“Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
Proverbs 29:18
♦
“While it is true that without vision the people perish, it is doubly true that without action the people and their vision perish as well.”
Johnnetta Cole[1]
If we, the world’s overconsumers:
. . . then we will move toward reshaping our society along the lines of ecological sustainability, environmental equity, economic equity, and distributed power. These are the terms of an ethic of neighbor-love as an ecological-economic calling. They transgress the logic of advanced global capitalism and call us to set our intelligence, our creativity, and our life-force against bondage to its sugar-coated mandates.
The maddening questions loom: What does this commitment imply for what we are to do? What are the practical implications of this realignment? What would it look like to defy the logic of neoliberal globalization, and forge life-serving alternatives to it?
Valid responses are diverse, multilayered, and constantly emerging. The challenge is to navigate this complexity with creativity and tenacity. How do we swim into these waters while attending to the demands of everyday life and relishing its joys? These questions lie before us in this chapter and the next.
To call for a radical change at individual and societal levels borders on the absurd if not accompanied by some kind of framework for unraveling what that conversion entails and some practical illustrations of it. Here I propose such a framework. The final chapter illustrates how it might play out. It may be seen as a framework for expressing neighbor-love as an ecological-economic vocation, or as a framework for translating neighbor-love into secular terms and public life. It also is a framework for confronting “hidden” structural violence or structural evil.
A basic theme of this book arrives here: Central to moral agency in the face of social structures that appear insurmountable is the recognition that they were constructed by human beings and therefore can be changed by them. The neoliberal global economy—including its manifestation in national economies—was constructed by people. It can therefore be replaced. This form of economy was put into place by overturning certain public policies and establishing others. Milton Friedman, one of the chief and early architects of what was to become neoliberalism, declared precisely that point: “[A]ctions that are taken depend upon the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”[2] With this conviction, he helped destroy much public policy that had been established in the New Deal to restrain the greed of powerful people seeking to concentrate wealth in a few hands. This conviction—that ideas expressed in public policies can accomplish the apparently impossible—helped to build today’s neoliberal global economy. In like manner, this conviction can help to reverse it and build more just alternatives to it.
However, the path from longing for social change to achieving it seems to travel through a thick and swirling fog. The complexity and vastness of the possibilities are confounding. Daunting obstacles jut across the path, as does awareness that the changes necessary are far beyond whatever “I” can do on my own. That fog needs illumination, a lantern to reveal pathways. A theoretical framework—in this case a moral framework—serves as one such lantern. Its elements are tools for making sense of apparently impenetrable complexity.
My intention is to sketch key components of a moral framework for reorienting our economy and our lives around the principles of ecological sustainability, environmental equity, economic equity, and distributed power. The proposed framework is not comprehensive. Rather it develops a few crucial components that often receive inadequate attention in ethical analysis, but that are essential to morality in the face of systemic evil. The point is to take the seemingly impossible and render it possible by opening it up to see its various parts and how they are at work bringing what may appear impossible into being. The framework pulls together ideas and methods developed earlier in the volume, and adds to them.
Imagine the elements of a framework for morality in the face of systemic evil as an initial and roughly hewn map charting a course into a more equitable and sustainable world. Readers traveling this course have passed through the first two stations on their journey, identified in chapter 8 as components of an ethic of neighbor-love. They are a moral anthropology (an understanding of who and what the human as a moral being is) and the scope of neighbor-love.[3]
Our trekkers will move along two intersecting streams, “resistance and rebuilding.” The travelers begin with traditional sources of moral knowing, and soon add another. The path leads them through arenas of life in which change takes place. Next, it ascends through successive levels, moving from a moral vision of the future to the practices that realize it. The trail concludes with moral formation.
These, then, are key components of a moral framework for forging more equitable, sustainable, and democratic economic structures and practices:
These components do not function in a linear fashion. The travelers wind through them moving back and forward, understanding each in light of the others. The remainder of this chapter fleshes out these elements, while the subsequent chapter illustrates the most concrete of them—practice and policies.
Resistance and rebuilding are two independent streams (or arms) of action for social change. Gandhi knew these two streams as “two strings [in the] nonviolent bow” of satyagraha.[4] They were:
Resistance and rebuilding are two sides of the same coin. One alone cannot begin to free us from our bondage to economic and ecological violence. “Resistance” means refusing to participate in some aspects of an economic system that is fast destroying earth’s atmosphere and countless livelihoods, communities, and lives. “Rebuilding” signifies supporting more socially just and ecologically healthy alternatives that are accountable to a “triple bottom line” (social, ecological, and financial). Many of these alternatives will be small-scale regional business and agriculture. “Resisting and rebuilding” are anchored in Christian theology as denouncing that which thwarts the in-breaking reign of God and announcing that which furthers it.
The “stories revisited” spread throughout this book provide many examples of both resistance and rebuilding. Another illustration may be helpful. To withdraw one’s money from the megabanks and investment firms that turn money into a commodity aimed at amassing great wealth for a very few people is to resist. To then conduct banking in a community-based bank and invest in a community redevelopment fund is to rebuild.
The reader will quickly note that doing such things will not, alone, change the economic order on a societal scale. Yet, at the same time these actions are crucial. Without ordinary people taking action, the societal changes will not happen; our actions are the seeds of societal change. Chapter 3 introduced this contradiction. It is further elaborated later in the current chapter as the “paradox of practice.”
Moral agency in the face of systemic evil depends upon people’s capacity to imagine and live toward freedom from it. That imagination and movement depends upon what we know. What we know, we draw—consciously and not—from various sources of moral knowing that inform our lives. In Christian ethics the sources traditionally are understood as four: Scripture, the tradition of the church throughout the ages, experience, and other bodies of human knowledge.[6] According to the moral consciousness sketched in chapter 8, this configuration of sources is dangerously flawed. As traditionally used, it perpetuates an anthropocentric and winner-centered moral consciousness. Our travelers moving toward a world shaped along the lines of social justice and ecological well-being will need to adjust where and how they gain moral wisdom. Without such change, they may flounder and flail in “the way things are.”
Two modifications of this centuries-old set of sources are requisite. Both appeared in chapter 5. They herald an epistemological realignment from modernity’s assumptions regarding knowledge.
One modification is to add a fifth source: other-than-human voices of the Earth. As noted previously, the Earth crisis casts unfamiliar meaning onto the ethical principle of seeking moral wisdom from the underside of power and privilege. Earth’s waters, soil, air, fauna, foliage, and biosphere have joined that underside. Human creatures are invited to learn, from the other-than-human parts of creation that now groan under our weight, wisdom for living in sync with Earth’s well-being. Moral knowing informed by Earth is uncharted epistemological terrain. Learning to negotiate it is an intriguing step for the “uncreators” seeking paths to becoming tillers and keepers of God’s glorious garden.[7]
The other alteration is to place a modifier on the four traditional sources. We, the uncreators, will seek to “read” scripture, tradition, experience, and other bodies of human knowledge from standpoints of people who are on the losing side of the global economy and more specifically, people whose lives are damaged or threatened by ours. We will “learn from people whose different stories reveal [our] participation in” structures of injustice.[8] “Experience” no longer will refer primarily to my experience or the experience of people “like me.” To learn from experience will mean to learn also from the experiences of people who suffer because of the systems that bring our material excess and who are proposing alternatives. And it will mean to learn from the experience of “the Earth.”
The idea of “learning from people on the margins of power and privilege” has become standard in the rhetoric of Christian ethics. Not yet standard is acknowledging the enormous obstacles to it and suggesting how to go about such an epistemological revolution. How might we operationalize the epistemological privilege of those who are, in George Zachariah’s terms, “uprooted from life”?[9] How am I to learn from people whose lives are threatened by mine when I do not even know who most of them are? How do I “learn from” people without repeating the colonizing assumption that “I” have the right to possess what is theirs, in this case knowledge? These are the questions of economic-ecological literacy raised earlier.
This shift in the grounds of knowledge does not come easily. Pathways for making it are not clear. Therefore, here we explore a few practical steps toward hearing and privileging perspectives of people on the losing end of the economic and ecological violence that buys our wealth. These steps are illustrative, meant to engender awareness of others.
“Mercy,” I asked her, “what would you advise U.S. citizens to do to support your struggles for justice?” My companion was Mercy Kappen, a highly accomplished feminist leader in India’s people’s movements. I had listened to her or her colleague for two days. They talked of their struggles on behalf of children, women, workers, and others. “U.S. citizens,” she responded, “who want to support our struggles for justice should get to know us and our social movements.”
Her statement was wise. Few things have more power to spawn moral agency than witnessing the courage and fierce tenacity of people’s resistance to structural violence. Mercy’s suggestion—getting to know people on the underside of the global economy and their social movements toward justice—is a step into the mutuality discussed in chapter 7 as a “feature of love.”
How, short of international travel, are we to connect with social movements toward justice in other lands? The best answers will come from the readers. I offer two.
One is to uncover and build on connections that already exist, that may be unknown to us or untapped. Transnational civil society has strengthened greatly in recent decades in the traditional realms of religious, labor, and other activist communities and through web-based connections between social movements. For instance, what if Lutherans in the United States were to listen regularly to Lutherans of the continent to our south? We might hear the “Declaration on the Foreign Debt, Neoliberalism, and Globalization,” written by the conference of Bishops, Presidents, and President Pastors of the Latin American Lutheran Churches declaring the “foreign debt of the third world . . . [to be] illegitimate,” and calling for its cancelation.[10] Rev. Angel Furlan, one of the declaration’s authors, describes its content: “As Lutheran bishops of Latin America, we denounce the economic and financial powers and the transnational companies that have imposed at a global level a model that has only produced poverty and exclusion. In this document we also say that the external debt, one of the tools of this model, has become a weapon that destroys the lives of millions.”[11]
Existing connections to social movements for justice may be religious, labor-related, professional, artistic, agricultural, interest-based, ethnic, or other. Recognizing and following up on them may lead to relationships and to learning from those movements. Their perspectives are varied and fallible, as are all human perspectives. But reflective respectful engagement with them will crack open our awareness, strengthen the muscles of critical vision, and plant seeds of moral agency.
Choosing alternative sources of news and information is another related means of learning from people on the underside of our consumer privilege and ecological debt. The way in which we perceive the world depends upon who we stand beside as we see it, and whose interpretation we ingest. Most United States citizens understand what is happening in this country and the world through the voice of United States mainstream media. Our view is as narrow as a crack in the wall. We might, instead or in addition, develop the practice of hearing from alternative news and information sources, as a regular diet, not merely an add-on. Our children will know a different world if they are raised assuming that everyday life includes alternative as well as mainstream news sources.
Alternative sources take many forms. Beginning to locate them requires only a thoughtful search on the web. The following list is a sampling, like viewing a few flowers in an expansive and expanding meadow. These examples are selected for their relevance to the vignettes in this volume.
Where we turn for moral knowing is a key component of the emerging moral framework. Morality in our context calls for dramatic alterations in the traditional sources of moral knowing. The standard four “sources” in ethical deliberation welcome a fifth; it is other-than-human voices. And people in sites of privilege will begin learning to “read” the standard sources from perspectives of people on the losing side of our privilege.[14] Our travelers, forging a path toward the world we seek, will dare to embrace knowing in these ways.
A degree of power for resisting what we deplore and rebuilding ethical alternatives emerges simply by recognizing different categories of change agents or “actors.” The agents of change may be categorized variously. I find it helpful to view them as:
The actions of each reinforce the work of the others.
These change agents may seek change in various arenas of society including: individuals and households, organizations of civil society, corporations and other business, and governments/public policy. To illustrate:
These arenas of change shape each other, often in unrecognized ways. Change in one arena opens doors to change in the others. In this knowledge, a seed of hope resides; our efforts extend further than we may know. The story of “Free Trade and Sweat Shops Revisited” demonstrates the interaction. Students against Sweatshops (an organization of civil society as agent) acted for change in all four arenas: in what individuals purchase, in how corporations treat workers, in universities’ (civil society) purchasing policies, and in governmental policy regarding international trade. Change in any of these arenas made change in the others more viable.
The next five elements of the moral framework work as a unit. It reveals a path from moral vision to its enactment. It begins with a moral vision for economic life and moves progressively through that vision’s: constituent principles; goals for realizing those principles; public policies moving toward those goals; and, finally, the most concrete level, practices of everyday life that flow from and contribute to these policies and goals.
“Moral vision is the vision of the good we hold . . . it is the socialized (or internalized) reflection of the communities we move among.”[16] In general, we assume moral vision unconsciously; we are not necessarily aware of it. It is shaped by the values, norms, and practices of the society and significant groups in which our lives unfold. It is taught by the narratives of history, advertising, cultural “heroes,” religious traditions, news media, and social structures assumed to be normal. A moral vision—conscious or not—tells us what is good, right, and true. By “economic moral vision,” I refer to the vision of what would be good, right, and true for economic life.
Moral vision shapes how people live. An economic moral vision in which people are affirmed or rewarded for accumulating wealth to the extent that they are able within the boundaries of legality, encourages people to do so. If, in contrast, according to the prevailing moral vision, wealth accumulation beyond a certain point was considered morally repugnant, people would be far less likely to pursue it.
Larry Rasmussen and Bruce Birch (discussing not economic moral vision but moral vision in a general sense) note that a changed moral vision affects all elements of the moral life. When what is considered in a particular society to be moral becomes seen as immoral, human behaviors, policies, and institutions change. Institutionalized race-based segregation moved from being considered moral to immoral in the span of a few decades. It was a shift in moral vision resulting in changed behavior, public policies, institutions, and norms for marriage and other human relationships.
As with an overall moral vision, so too with the vision of a moral economy: with a changed economic moral vision come changed behaviors, public policies, institutions, cultural norms, standards of achievement, goals, and more. The film “I Am” includes a brief provocative animation. The character inhabits a world in which it is considered insane to accumulate more than what is needed for a healthy happy life. The animation—only moments long—swept across my mind with the power of the boy who revealed that “the emperor has no clothes.” It disclosed our accumulation and consumption-based economic vision as the social construct that it is.[17]
When moral vision changes, what is perceived as possible also changes. A few centuries ago in many Western societies the legal equality of women and their legal right to freedom from nonconsensual sex would not have been seen as possible. The moral vision shifted and with it the seemingly impossible became possible.
It is wise to be aware of what economic moral vision is guiding a society, an individual life, a family, or other group. With an economic moral vision come life decisions. My students who understand that their families will be proud of them and consider them “good” people if they make a lot of money, buy a luxurious house, and drive a sophisticated car, tend to make certain choices during their college years. (According to many student accounts, these may not be the choices that they wish to make.) Students who sense that their parents envision for them a life of artistic production or service to society and who might be a bit chagrined by the large house or other conspicuous signs of wealth, tend in other directions. The two sets of students are responding to differing economic moral visions.
An account of a young Cherokee boy growing up in the early twentieth century described the hunting philosophy of the boy’s people. As the boy’s grandfather explained, they were to hunt only the animals that they needed for food. He was describing a lived economic vision. It contrasted starkly with the prevailing economic vision of his day, and it shaped a way of living.
The advocates of a particular economic moral vision had best be clear about what is at stake in it. For an economy as powerful as that of the United States, moral vision can determine life or death for millions. The economic moral vision suggested herein is of economies in which all people have the necessities required for a healthy life, Earth’s life-systems are sustained and regenerated, and none accumulate vast wealth at the cost of impoverishing others or Earth’s life-support systems.
It is one thing to envision such an economy. It is another thing to move in that direction. A step toward doing so is to identify defining features or principles of this economic vision. We have done so. They are ecological sustainability, environmental equity, economic equity, and democracy where democracy implies relatively distributed and accountable economic power.
As we have seen, these principles cannot be approximated within the current form of global economy, neoliberal capitalism. It would be absurd not to acknowledge the daunting reality that emerges from the contradiction between the proposed economic moral vision and neoliberalism. It is this: The forces and interests lined up to perpetuate the concentration of financial capital and other wealth—and hence of power—in the hands of the most wealthy are monumental and formidable. The recent and, for many people, continuing global economic meltdown is evidence. The raw power of unregulated finance capital motivated to maximize profit regardless of the cost to others cast countless people into misery and managed to remain unaccountable to the “demos” (the body politic). Movement toward distributed accountable power, equity, and ecological sustainability (the principles of a moral economy) directly counters that concentration of power.
No less significant is the fact that courageous people around the globe already have lost their lives in struggles for economic and ecological justice. My point is not that privileged United States citizens are likely to be killed in the quest for a more just and sustainable economic order. Rather, my point is to face the reality of “what is.” Some people will go to any length to maintain their power and wealth. Without the sustaining power of community and resources for hope and courage, the challenge might be insurmountable.
One test of a moral vision and its defining principles is whether one can construct practical steps toward realizing them. Those steps include mid-way goals and the policies and practices for reaching those goals.
A cavernous gap separates these four principles or features of a moral economy from “the way things are.” Mid-way goals—in ethics known as “middle axioms”—are a tool for bridging that gap. Said differently, to realize principles of moral economic life, goals along the way help. They provide some sensibilities regarding how to get there. They serve as directives and criteria for whether a particular policy or practice accords with the moral vision. Mid-way goals are more specific than are the four overarching principles, yet not as specific as the actual public policies and practices that move toward reaching the goals.
Goals along the way to a more sustainable, environmentally and economically equitable, and democratic economic order include the following. They pertain to the high-consuming world. I am not proposing goals for the Global South. This account is illustrative rather than comprehensive.
These goals counter the power imbalances at the heart of structural violence. With significant movement toward these goals, the world’s trade in seeds would not be controlled by a few mega-corporations. The children of indebted poor countries would not see their food and healthcare disappear down the drain of insurmountable and illegitimate debt payments. Robin and others like her would not be forced into homelessness while working for people receiving 400 times what she makes. We would not fill our plates consistently with food that is trucked to us over hundreds of miles by carbon-spewing vehicles, and that is grown on land desperately needed by impoverished people to produce their own food. Our clothing would not be produced in sweatshops. Nor would hundreds of thousands of Americans lose their savings and livelihoods to speculative investors.
The crucial point, the transformative reality, is this: While for many of these goals, fulfillment is a long a way down the road, they are attainable. These goals may be achieved through the commitments, decisions, and actions of human beings working together. Moreover, people around the globe are working avidly toward each one of them.
A moral vision and the goals for reaching it ultimately depend upon people putting them into practice. Vision, principles, and goals must be lived. The next steps in a moral framework leading from an economic moral vision toward its realization are public policies consistent with the goals, and then “practices” related to those policies.
By “practices” I mean what individuals, organizations, corporations, governing bodies, and other units of society do on an ongoing basis. They are the actions or behaviors that give shape to life in the home, workplace, school, place of worship, and the other venues in which daily life unfolds. “Practices” may be intentional or they may be rote.
“Public policy” refers to laws and regulations established by people through their governing bodies, be they local, state, provincial, or national. Public policies shape practices. The opposite also is true; practices influence the formation of public policy. Moreover, individuals’ practices influence a society’s practices and policies. So too, of course, the policies and practices of a society influence the practices of individuals. Thus the morality of a society and the morality of individuals are mutually informing.
Actions to build economies—local, national, and global—marked by ecological sustainability, economic and ecological equity, and relatively shared power take countless forms. In discerning one’s place in the movement toward a more just and sustainable world, it is useful to view the range of actions. Here then, is a typology. Its categories are neither rigid nor mutually exclusive. The value is not in establishing a particular set of categories. Rather, the value is in revealing the multiple forms of practices and how they enable each other and contribute to reaching the goals identified above.
The practices in this schema stand in three kinds of relationship to the identified goals. Some practices contribute directly to one or more of the goals. Supporting economic alternatives such as independent local businesses is an example. Other practices—such as legislative advocacy—aim at changes in public policy that lead toward one or more of the goals. Still other practices contribute to the goals by forming people capable of making choices in their direction. Earth-honoring worship exemplifies this kind of relationship. The forms of action apparent in this book’s “Life Stories Revisited” appear here.[21]
These are practical forms of “loving neighbor as self” in our context. They are steps toward the aforementioned goals. As such, these practices are means of resisting economic and ecological violence and rebuilding more equitable, sustainable, and democratic economic life.
A sharp tension accompanies any honest look at the practices entailed in movement toward economic lives that do not exploit and endanger neighbors and Earth. On the one hand is the magnitude of the changes necessary and the shortness of time (in light of climate change). On the other is the fact that we also are responsible for the realities of everyday life and relationships: getting to work or school on time, acquiring and cooking food, bringing attention and joy to family and friends, washing our hair and the dishes, studying, clothing ourselves and family, taking out the garbage, caring for friends or family who are sick or suffering, earning a living, fixing broken cars and worn-down houses. Many of us do not have time to add more “things to do.” This reality is most fierce for households in which the adult or adults work full time (or more than full time) at low-paying jobs, and no extended family is available to care for children or other dependent members of the household.
This tension points to the burning need for the structural changes that this book and its vision of a moral economy seek. Over time, the aim of the aforementioned goals is to rearrange systems of transportation, food production, housing construction, and so on so that our daily activities are in themselves practices that contribute to healthy ecosystems and socially just human relations.
I do not propose to resolve the tension here. The resolution clearly varies depending upon circumstance. A family in my neighborhood offered one piece of a fruitful response. This family fits the above description of two working adults with dependents needing special care and having relatively low income. In moving toward a more just and sustainable lifestyle, they have not added more things to do, but rather have changed the way they do things. Each month, this household makes one change that moves it into the trajectory of justice and Earth-care. One month they began washing clothes only on the “short wash” setting of their laundry machine, noticing that clothes came out just as clean while using less water and energy. The parents instilled in their daughters the preciousness of water. At another point they began hanging out laundry to dry rather than using the energy-intensive dryer: “We actually hung our cloth diapers to dry,” recalled, Karen, the mother in the family. Packaged food soon disappeared from the kitchen, replaced by food bought in bulk from the local co-op, and plastic products and containers were largely replaced by glass, metal, bamboo, or other alternatives. “When changes are taken one step at a time, it’s not that big a deal,” Karen explained. “If you try to do it all at once it’s self-defeating.” Both parents now bike to work; one is able to show up in bike clothes a bit sweaty and the other changes clothes at work. “We don’t frame it as a sacrifice, biking to work or taking the bus,” Karen explained. “It enriches our lives. We get exercise while biking. We meet new people on the bus. It connects us to the community.”[25]
Over the years, as these changes have accumulated, the family’s daily activities have come to include practices from all of the categories noted in the typology above. One comes away from dinner in their home far more aware of legislation to support, products to boycott, and how to join a campaign to protect local business from global corporate enterprise. One also spends much time in laughter. These friends—and countless other people having made similar choices—are a beacon of hope, quietly shining on what is possible.
A tree grows near the street on which I live. One small strand of root pushing up against the asphalt and the concrete has no apparent impact. It is as inconsequential as my divestment in large-scale banking and investment firms. However, many strands of root woven together and persisting in their effort to nurture the life of that tree have pushed up large blocks of the concrete sidewalk and the asphalt street. Trucks driving over the ridges in the road rattle, so great is the disruption caused by those tenacious strands of root working together on behalf of life. If each strand of root opted out on the basis of its insignificance, the powerful force on behalf of life would go untapped.
A vexing paradox colors the commitment to take action toward social change. Depending on how it is perceived, this paradox may render moral defeatism in the quest for justice or moral tenacity for pursuing it. The stakes, then, in recognizing and interpreting the “paradox of practice” are high.
Few concepts are more important to moral agency than recognizing the constructive interplay between individuals’ behavioral changes and social structural change. Many of my students argue that what individuals do in their everyday practices—riding bikes or buses instead of driving, giving up beef and packaged food, drinking fair trade coffee, boycotting Walmart, sending emails to legislators, shopping at co-ops and farmers’ markets, and so on—are ineffectual and relatively insignificant. What is needed, they insist, is major public policy change, legal mandates, and large-scale institutional change.
Other students insist the opposite. Social structural change through public policy and legal mandates, they aver, will not occur to the extent that we need it. What is needed are individual people and households deciding to live in ways that are ecologically sound and economically nonexploitative and then doing so.
It is a delight to help them unearth the synergy between behavioral change and structural change at varied levels. Imagine city streets in the United States filled with bicycle riders, as are many streets of Amsterdam. How to get there? People are more likely to ride a bike to work (behavioral change) if city policy makes bike-riding safer and more convenient. (These policies would provide bike lanes on all arterials; create low-cost bike acquisition programs for low-income people; close many streets to all but bikes, scooters, and buses; and so on.) Such policies will come about because of individuals changing their outlook and behavior.
One’s everyday practices in fossil fuel use, food-related decisions, and other consumer choices may seem inconsequential for change at the macro level. Yet, these practices are necessary and “effect”ive. Every “system of evil requires personal actions to make it work.”[26] Thus every system of evil also requires people to resist their own and others’ participation in it, even while acknowledging that their acts of resistance in themselves appear relatively ineffectual. Corporate power continues unfettered because “so many players, right down to individual human beings, facilitate its operation.”[27] While individual acts will not in themselves change the course of social structures—including the global economy—they are necessary for that change to be achieved.
The paradox of practice invites two contrasting and morally weighted responses. One is the sense of powerlessness and hopelessness discussed in chapter 4. Its cost is astronomical—widespread failure to challenge the structural injustices that shape our lives.
A far more empowering response is recognizing that while structural injustice transcends individual agency, it does not transcend collective agency; collective agency can overcome structural injustice, and collective agency requires individual agency. As “I” becomes “we,” individuals’ practices bear rich fruit. The channels of impact are psychological, political, economic, and cultural:
The classic feminist adage, “the personal is political,” rings true. Personal practices and public policy are inextricably related. Change in the one catalyzes change in the other. Choices in personal life have political impact.
The “forms of practice” appearing below illustrate many facets of the emerging moral framework.
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The story of blood minerals in chapter 4 ended with the political, environmental, and human-rights implications of mining columbium-tantalum in the Congo.
I hear stories about atrocities and suffering in Africa a lot, and I usually just sigh and move on because I doubt there’s anything I can do about it. But I could no longer deny that my electronic product purchases were connected to intense misery on the other side of the globe. I started to wonder: who do I think I am anyway . . . do I have the right to own and use all of this stuff if it causes so much suffering? I decided to do something. I started by taking a serious look at the electronics in my household and considered if any of them were redundant or just plain too indulgent. My friend and I discussed the possibility of sharing a video -game console and maybe some other electronics, and we think a sharing arrangement might work.
Next, I called my state senators and asked them to support the Conflict Materials Trade Act. It requires the commerce department to audit mineral mines and declare them conflict-free or not. Although it’s not a ban on conflict minerals, it is a beginning.
After that I contacted Apple, and asked them to support the Conflict Minerals Pledge. [28] It is a pledge to stop using conflict minerals and allow independent supply-chain verification to that effect. I told them that I was committed to purchasing electronics only from firms that are abiding by the Conflict Minerals Pledge, and that I was going to tell my friends and family about the role of conflict minerals in the Congo.
Why on Earth did I not know about this problem, I wondered? How could a smart guy like me not realize what was going on behind my cell phone, iPod, and computer? What if other things that I buy or use also come at such a price? I’ve decided that I’m not going to spend the rest of my life not knowing. I’m going to organize for a speaker to come to my school—an expert, a witness, or survivor of the conflict, someone who will be able to reach the students on a deep level and spur them to take action. The simple fact that most people have no idea that their electronics are fueling such violence, I think, is the main reason more significant action isn’t taken. And I decided to petition the organizer of our weekly campus film series to show “Blood in the Mobile,” a film documenting how our cell-phone use finances the war in the Congo. [29] Next term, I think we’ll petition the university administration to purchase only conflict-free electronics. I can just imagine being part of a nationwide movement of universities committed to blocking conflict minerals.
My theology prof said that I could get “service learning credit” for community organizing around a social justice issue. So this summer at home I plan to get the local religious community involved. I found out online that Jewish World Watch offers speakers and education for congregations who want to spread knowledge of genocides and mass atrocities. They could help convince my congregation to become a “conflict-free congregation.” [30] And once people’s eyes are opened, I know they’ll pass on the knowledge.
I learned that other organizations are already working on this and that I could do more if I connected up with them. The Enough Project seems to know what they’re doing, so I sent them a donation and now I follow their progress online. Finally, I started thinking about everyone else I know who isn’t a part of my school or church. I decided to let them know—through email and Facebook—about an audit system the Enough Project has produced. It ranks electronic companies on their progress toward responsible sourcing of conflict minerals. I’ll urge everyone to buy only conflict-free electronics, or, if that’s not possible, to buy from the companies with the highest rankings. Well, I guess I’ll also urge them—and myself—to buy less electronics altogether.
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Moral formation is the elephant in the room of social change. How do we become “the people that we need”? The question has been present, explicitly or implicitly, throughout these pages. What forms the economic moral vision of a people? What sculptors—generous and generative or confining and excluding—craft our vision of “what ought and could be” regarding the distribution of Earth’s goods? What forms the moral-spiritual power to move toward “what ought be,” especially if doing so entails transgressing cultural norms and the lifestyle habits solidified over a lifetime?
Commonly the field of ethics locates moral formation in values and the practice of them. Clearly, it is important to identify requisite shifts in values. Foremost among them are sufficiency over endless acquisition, economic justice over concentrated wealth, meeting needs over material accumulation, collaboration and community over privatized living, well-being over growth, service and empathy over blind pursuit of individual gain.[31] A theme emerges. It is the problem of valuing wealth too much. Kenneth Sayre puts it simply: “Return to environmental health requires diminishing society’s high regard for wealth . . . this will involve curtailing both society’s general endorsement of wealth as a personal goal and establishing countervailing values that forbid accumulation of excessive wealth . . . equity is a normative value that might be effective in this countervailing role.”[32] Particularly toxic is the extraordinary valuation of wealth as criterion of success. Had ours been a society in which equity was highly valued, and excessive wealth accumulation was widely considered a vice, the world would be radically different.
However, I leave further thinking about specific values changes in the hands of others. We focus here on a different point about values and on a question that is infrequently posed.[33] Both concern moral formation.
The point is this: While indeed significant shifts in values are needed, many people already hold dear many of the values we need, and seek to practice them in interpersonal relationships, but do not apply them to our lives as parts of social systems. These are values such as compassion, justice, service, empathy, love, and sacrifice for the sake of life. The pivotal question becomes: How are we to become people who bring into public life the values we treasure in our interpersonal relationships? How do we form ourselves and others for practicing these values as members of social systems that have life-and-death impact on millions of people? Here we view clues emerging from the morally formative power of what people do (our practices), first considering practices in general and then practices of worship.
I am reminded of a Cherokee tradition in which a wise elder narrates a story to the tribe’s young people about a fierce battle between two wolves that live inside him. One wolf, clever and proud, is known for its greed, hate, envy, and violence. The other, strong and courageous, is known for its grace, love, peace, and humility. As the Cherokee elder describes the frequent and mounting tension between the two wolves, an excited boy implores him, “Please tell us which wolf will win!”
“The one who will win,” the elder replies, “is the one I feed.” [34]
This story holds rich truth. A principle of ethics is that we become what we do. What we “practice” shapes what we value, how we see the world, our sense of what is right and good. The habits of everyday life—one’s “lifestyle”—over time “feed” one wolf or the other. The wolf that is nourished best is the one that grows. This pertains to both individuals and societies.
Yet, in the context of structural sin or structural violence, the story of the wolf also harbors a lie. A basic thrust of this book is that one might grow in moral goodness in personal life, while yet continuing in paths of structural evil because one does not recognize that evil for what it is; structural evil hides. Where hidden, it is not resisted. Compassion, generosity, and justice may be nurtured to reign strong in the personal lives of people who nevertheless are unknowingly killing others through economic and ecological violence.
Therefore, the “practice of moral goodness”—if it is to shape people for challenging the structural violence in which they swim—must be informed by critical awareness of that violence. Moral formation calls for “seeing” structural evil and its persistent ability to hide. Thus, critical vision is a central ingredient of moral formation for justice-making and earth-keeping in the context of structural evil. The tools for developing critical vision, discussed throughout the volume, take on added importance.
“…join in the hymn of all creation.” [35]
From its earliest years, the church has affirmed that the practice of worship—and particularly the sacraments of Eucharist and baptism—is morally formative. It influences how people act in the world.[36] As articulated by liturgical theologian Don Saliers, “there is an internal, conceptual link between liturgy and ethics. How we pray and worship is linked to how we live.”[37]
Contemporary theorists in multiple disciplines argue that human identity, subjectivity, and action are shaped by the narratives that we experience and the rituals that reinforce them. Liturgical theology concurs. The practice of worship shapes people by enacting a vision of the world, and by telling an epic story in which the worshiping community is a player.[38] The vision and story teach the people how to live and empower them for that life. Martin Luther, speaking of the Eucharist, describes this influence: “The sacrament . . . so changes a person that he is made one with the others.” “Thus by means of this sacrament, all self-seeking love is rooted out and gives place to that which seeks the common good of all.”[39]
However, a troubling question hovers. How is it possible that Christian communities of the Global North worship and celebrate the Eucharist regularly and sincerely, and yet continue in patterns of life that damage Earth’s life-systems and bring many neighbors suffering and destruction? We do not love neighbor by resisting economic arrangements that buy our luxury at the price of others’ blood. Instead, we give of our wealth to help others, fail to ponder our wealth’s connections to others’ impoverishment or to Earth’s distress, and carry on with life as usual. I, for instance, am sent forth by the Spirit from worship every Sabbath day to embody God’s justice-making and Earth-honoring love. In stark contrast, however, I go forth from worship to produce, on that Sabbath day, outrageous amounts of greenhouse gases.
To speak of worship forming humans for the work of love appears as the height of theological hubris and self-deception, unless we acknowledge the overriding reality of our participation in structural sin. Sri Lankan theologian Tissa Balasuriya poses the contradiction starkly: “Why is it that in spite of hundreds of thousands of Eucharistic celebrations, Christians . . . who proclaim Eucharistic love and sharing deprive the poor people of the world of food, capital, employment, and even land . . . inequities grow . . . [and] the rich live like Dives in the Gospel story?”[40]
Theologians have grappled with the contradiction between the call to love experienced in worship, and people’s apparent obliviousness to that call in lived life. The contradiction is expressed theologically and sociologically in multiple ways. Typically liturgical theology posits it as the “radical conflict”[41] between how we worship and how we live, or between “worship and social-ethical practice,”[42] or between “a purely believed”[43] faith and a faith embodied in society.
Our focus is on how it could be otherwise. How might worship help to shape the worshiping community for neighbor-love that is relevant and empowering in the face of massive structural sin and our participation in it? Three pointers lie in the “story” told in worship, communal lament, and worship as a “school for seeing.”
If indeed the moral life of worshipers is formed by liturgical enactment of a “vision of the world,” then the “vision of the world” chosen and enacted matters, and it matters much. Perhaps worship will better form the people for love as an economic-ecological calling if worship enacts an alternative “vision of the world” in which humans are creatures with all the other creatures, dependent, for example, upon millions of microbes inhabiting our bodies enabling us to sing and taste the bread and wine. Or what if the alternative vision of the world enacted in worship portrayed water, trees, and bodies—rather than buildings—as sacred abode of God? What if the vision enacted in worship portrayed not only all people with enough, but the overconsumers no longer having too much? What if the vision foretold the “uncreators” forsaking the curse of uncreating, and instead honoring the original charge given to us by God, to “keep and till” God’s garden Earth? Where would worship enacting such “visions of the world” take place? What would it look like?
The questions thickens. Whose “vision of the world” is to be told? Is it “ours”? Or is it an alternative vision of the world as told, for example, by indigenous Americans whose great grandparents were pushed out of their homes, cultures, and livelihoods by the descendants of the tribes of Europe? Whose interpretation of scripture and of God will ground the vision of the world enacted in “our” worship?
If the moral life of worshipers is formed also by an epic story told through the process of worship, then what epic story is “told” matters. What if the story told in the sermon, songs, chanting, sacraments, and art highlighted the Christian heritage of resistance to systemic domination? What if the practice of worship taught our children that they stand in a long line of courageous resisters who stood up against structural evil even at cost of life: the daring midwives who rescued Moses from the Pharaoh’s deadly hand, Jesus who refused to comply with the ways of empire, the early martyrs who resisted imperial demands, the abolitionists, the “righteous gentiles” who defied Hitler’s death machine, the Huguenots in the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon whose quiet resistance saved four thousand Jews even while occupied by fascist forces? What if our children frequently heard sermons such as that preached by one of my pastors: “I could empathize with Paul in prison,” she declared, “because last time I was in prison, I too was in solitary confinement.” She had been jailed many times for protesting the Trident nuclear submarines stationed near Seattle. What if our congregations were morally formed to see themselves as walking in the footsteps of fiercely loving resisters? What if the story told, including us as characters, truly honored our rich heritage of resistance to dominant powers where they demanded that people transgress God’s commandment to love? Telling this story would not be too strange, for that heritage is at the heart of Christian and Hebrew scriptures. Were the story told in worship, might we be more fertile ground for love that defies economic and ecological violence?
In a powerful sermon on the book of Joel, Christian womanist ethicist Emilie Townes claims that, for people living in covenant relationship with God, social healing begins with communal lament. Lament was integral to the ancient Hebrews’ covenant relationship with God, suggests Townes, drawing on the work of Walter Brueggemann. A loss of lament meant “also a loss of genuine covenant interaction with God.”[44] Where the assembly praises God but does not lament, “covenant is a practice of denial and pretense.”[45]
Communal lament, as Townes explains it, is the assembly crying out in distress to the God in whom it trusts. It is a cry of sorrow by the people gathered, a cry of grief and repentance and a plea for help in the midst of social affliction. Deep and sincere “communal lament . . . names problems, seeks justice, and hopes for God’s deliverance.” Lament, as seen in the book of Joel, she says, forms people; it requires them to give name and words to suffering. “[W]hen Israel used lament as rite and worship on a regular basis, it kept the question of justice visible and legitimate.”[46]
Perhaps for us too, lament is integral to social restoration. Could it be that worship that empowers the people of God for social and ecological healing will include profound lament for the ways in which our lives unwittingly endanger Earth’s life-systems and vulnerable neighbors far and near? Imagine churches offering space for “public lament” about the fact that we have allowed hundreds of thousands of children, women, and men to go homeless in our land.
Worship may remind the people why they can lament without drowning in despair. Sacred Power for healing this beautiful and broken world is present with, among, and within the stuff of Earth. That saving presence flows instinctively to life’s broken places. There it nurtures power for love, including the love that reforms society.
According to a longstanding Christian claim, God comes to and within the worshiping community through the sacraments. The Latin, “sacramentum,” was used in early Christianity to translate the Greek, “mysterion.” The mysterion of God, at least in the apostle Paul’s work, “are the ways of God in getting through to us, in opening our eyes to face reality, in bringing us faith, hope and love.”[47] The sacraments then are God’s ways of getting through to us in at least two ways. They open our eyes to reality, even when reality may seem too painful to face. And they bring us faith, hope, and love, the ingredients of agency for responding to reality in ways that reflect God’s healing and liberating presence.
Since at least the third century, the Eucharist has been known by some as a school for seeing.[48] Cyril of Jerusalem, in his teaching on the Eucharist, admonishes participants to “hallow your eyes by the touch of the sacred Body, and then partake. . . . After partaking of the Body of Christ [and] . . . receiving also the Blood of Christ . . . while It is still warm upon your lips, moisten your fingers with It and so sanctify your eyes, your forehead and other organs of sense.”[49] Thirteen centuries later, Martin Luther insisted that vision of how we are to live in accord with faith is obscured when sacramental practice is ignored or distorted.[50] In a contemporary Lutheran baptismal rite drawing upon this heritage, the cross is traced on the eyes with the words “receive the cross on your eyes that you may see the light of Christ, illumination for your way.”[51]
To what reality will the sacraments open our eyes if, through them, God is enabling Her people to see differently so that we may live more fully the love for which we are created? What will the sacraments reveal if they are to evoke wisdom and courage for the work of justice-making and Earth-healing? The elements of “critical mystical vision” suggest that the sacraments ought to help us to perceive:
How, then, will the church practice worship in a manner that opens our eyes to see what is, what could be, and God’s power flowing through us and the world, unleashing moral-spiritual power for reshaping society toward justice, compassion, and Earth-care?
As long as people who “benefit” materially from structural injustice develop and practice liturgy through the perceptual filters of privilege, our vision of God and of how we ought to live will be dim and distorted. Our vision will tilt toward reinforcing the injustices that benefit us. The Jesus Christ whom we encounter in worship will continue to be colored by our vested interests in existing social arrangements. Worship—shaped and experienced through lenses of privilege—inadvertently and despite our best intentions may reinforce that privilege.
Consider the extent to which worship formulated over the centuries by Euro-Western mindsets reinforces white privilege even for white people who in their conscious minds abhor racism:
In a similar vein, worship held constantly in walled spaces in which the only nonhumanly constructed things are domesticated and formally arranged flowers tends to reinforce anthropocentric assumptions about what is sacred. If trees and soil were as sacred as altars and chalices, why do we not see those things of Earth in worship?
If the practice of worship is to be socially transformative, then it must help worshiping communities see the eyes through which we view reality and, especially, to perceive from perspectives of people who are oppressed by our privilege and are struggling to overcome it. Worshiping communities will seek to bring those views to bear on liturgical reformation. And worship will guide us in the strange effort to perceive from perspectives of Earth. Socially transformative worship will evoke also the visions of more just and Earth-honoring social structures, and God’s presence luring creation in their direction.
Imagine baptism in rivers where the baptizing community has been practicing river restoration. Or worship space designed to leave no carbon-footprint. How about liturgical blessing of congregations heading out to protest against wage theft, or blessing of youth “mission trips” to work on the “living wage” campaign?
Consider the “tree-planting Eucharist” developed by the African Earth-Keeping churches. And what of the water-conserving, food-growing rituals of the Georgetown Gospel Chapel in a low-income industrial area of Seattle? I recall vividly the simple outdoor worship space initiated by a rural and agricultural program of Tamilnadu Theological Seminary, a Christian seminary community dedicated to eco-justice in India’s Tamilnadu province. The chancel has no walls and no roof. Vines growing from one side to the other provide a small bit of coverage from rain. The cross is honed from a nearby tree, and the altar and celebrant’s chairs are large stones.
I think of the Dalit liberation liturgy celebrated by many Dalit communities in India.[54] Valley and Mountain Fellowship also comes to mind. This Christian community in Seattle includes acts of “creative liberation” as a form of worship. The community gathers alongside unions, community groups, environmental groups, and other faith communities for public witness supporting worker justice, environmental justice, immigrant rights, and more. Communities of “Green Sisters” are spread throughout the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Nigeria, and the Philippines. “Green Sisters” refers to Catholic sisters dedicated to heeding the plight of the Earth, healing the Earth, and developing a religious culture that enables both. In their Earth literacy programs, they practice “Earth body prayer.” Their “Earth meditation trails” invite people to meditate on Earth-human relations, celebrate the journey of the universe, and strengthen their connections with self, others, Earth, and God.[55] The Maryknoll Ecological Sanctuary in Baguio, Luzon, has created the Stations of the Cosmos instead of the Stations of the Cross, a nature walk of discovery into the earth’s deep interconnectedness. Beyond this, I invite the reader to a growing body of creative faithful resources.[56]
The church claims that Christian worship forms and empowers believers to heed God’s call to love neighbor as self. In contrast, the church of the Global North tends to comply with ways of life that accumulate and consume at terrible cost to others and to Earth’s life-systems. The question here has been: “How can this be, and how might it be otherwise?” We have uncovered clues to Christian worship that nurtures the capacity to serve God’s justice-making, Earth-tending work.
This chapter sketched key elements of a moral framework capable of enabling movement toward more equitable, sustainable, and democratic economic life. The framework begins with the moral anthropology and the understanding of neighbor-love’s scope developed in the previous chapter. The framework entails both resistance and rebuilding, and depends upon substantive shifts in sources of moral knowledge. According to this moral framework, change agents include individuals, institutions, business, and government, and change happens in these same four arenas. This framework stems from a vision of a moral economy and its four constituent principles. It identifies goals for realizing those principles and then policies and practices of life that would enable these goals to be met. Finally, this framework acknowledges the role of moral formation in enabling social transformation.
In theological terms, this is a framework for expressing neighbor-love as an ecological-economic calling. It remains now to illustrate more fully the most concrete pieces of this framework—policies and practices. That is the intent of chapter 10.