cell phone using Verizon’s “new every two” plan, or replace my old TV with a plasma screen, or make the leap to an iPad, the new devices will not come with a label that reads “Warning! This device was made with raw materials from Central Africa that are nonrenewable, were mined in inhumane conditions, and then sold to fund a bloody war of occupation. Moreover, the device has caused massive soil and water contamination and the virtual elimination of endangered species. Enjoy.”
Even with such a label, would I think twice about where my electronics come from? Would I speak up to influence public policy around coltan imports? Would I consider sharing electronics with neighbors, or forgo owning some of them at all? Would I contact Apple, Microsoft, or other companies that produce electronics?
The story continues in chapter 9.
Coltan is a shorthand term for columbium-tantalum. Many devices beyond cell phones contain this mineral: cameras, mp3 players, computer chips, pagers, DVD players, video game systems, missiles, and airplanes all depend on coltan. Americans use and discard cell phones at a faster rate than any other nation and tend to own far more household electronics than do other people. The United States is the largest consumer of coltan in the world, accounting for 40 percent of global demand. [6]
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One factor leading to moral inertia in the face of systemic injustice on the part of people privileged by it is their failure to “see” it, and to acknowledge their implication in it. This is a failure to recognize the structural links between the privilege of a few and the suffering of the many. We do not notice how the “patterned behaviors we engage in daily . . . exploit, silence, disable, or marginalize some as they confer status, profits, and other benefits on elites.” We may enjoy the spotless interior of a well-cleaned business building, but “are socialized not to see the [janitors] whose work maintains our lifestyle” and not to “grasp the economic system that gives us access to better jobs” and underpays the janitors.[7]
A crucial initial step in challenging social structural mechanisms that build material wealth for some at the expense of others and of Earth’s ecosystems is realizing that they exist. If indeed morality requires challenging and seeking to undo those structures, then a task of morality is to see them in order to dismantle them. This is one role of moral vision.
How is it that white, economically secure adults did not see the racial and economic injustice shaping life for thousands of black and poor white residents of New Orleans for decades preceding Hurricane Katrina? The matter is not one of private or personal choice alone. Power arrangements, economic power in particular, play a role in obscuring from the “haves” the reality of the “have nots.” Public sociologist, Gary Perry, describes how freeways were designed in New Orleans to enable tourists and other airline travelers to move from the airport to tourist havens and other relatively wealthy parts of town without seeing the impoverished areas and the people who inhabit them.[8] They are hidden from view of wealthier people. People who live, work, and play in non-poor neighborhoods are drawn into moral oblivion by “powers that be” who have a strong vested interest in hiding the horrors of abject poverty.
Indeed, crucial moral weight lies in perceptions of “what is.” What we see and refuse to see, and how we see are morally loaded, bearing on whether we foster or thwart life-saving change. A primary function of Christian ethics is developing tools for morally responsible vision, especially vision of the power dynamics that determine who has the necessities for life and determine humans’ impact on planet Earth.
This chapter and the next two respond to the moral imperative of honing skills in seeing structures of injustice cleverly hidden behind the blinders of social privilege, and in particular economic privilege. I seek tools for “unmasking social evil where it parades as good.” I refer to that unmasking process as critical vision.
It has been fascinating to encounter other voices alluding to “seeing” as an integral dimension of morality and ethics. Hear just a few:
Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann: “The ones who minister to the imagination, who enable people to see the world differently and to live now in the world they see are fatally dangerous to the establishment.”[9] “Poets and artists are silenced because they reveal too much of what must remain hidden.”[10]
Christian ethicist Daniel Maguire: The “bane of ethics” is to ignore or “inadequately see reality.”[11]
Jesus: “Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes, and fail to see?” (Mark 8:17-18)
A first step in enabling critical vision is unearthing the dynamics that impede it. We begin there, probing for factors that cloak structural injustice “to the point of invisibility.”[12] The focus here, then, is less on the power dynamics that cause injustice, and more on the dynamics that cause us not to recognize it.
The task is not merely to unmask the mechanisms of moral oblivion. The challenge is to do so in ways that evoke and sustain moral agency for the long haul toward forms of economic life that do not accumulate massive wealth for a few at great cost to the many and that do not endanger Earth’s regenerative capacities.
For people or social sectors who are invested consciously or unconsciously in preserving “the way things are,” moral vision is socialized or culturally constructed to affirm “the way things are” as good, as “the way things ought to be.” Or if “the way things are” is not perceived as good, it is accepted as the way things simply must be. More specifically, vision is constructed to normalize and rationalize existing social and ecological conditions (the way things are) that may be evil, allowing them to parade as good, inevitable, or normal. This entails not seeing (or seeing but disregarding) evidence to the contrary.
To understand the social construction of vision, we turn to a sister concept with a more developed body of theory: hegemonic knowledge or vision. We first examine the concept and then, to concretize and contextualize it, we isolate and analyze eight factors contributing to hegemonic vision in the current context. Each factor lends concrete form to the previous chapter’s discoveries regarding evil’s capacity to disguise itself as good, social necessity, normal, or simply inevitable.
For years I have taught my students to keep in mind what I call a “boilerplate question”—an overall query to bear in mind while walking through the events of daily life: “What in any given circumstance is uncritically presupposed to be natural, normal, inevitable, or divinely ordained, that in fact may be none of these, but rather a social construct?” The purpose of this “boilerplate question” is to expose and examine the “knowing” and social vision that shapes our unconscious and semi-conscious assumptions about what is natural, normal, inevitable, or divinely ordained and about what power we have or do not have to build a more just world.
The students are exposing “hegemonic vision.” The term refers to the constellation of socially constructed perceptions and assumptions about “what is,” “what could be,” and “what ought to be” that maintain the power or privilege of some people over others, and “blind” the former to that privilege. We are working here with a basic insight of the postmodern turn: that ideas have the power to shape social reality and to do so in ways that may not be recognized by those who benefit most from that constructed reality.
The grave danger of hegemonic vision is its deadening impact on social change. What is natural, inevitable, or divinely mandated is not subject to human decisions and actions. With hegemony, notes Stephen Brookfield, “there seems to be no chance of opposition, no way to develop alternative possibilities.”[13]
To probe the forces that hide injustice from the eyes of those who “benefit” from it, but could resist it, may seem to be a breeding ground for hopelessness itself. To the contrary, it is an excursion of hope and into hope. For this quest is born of the firm conviction that human beings—enlivened by the breath of God—bear vast moral power. It is the power to see and resist what betrays God’s boundless, unquenchable yearning toward abundant life for all. That power requires stark honesty. Uncovering hegemonic vision is an act of stark, subversive honesty.
The theorist most associated with the term “hegemony” is Italian political theorist and cultural critic Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci used “hegemony” to denote the social control exercised by dominant sectors through ideological means. Neither state nor military domination is required to elicit the general population’s consent to the overall direction imposed on life by dominant sectors or culture. Rather, consent is garnered through worldview, values, and ideas, even where that societal direction is exploitative or oppressive to the very people who consent to it. For Gramsci and many other theorists, hegemony refers in particular to the processes that convince people to accept rather than to resist cultural norms and practices that betray their own best interests while appearing to support them.[14] A hegemonic culture, notes Cornel West, is “a culture successful in persuading people to consent to their oppression and exploitation.”[15]
Hegemony elicits consent in part by convincing people that existing social arrangements are normal or necessary. Hegemony is, in West’s words, “the set of formal ideas and beliefs and informal modes of behaviors, habits, manners, sensibilities, and outlooks that support and sanction the existing order.”[16] Particularly relevant to the contemporary reality of unintentional yet brutal economic and ecological exploitation woven into our lives is the insight that hegemony “constitutes a sense of reality . . . beyond which it is very difficult for most members of the society to move, in most areas of their lives.”[17]
In opposition to hegemonic vision stands critical vision. To accept as reality the world as it appears to be through lenses constructed by dominant social forces is, in Gramsci’s words, to live without “a critical awareness.”[18] It is to adopt “the uncritical and largely unconscious way of perceiving and understanding the world that has become ‘common’ in any given epoch” regardless of its detrimental impact on the very people who hold it.[19]
My intent is not to adopt precisely Gramsci’s use of “hegemony.” Rather, I draw critically upon his insights and the insights of others who have adapted the term and Gramsci’s basic premises about it to other contexts, and who have done so in order to pursue questions similar to mine. These scholar/activists are valuable not only for their astute insight into hegemony, but also for their firm conviction that it can be overcome and transformed into socially responsible action for change.
Hegemony may be seen as a process. Brookfield defines it as “the process by which we learn to embrace enthusiastically a system of beliefs and practices that end up harming us and working to support the interest of others who have power over us.”[20] Hegemony, he writes elsewhere, is “the process by which people learn to live and love the dominant system of beliefs and practices,” a process “not imposed on them so much as it is learned by them. If anything can be described as lifelong learning, it is this.”[21] I aim to isolate and analyze elements of those processes, to untangle their elusive strands.
Below we unravel the forces of collective deception not for the sake of intellectual curiosity or some perverse desire to uncover the ills of American society. The purpose is singularly constructive. It is to understand processes that build collective moral oblivion so that we may dismantle them, and enable moral vision.
With socially constructed vision—and more specifically, hegemonic vision—as the illuminating concepts, and hegemony the informing theory, what are concrete factors that produce hegemonic vision in the given context? What processes garner consent to the dominant mode of economic life despite its dangerous consequences? What convinces us that there is “no chance of opposition, no way to develop alternative possibilities”?[22]
The factors behind moral oblivion may be values, ideas, practices, symbols, social trends, norms, emotions, presuppositions, or other influences. They may be conscious or not. Here we focus sequentially on eight. Consider these as ingredients in a soup, ingredients that tend to be mutually reinforcing, that draw out each other’s flavor so to speak.
This list of dynamics is not comprehensive. An all-inclusive survey of the processes by which we learn to ignore our complicity in structural evil would be a multidisciplinary task, involving the social sciences, philosophy, learning theory, neuroscience, and more. Rather, my account here illustrates the function and power of a few potent factors. I have described others elsewhere.[23]
Impervious adherence to economically and ecologically exploitative lifeways stems in part from a historical penchant for misperceiving social problems as individuals’ problems. This leaning sports manifold faces. The most obvious is the tendency to locate the causes of social suffering—particularly poverty—in individual failings or misfortune rather than in the historical and current political, economic, and cultural forces that produce it. We sever the link, for example, between a certain homeless woman on the street and the real estate development that replaced her low-cost apartment complex with luxury condos.
Another common avenue for avoiding structural causes of poverty is locating them in the inadequacy or historical misfortune of groups. What do Euro-Americans in areas of significant indigenous American populations do to rationalize the vast economic disparity between white people and the indigenous of their locales? A mere 150 years ago, native peoples thrived on land now covered by cities in northwest Washington. Today, the native population suffers from shockingly high rates of death from diabetes, alcoholism, tuberculosis, suicide, and unintentional injuries compared to all other Americans.[24] On some deep unconscious level, do we rationalize the disparity by assuming historical necessity or tribal peoples’ inadequacy in the face of modernity?
In like manner, if hunger in Africa or India is understood to be caused by the tragic misfortune of drought or by people’s inability to develop adequate farming techniques, then foreign aid and development assistance are in themselves adequate responses. If, however, hunger is the result of colonial policy that destroyed African economies, trade policies that shift market advantage to wealthier nations, corporate takeover of coastal fishing areas, lakes dried up by global warming, or water supplies privatized and sold on the global market, then the moral response called for is quite different. Our turn to foreign aid and development assistance may distract us from the trade policies, corporate exploitation, climate change, and other connections between our overconsumption and others’ hunger.
Even where social structural causes of suffering are recognized, solutions often are seen in personalized terms of charitable giving or service. Far too readily, deep and heartfelt concern about poverty and hunger is channeled primarily into the interpersonal or private arenas of charitable service and giving, and concern for the morality of society itself drifts to the wayside. Impeded then are sustained efforts to counter injustice in public policies, social systems, institutions, economic policies and theories, corporate practice, public budgets, cultural norms, and other dimensions of public life. While in many circles—ecclesial, academic, activist—“social justice” is common parlance, it often is used to signify a commitment to service in society or to helping the needy rather than to uprooting structures of unjust power and privilege.
Enter here the gnarled dilemma of individualized and charitable response to human suffering rooted in systemic arrangements. Human beings have immense capacity to feel compassion for others who are suffering, and to act on that compassion. Christianity maintains that to serve the needy other is integral to faith. In my city, Seattle, countless people work diligently to feed and shelter the city’s homeless people. A front-page newspaper article about a young child severely injured by the United States’ bombing of Iraq produced an outpouring of money to bring the child to the United States for reparative surgery. Hurricane Katrina’s devastation elicited a wealth of time, money, energy, and creativity on behalf of the victims.
Such charity is a strong and necessary response to God’s call to love neighbor as self. However, alone, it is NOT a turn away from—a renunciation of—structural sin. I may respond in charity to a homeless woman and continue to support and benefit materially from public policies and corporate actions that rendered her homeless. I may help pay for the injured child’s surgery while still enjoying cheaper oil enabled by the Revenue Sharing Agreements with Iraq obtained in part through the American war on that country. I may rebuild houses in New Orleans and remain a beneficiary of the white privilege that made Katrina’s victims disproportionately black.
My point here is not the long-touted and mistaken idea that charity must be replaced by work toward social justice. I do not believe this simplistic formula. The two overlap and are both mandates of Christian faith. To affirm work for systemic change while devaluing charitable response to suffering would be naïve and cruel. Rather, my point is this: Where suffering is caused, at least in part, by societal or systemic factors, rather than singularly individual factors, charitable service aimed at meeting the needs of individuals and groups without also challenging those systemic factors may build social consent that perpetuates the suffering’s powerful systemic roots. It is crucial, therefore, to excavate the dangers of channeling compassion for suffering singularly through the individualized lens of charitable service and giving.
Charity may become a blinder, obfuscating the systemic roots of suffering. A problem that is addressed by helping individual people may be seen as a problem rooted in individual misfortune, inadequacy, loss, or lack of knowledge or opportunity. In Lee Artz’s terms, charitable service throws a “cloak of invisibility” over structured oppressions and may lead inadvertently to constructing the oppressor as good.[25] Charitable service may individualize or privatize the causes of social problems, obscuring their systemic roots.
A second danger is that a turn to charity suggests its adequacy. An old adage notes that it is better to teach a person how to fish than to give her or him a fish. And yet the charitable act of teaching someone to fish will not provide food if the fish supply is rapidly drained by a large dam built upstream to benefit elite interests, overfishing by global corporations, global warming, or toxic waste. The individualized response of charitable service and giving may reinforce a dominant worldview that “a thousand points of light” is alone the answer to social suffering.
Privitizing systemic problems helps us ignore and accept unjust systems. In the words of Margaret Miles, the “effort to remain altogether private [beings] is to become “morally insensible.” Bonhoeffer’s warning that evil can “masquerade as . . . charity” echoes here.
“The rich are in possession of the goods of the poor even if they have acquired them honestly or inherited them legally. . . . [If they do not share,] the wealthy are a species of bandit.”
John Chrysostom, fourth-century church “father”
Gratitude is widely accepted as a moral good. I firmly agree. Christians affirm that material goods and the life-enhancing opportunities they provide are fundamentally a blessing, a gift from God for which we give thanks. According to this idea, we ought to live in gratitude for these gifts and generously share them with others. The liturgical life and prayer life of the church, as well as Christian education, teach this understanding. It is the basis of the stewardship practices that have enabled the church worldwide (in its various ecclesial communions) to provide hospitals, schools, housing, and other vital life services. Gratitude is what we teach our children in forming them into people who always will give away at least a tithe to people in need. Listen in:
“We have been given so much,” a father teaches his child. “God has blessed us greatly. So, we share it with those less fortunate. When you get your dollar allowance, you will put a dime in the jar to give away to those less fortunate.
“God, we give thanks for the food that we are about to eat” a mother recites sincerely before dinner.
“We were able to get the loan for the house in spite of the difficulties,” a young couple shares. “God has been so good to us.”
These prayers are good. I remain convinced that gratitude is a bedrock disposition of Christian faith. One of my spiritual practices is to give thanks upon arising each morning. Yet, I have begun to realize a haunting paradox. Many of the material goods for which I give thanks became mine because they were “taken” from others through complex economic, political, cultural, and military systems. For those others, as illustrated in the stories throughout this book, that loss may have been devastating, even deadly.
Is it possible that our prayers and attitudes of gratitude for our many blessings subtly rationalize and normalize the ways of life that produced my material blessings while also generating global warming and toxic dumping?[26] Do those prayers conceal the enormous extent to which those blessings are stolen goods, stolen primarily from the world’s peoples of color? To conceal that theft is to perpetuate it.
Here, therefore, we dare to look. Recall the people of Orissa in India, where aluminum companies mining rich deposits of Bauxite pushed the tribal people off the lands and into urban destitution. When I give thanks for a meal, am I thanking God for food that came in aluminum cans containing Bauxite from India? Vacations are a blessing. How many of us vacation in beach hotels on land stolen from its longstanding residents by global corporate business? Was the computer on which I write this book less costly because it was produced in a “free trade zone” in which the company producing it was “freed” from environmental protections as well as labor productions? These “freedoms” from regulations increased the efficiency of production and lowered my computer’s price, enabling me the blessing of owning it at low cost, and enabling the corporate CEO his lucrative income. He well may give thanks to God for that “blessing.”
How many relatively well-off American families fund their children’s education and remodeled house with investment returns from lucrative companies that do not pay all employees a living wage? Were the diamonds in my wedding ring mined by what is essentially slave labor in South Africa? How many white middle-strata churchgoers in Seattle own homes because black people were prevented from buying them by redlining laws or were forced out of them by gentrification?
My husband is a pastor and I a professor. I give thanks for truly wonderful material blessings enabled by our modest salaries—basic camping equipment, funding for travel to visit family and dear friends, books, healthy food. To what extent were the monies that pay our salaries produced by companies that supply the weapons and airplanes used to bomb Iraq? The money that produces my salary probably passed through a bank that profited from debt repayments paid by Mozambique, the money that should have produced healthcare and food accessibility for the people of that country. When I donate money to an agency working in Mozambique, dare I consider a gift what is frankly “stolen goods”?
These are the material blessings for which we give thanks. God, forgive them, for they know not what they do, cried the crucified one.
St. Ambrose, a fourth-century theologian, cried out: “How far, oh rich, do you extend your senseless avarice? Do you intend to be the sole inhabitants of the earth? Why do you drive out the fellow sharers of nature, and claim it all for yourselves? The earth was made for all, rich and poor, in common. Why do you rich claim it as your exclusive right? The soil was given to the rich and poor in common—wherefore, oh, ye rich, do you unjustly claim it for yourselves alone? Nature gave all things in common for the use of all.” Ambrose speaks to us.
The questions raised are these: Does giving thanks for our material benefits help us not “see how the suffering and unearned disadvantages of subordinate groups are the foundation for [our material] privileges?”[27] If so, how could our practices of gratitude spur us to the work of creating more equitable and ecologically healthy economic relationships?
Chapter 3 suggested that the intermingling of evil and good and the ensuing moral ambiguity bred by that mix is one reason that we so easily fail to see evil. Here that claim has taken concrete form.
For people who care deeply about others and who seek to live in ways that enhance life and ameliorate suffering, denial is a seductive ingredient of moral oblivion, the bouillon in the soup, perhaps. Denial is rarely conscious and comes in many versions. It could simply deny that our actions are causing others to suffer or are endangering Earth’s life-regenerating capacities. Or it might simply state that “there is nothing that I can do about these problems,” and I cannot acknowledge what is both horrible and unchangeable. Or denial might whisper that these claims about injustice and ecological disaster are claims of leftists or of a fanatic few.
I will never forget the honesty of a woman who had listened to a talk I gave years ago, after returning from Central America where I led a delegation of U.S. elected officials. She was a person whom I had come to know as having an unusually deep sense of compassion for others and their suffering. “Cindy,” she said, “I honestly can hardly bear to listen to what you are saying. It is too painful.” Her honesty was clear and I respect her for it.
Many of us do not see because seeing would be too terrible. We are like the mourner, distracting himself or herself from engaging the grief of a loss because the emotions are simply too raw, too sad. It would be too painful to recognize our implication in profound and widespread suffering, and in what threatens the life of the world today. Our overconsumption is “covered with the blood of African children,” declared the Methodist Bishop from Mozambique. Over 500,000 children under the age of five died in Iraq between 1991 and 1998 from diseases connected to the United States bombing (devastation of water systems, electrical system, and land contamination), and U.S.-invoked sanctions that prohibited medicines from entering Iraq. How could we live with realities like this, if we truly took them in? How could we face the piercing, life-shattering anguish endured by the parents of those children? While human life depends upon the health of Earth’s life-support systems (air, soil, water, biosphere), “every natural system on the planet is disintegrating”[28] due in significant part to massive consumption of petroleum products in the last fifty years. How can we think the unthinkable, acknowledge the utterly unacceptable?
We run from awareness of our implication in structural brutality. We run with body, heart, and clever mental manipulations. The reality would be too horrible, my guilt and grief too great. On a level too deep for words, I fear being shattered by them. Denial or its companions, defensiveness and self-justification, race in to shield us from a vision too appalling to face.
A sense of entitlement produces another form of denial. Denial and entitlement are mutually reinforcing. I feel entitled to the lifestyle that I lead because I worked hard, even sacrificed to achieve it. Many years of education, thousands of tuition dollars and loans, and years of living on a restricted budget should entitle me to a few niceties. Conventional wisdom declares that if I have inherited some wealth, it is because my parents sacrificed tremendously to provide me with this gift and their deep desire was that I enjoy it. Where people understand themselves to be entitled to the material wealth and wealth of opportunity that they possess, they are likely to deny that having it required exploiting other people. Denial then protects us from seeing injustice inherent in the reigning order of things and, thereby, seduces us into accepting it.
Yet another source of denial is the claim to “necessity.” Its soothing and deceptive voice infiltrates the public consciousness, insisting that the Highly Indebted Poor Countries repay their debt. Free trade agreements are necessary for goods to circulate and economies to grow. Climate change may be a problem but allowing industries freedom from environmental constraints is necessary for a healthy economy, this voice purrs.
One rarely acknowledged face of denial stems from “othering,” the process—often unconscious—by which people exclude others and render them less than “us.” The “others” may be less important, less worthy, less real, or weaker. The environmental refugees of Asia and Africa, for instance, are so very “other” and distant from me. They are a dense mass of people, crowded together, scantily clad, and speaking strange sounds. Somehow their deaths do not count as much as ours.
Denial in its varied forms is made easier by the geographic locations of privilege. Most of us do not experience directly the damaging effects of our actions on people and climates across the globe. If we are aware of climate refugees, we know them as facts but not through actual experience or relationships. Not encountering the victims is an open door to denial.
Thus is constructed the seductive lure of denial. We “distance ourselves from the horror and terror that inhabit” the products and activities of our daily lives.[29] To see would be nearly unbearable.
Where denial fails or numbness thaws, despair or hopelessness knocks. Seeing the “data of despair” invites it. Recognizing the complexity of systemic injustice, we may feel powerless to make a difference in the face of the massive suffering it causes. We may retreat into overwhelmed exhaustion or slip back into the safety of denial.
Hopelessness and perceived powerlessness are not necessarily conscious. People do not walk around admitting that they are resigned to lives of economic and ecological exploitation. Erich Fromm, a theorist in Germany’s Frankfurt school of critical theory, explains: “most people do not admit to themselves feelings of . . . hopelessness—that is to say, they are unconscious of these feelings.”
“What are you writing about?” asked a man sitting down at the table next to mine in the coffee shop.
“Oh . . . you don’t want to know,” I responded with a sigh. “I’m trying to deal with what it means to live a moral life given that we are killing people all over the world—through climate change, and by taking their land to grow our snowpeas, destroying their fishing communities to build resorts, poisoning their water supplies to make Coca-Cola, . . .
“I know, I know,” he interrupted. “Listen, I totally agree with you.”
“You do?”
“Look, any sentient middle-class person in America knows,” he went on. “There’s a gnawing sense of guilt. We know we’re destroying the planet. We also know we’re the ones who can fix it . . . we have the money, the science, the power.”
“So, what do you do about it,” I asked, typing his words as he spoke.
“What do I do about it? What does anyone do about it? Nothing. I buy another latte, or a toy for my car. Listen, I drive a big gas-eating car. Hey, I’m a total socialist but it doesn’t change anything I do,” he confessed, holding up his latte in a paper cup with a plastic lid. “What’s there to do? I don’t see much changing.”
A sense of powerlessness is understandable given the structural roots of the suffering described in this book. The structural injustice will continue despite my actions to the contrary. Even my fervent commitment and actions will not force Monsanto to stop patenting seeds and promoting chemically based farming.
Precisely here we see the vital importance of recalling and even embracing “the paradox of privilege” discussed in the previous chapter: While individuals’ actions will not alone dismantle systems of evil, those systems will only be dismantled if individuals do act. Our actions toward justice are vital, even while they may seem inconsequential.
Grave moral danger accompanies the subtle but debilitating sense of powerlessness and despair that lurk when one recognizes the magnitude of suffering connected to how we live. Where we experience no hope for change and no power to move toward it, “the way things are” becomes “the way things simply must be.” If I see no hope for different forms of global economic relationships and no power to move toward them—even in small ways—then currently prevailing economic policies, practices, and structures become, according to my reality, inevitable. I am lulled into accepting the existing order of things and satisfying my compassionate urges by helping individuals or small groups escape from poverty. Drained away are the will and capacity to enter into movements aimed at uprooting its causes; lost is the impetus for seeking more just and sustainable forms of economic life. Herein lies the peril of this poisonous ingredient: lost hope and perceived powerlessness.
Erich Fromm dedicated himself to understanding how and why people collectively conform to ways of thinking and living that reinscribe existing power structures and belief systems, even where they are socially destructive. He worked in the context of rising fascism in mid-century Europe and sought to unravel the tangled roots of what he called “automaton conformity,” a social character prone to conform to and adopt ideas and practices that reinforce existing structures of power and privilege, all the while under the impression that they are “following their own will.”
Conformity may be driven by the hunger for approval. Socialization into attitudes and habits geared toward gaining social approval is also socialization into patterns of extraordinary consumption. Normalizing degrees of consumption previously unheard of in human history proceeds without people’s full awareness. Through “a complicated process of indoctrination, rewards, punishments, and fitting ideology,” Fromm writes, “most people believe they are following their own will and are unaware that their will itself is conditioned and manipulated.”[30]
The sources of social manipulation in our context are not coercive but seductively persuasive. They are a complex array of anonymous influences, the persuasive power of which remains largely below the consciousness of the public. They include public opinion, conventional wisdom, political spin, ideological manipulation, the normative “scripts” of one’s family and subculture, the availability of consumer goods, and perhaps more powerful than all else, advertising in its many forms.
One key factor in producing widespread conformity, in Fromm’s analysis, is modern capitalism and its need for people who “cooperate in large numbers, consume more and more, [and] have standardized tastes, to a degree unknown in most cultures.” Capitalism, he argued, needs people who are “malleable consumers . . . [who] equate living with consuming, gain identity from brand names,” and can be persuaded to conform to the market’s aim of maximized profit.[31] The directives to consume are (using Brookfield’s term) inscribed in the cultural DNA.
The values and practices of capitalism in its neoliberal form infiltrate all areas of life and are universalized as the only normative way to live. We conform to these norms unwittingly, assuming their universal normativity. The result is a “fog” of moral oblivion that wipes away awareness of the dramatic amputation of alternatives.
Not only the consumer norms demanded by market-driven society but the color lines it draws around economic and ecological violence demand our conformity. White people, unless shocked out of compliance, etch those lines ever more deeply into the fabric of societies. As American citizens conform to the tacit but fierce mantras—“buy more electronic toys!” “Drink more bottled water!”—people of color in India or the Philippines see more and more toxic waste and plastic bottles piling over their lands, and people of the Congo die in the coltan mines or the wars fueled by them. As we admire flaunted wealth and consumption on television, as we invite the “free speech” of corporate America to convince our children that “stuff” will make them happy and successful, as we unwittingly conform to these standards—people of color in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands lose their communities and livelihoods to the consequential climate change. We white people do not tend to see these color lines.
A defining feature of structural violence noted in chapter 3 was its lineage from generation to generation through socialization processes. Here that feature has come into full view.
Conscience, Fromm points out, is a casualty of automaton conformity. “[H]ow,” he asks, “can conscience develop when the principle of life is conformity? Conscience, by its very nature, is non-conforming; it must be able say no, when everybody else says yes. . . . To the degree to which a person conforms, he cannot hear the voice of his conscience, much less act upon it.”[32]
Likewise, critical thinking shrivels under the pressure to conform. Disabled conscience and critical thinking curtail the questioning of existing structures of injustice that are not readily visible to people who are advantaged by them. “Automaton conformity,” then, is a potent and vital ingredient of the moral oblivion that invites evil to parade as good.
Edward Bernays (1981-1995), a nephew of Sigmund Freud, drew upon Freud’s ideas to develop promotional campaigns for products ranging from bacon to cigarettes. Bernays is considered a father of the public relations industry. He helped convince the American public that Dixie Cups were the only sanitary form of drinking cup. Resolving “to transform America’s eating habits” on behalf of Beechnut Packing Company, a huge bacon producer, he convinced Americans that bacon with eggs was the ideal breakfast. Serving the United Fruit Company (which paid him enormous amounts of money yearly) and the American government, he promoted the idea, in the American media and in Guatemala, that Guatemala’s then president, Jacobo Arbenz, was a communist threat—in order to justify his overthrow orchestrated by the CIA in 1953–54.[33] Bernays was master at using propaganda to shape public policy to favor large corporate business. “[I]t remains a fact,” Bernays opined, “that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world. . . . As civilization has become more complex . . . the technical means have been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented.”[34]
Corporate public relations and advertising conspire to manipulate our perceptions of what we ought to value and strive for and of how we should behave. They attempt, often with great success, to define our self-worth, and our sense of what constitutes a successful life, what makes us worthy of others’ esteem, what renders us lovable, what is necessary for happiness, and, simply, what is true. The “reality” defined by much corporate advertising is a reality in which many global businesses that enslave children, destroy water supplies, and disgorge massive quantities of greenhouse gases are represented as good, vibrant producers of happiness and well-being. It is a reality in which we will be more worthy, more successful, more respected, more attractive, and happier if we buy and consume.
Public relations is a powerful industry worldwide, with billions of dollars spent each year on reshaping reality, altering perception, and “manufacturing consent.”[35] Corporate clients engage marketing firms to mobilize private detectives, attorneys, satellite feeds, sophisticated information systems, social media—all with the intention of shaping the image of the corporation or business or government industry that they represent, and controlling public perception of this business or industry.[36]
For example, “video news releases” written and filmed by marketing firms frequently air as story segments on news shows without any attribution to their source in the marketing industry. One day the evening news might show a short segment about proposed drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge, featuring a news reporter interviewing an actor posing as a “man on the street” about his views on drilling (they are, of course, positive). Pre-selected “experts” are interviewed to give their professional opinion. Even product demonstrations or corporate logos may make their way into the segment. The end result is a short, evocative “news story” about the benefits of drilling in ANWR, produced by a marketing firm.
Marketing firms engineer groups such as the “Coalition for Vehicle Choice,” the “National Smokers Alliance,” and “Americans for Prosperity.” These names give the impression of genuine grassroots organizations, when they are in fact front groups for corporate interests. The National Smokers Alliance has been alive and well for almost twenty years. Founded by the Phillip Morris Tobacco Company, this group was intended to appear as a grassroots movement of people opposed to smoke-free laws, unaffiliated with the tobacco industry. The group’s sophisticated, hi-tech campaigns target unemployed college students in bars and bowling alleys, exhorting them to “stand up for their rights” and offering stickers to place in stores and restaurants that say, “I am a smoker and have spent $_____ in your establishment.”
Marketing firms frequently target populations that are young, vulnerable, less educated, and susceptible to peer pressure.[37] The explosion in recent decades of marketing to young children, even infants, exemplifies the power of these covert persuaders. The sinister world of marketing to women, and specifically the creation and exploitation of insecurities around women’s body image, sexuality, and self-esteem, demonstrates the power of psychological manipulation in marketing. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique traces some of the origins of advertising to American housewives in the 1950s that began manipulating insecurities into dollars. A marketing service report at that time instructed advertisers to capitalize on “guilt over hidden dirt” and stress the “therapeutic value of baking.” Identify your products with “spiritual rewards,” almost a “religious belief,” the report advised.[38] Today the focus has shifted from household goods to clothes, cosmetics, and the body itself. Weight-loss, clothing, and cosmetics industries are well aware of the lucrative market at their fingertips provided that the cultivation of body dissatisfaction continues. “Advertising aimed at women works by lowering our self-esteem,” writes Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth. Media images of female beauty are simply unattainable for all but a very small number of women, but the cultivation of body dissatisfaction is so lucrative that the misguidance continues.
The next ingredient of moral oblivion is the assumption that economic growth is inherently good and ought to continue regardless of the unintended consequences. This idea is central to the idealization of material wealth in our nation and the world today. Mainstream economics and common wisdom equate economic growth with economic well-being. This assumption shapes American domestic and foreign public policies that determine wealth or poverty, even life or death, for many. The growth myth blinds its adherents to the dangers of economic life as we know it.
As the theory goes, growth in a nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increases and is necessary to increase prosperity, employment, and living standards for most people. An economy must grow in order to maintain jobs and prevent recession and inflation. During the economic breakdown at the turn of this decade, for example, we were encouraged to buy things in order to help the U.S. economy to grow. Growth has no fixed limits, and boundless economic growth will bring all people to a state of prosperity as defined by Western middle-class standards.[39] This theory is the bedrock of economic policy today. It is an ideological foundation of the global economy in its current form.[40]
Without a doubt, economic growth has reaped incredible bounty for a good many, and has enabled many others to escape poverty. However, the theory that economic growth is an accurate and adequate indicator of economic well-being for all or that more economic activity necessarily means a healthier economy is invalid, today, for many reasons. Here we note four and then focus on a fifth.
First, growth figures do not account for the consequences of economic or financial activity beyond the period to which the figures pertain. Thus, for example, the speculative activity that caused the recent financial crisis was given free rein. Faulty investments that created growth in the short-term proved treacherous in the long-term.
Second, growth theory does not account for distribution of wealth and income. Thus growth, in terms of GDP or average household income or wealth, frequently obscures an accompanying increase in poverty. India illustrates this.
Third, growth as measured by GDP does not distinguish between destructive and beneficial economic activity. Socially and environmentally destructive economic activity counts as a gain for humanity. Ten-year-olds purchasing cigarettes, alcoholics feeding their addiction, sale of pornography, oil spills, rising cancer rates, and electrocutions all contribute to growth. The GDP, for example, treats the extraction of natural resources as income rather than as depletion of an asset.
Fourth, growth as measured by GDP is an inadequate measure of economic well-being because GDP attributes to a host country profits that actually are repatriated. Thus while Coca-Cola’s operations in India register as growth in GDP for India, the vast portion of the wealth produced does not stay in India.
Fifth, and most relevant to our current purposes: Growth figures fail to account for Earth’s economy. That economy includes goods and essential services that Earth provides as well as costs. The theory that growth has no limits fails to recognize that the planet does. This problem is multifaceted.
Growth theory assumes that natural goods such as air, water, soil, fossil fuels are unlimited. Yet, as many economists, scientists, environmentalists, and ethicists now point out, the human economy is part of a much larger planetary economy of life whose limits in both renewable and nonrenewable goods have been so pushed that unchecked growth now further impedes Earth’s regenerative capacities.[41]
Likewise, growth theory does not recognize the limitations in Earth’s capacity to provide essential services. Nor does the theory account for the economic value of the services provided by Earth without which we would not survive. Earth’s services—better known as “ecosystem services”—include purification of air and water, generation and renewal of soil and soil fertility, pollination of crops and natural vegetation, detoxification and decomposition of wastes, nontoxic control of the vast majority of potential agricultural pests, and protection from the sun’s ultraviolet rays.
Yet another facet of this problem concerns externalized costs, the unacknowledged price tag of economic growth. Growth figures fail to factor into the bottom line and the price of goods the environmental costs of production and commerce. Rather, the harmful ecological impacts are considered “externalities” to be paid by society at large or by future generations. Thus, for example, China’s economic growth figures for the last decade do not include the eventual cost of massive environmental degradation due to coal burning, and water and soil depletion.
I am not arguing against economic growth per se. Some forms of economic growth are necessary—especially for the underconsuming world and impoverished people of affluent nations. I am arguing vehemently against the assumption that growth unqualified is necessarily a good and that growth is an adequate and accurate indicator of economic well-being. The myth of growth’s inherent goodness is integral to the worldview shaping the society and lives of high-consuming United States citizens.
Four changes regarding growth theory are required for more just and sustainable economic ways:
These changes in how we view economic growth would dramatically reconstitute our economic lives. They would change how we produce goods; transport, house, and feed ourselves; use energy; and meet the material needs of everyday life.
For the moment, the salient point here is this: The assumption that growth is inherently good obscures the economic and ecological violence rendered when growth is pursued at all costs, and obscures alternative economic ways. Allegiance to unqualified growth as the aim of the economy is yet another factor in moral oblivion; it clouds moral vision.
This discussion of growth theory illustrates theory functioning as truth. The theory that “economic growth benefits all” became an assumed truth, rationalizing and justifying the prioritizing of economic growth despite the costs. Evidence to the contrary can then be ignored or discredited because it does not cohere with the “truth.” Theory functioning as truth can cement into place “how things are,” and obscure “how things could be.”
These ingredients of moral oblivion are reinforced by practicing them. We learn them and reinscribe their normality through performing them in daily habits, behaviors, and rituals. Stephen Brookfield says it well: “[H]egemony is lived out a thousand times a day in our intimate behaviors, glances, body postures, in the fleeting calculations we make on how to look at and speak to each other, and in the continuous microdecisions that coalesce into a life.”[44] Moral oblivion—and with it our pervasive acquiescence to exploitative economic norms—is learned in part through what we habitually do.
Breaking that pattern of reinforcement requires seeing how it works. How do economically privileged United States citizens ritualize these dynamics in our roles as citizen, parent, spouse, friend, daughter, provider of material goods, creature with need for food and water, etc.? In what senses do our activities of everyday life embody the ingredients of moral oblivion described herein and, more importantly, reinscribe them? Let us imagine.
“Your sweater is beautiful. I love the color.” “Thanks! Believe it or not, I got it on sale for only ten dollars.” (This is said with a sense of accomplishment and of absolution.) This ubiquitous exchange betokens much. It is okay that I bought another sweater (that I do not need) because it cost so little. No, it is more than okay; it is virtuous to have purchased the sweater so inexpensively.
This is practiced denial and powerlessness. I have denied the sweater’s hidden price tag. The low monetary price came at high cost to others. The sweater, like other products, may have been made in a sweatshop in which women like Maria Chantico were sexually and economically exploited. The discount store that sold it paid its workers so little that some are homeless and ill. Ignored too is the petroleum component of the sweater’s synthetic fabric, and the greenhouse gasses emitted in producing, packaging, and shipping it. I have affirmed my powerlessness to clothe myself without damaging and degrading others. Exploitation has become consumer virtue.
A trip to the grocery store to purchase a pound of hamburger quietly convinces the everyday consumer that the amount of water consumed and greenhouse gases released in producing that meat is acceptable.[45] In putting inexpensive strawberries on my table and sprinkling them with inexpensive sugar, do I deny the reality of the strawberry pickers’ children, and of the former employees of the Kenyan sugar industry that was crippled by the dumping of U.S. sugar? Do I filter from my consciousness their ensuing abject poverty, and the lives that may be destroyed by it? Or do I see them, but remain hopeless that my family may eat in ways that do not deprive others? Or perhaps I convince myself that I can “make up for” the destroyed sugar industry by buying chickens or goats for impoverished people in Kenya? When my family sits down to eat, we give thanks for the food. We are blessed.
“I see here that when I buy this bottled water, Starbucks will give a percentage of the proceeds to help provide water to villagers in Africa. What a great idea,” muses the woman in line for coffee at Starbucks while gazing at a lovely ad showing a smiling African boy. “And with the economy in such bad shape, spending money helps it to grow.” Denied are the people whose water supply was sold on the global market to fill that bottle, and the people whose land will become its dumping ground.
The ingredients of moral oblivion are ingested by “practicing” them. The routine behaviors, thoughts, decisions, and social interactions of daily life protect us from seeing the consequences of our lives on people and ecosystems imperiled by them. Our everyday actions ritualize the acceptability of how we eat, transport ourselves, communicate, recreate, invest our money, and the other aspects of life as we know it. What we do persuades us that “the way things are” is “the way things will remain.” Practicing moral oblivion forges it.
In the following story, look for the ingredients of moral oblivion at play.
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I step off the number 7 bus in downtown Seattle and zip up my fleece against the chilly drizzle. My destination is only a few blocks away but I’m already craving the warm and sheltered interior of a building. As I trudge up Union Street, I pass a middle-aged woman in several bundled layers, smelling slightly stale.
She is squatting in a doorway, rattling a Wendy’s paper cup with a few coins in it. Her jacket looks several sizes too big and her pants look like they haven’t been washed in a while. I hesitate for a moment, feeling guilty. I’d rather not rustle around in my backpack on this busy street and I’m already late. What’s she going to buy with this money anyway? My eyes meet hers for a second, and I hastily make my decision. Swinging my bag around, I reach into the outermost pocket and find a few coins at the bottom. Sensing my intentions, she tilts the cup toward me. I walk over and drop the coins in her cup, slightly embarrassed when I realize that I had unconsciously been holding my breath while near her. But I feel pretty good about supporting someone in need, and by the time I arrive at my destination I’ve forgotten all about her.
This woman has a name: Robin Martin. I passed her on the street today, but I didn’t see her in Renton last month, working the register full-time at a Walmart. I was in the adjacent checkout aisle, buying an mp3 player for my brother’s birthday, as well as a bunch of running socks and a closet organizer. Robin’s cheap labor, among other things, makes it possible for Walmart to sell items at extremely low prices. She worked a nine-hour shift at the store that day and stayed in a shelter that night, because she had lost her apartment. Walmart didn’t pay her enough to keep up with rent, even at her cheap apartment that she shared with a few others. Even if she could have kept up with rent, all tenants had received notice that the apartment complex had been bought up by developers who planned to convert it into condos in response to rising land values as that particular neighborhood gentrified.
Robin worked the register for as long as she could, but she caught something in the shelters that exacerbated a preexisting medical condition, and before long wasn’t able to handle the nine-hour shifts on her feet. After several occasions of showing up late due to illness or leaving early for a doctor’s appointment, Robin was laid off.
Later that day a friend told me about an opportunity to attend a fundraiser for a local homeless shelter. Thinking of the woman I saw that morning, I made a $20/month online donation to the cause. The thought never crossed my mind that my contribution—significant as it is—does not address the roots of the problem, or that charity generally doesn’t solve the problems of poverty.
Today Robin sat on that same stoop for most of the day. When it began raining more heavily she thought about making her way to the local library, one of the few places that allow homeless people inside during the day. But in the end she decided to wait it out under the doorway. She checked the time on the parking meters periodically, because at 5:55 pm she needed be in line at a shelter nearby. If she were to line up any earlier than that she would be chased away by local establishments who loathe loiterers. If she were to show up even a few minutes later, she might not get one of the thirty-five beds in the shelter.
My friends at dinner were impressed by how little I had spent earlier on my socks, mp3 player, and closet organizer, and I felt pretty good about it too. Frankly, I always try to get a good deal when I’m shopping. I don’t want to get ripped off or ever pay more than I really need to for something. That’s why I like Walmart.
At home I signed onto my computer and noticed that my mutual fund finally went up in value again. Phew! Walmart is one of the companies in which my fund is invested; the company’s commitment to maximizing profit is working. I whispered a little prayer of gratitude. Little did I know that low wages contributed to that profit, or that Robin and I were connected through this company and this mutual fund: her poverty increases and my “wealth” increases. I didn’t know where Robin was and I didn’t think much about it. Powerful blinders kept me from seeing and powerful structures kept me from knowing the reality of her existence.
The story continues in chapter 6.
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We have uncovered dynamics that prevent economically privileged people from recognizing the dire impact of our lives on many of the world’s impoverished people and on Earth’s web of life. I have argued that moral vision is socially constructed to reinforce and rationalize “the way things are” for those who are invested (consciously or not) in keeping it that way. We examined eight dynamics at work in luring us to accept “the way things are” in the contemporary context of economic and ecological injustice. These eight mutually reinforcing factors are mainstays in the edifice of moral oblivion that enables systemic evil to remain invisible to its material beneficiaries. Hard-won insight into socially constructed moral oblivion has been for the sake of moral vision that enables societal transformation toward social justice and ecological well-being. Toward that vision we now turn.