Community, capitalism, and the human story
It occurs to me that this blog’s new title is Community, and I found that word echoing in my head last night as I asked a question at Union Theological Seminary’s “mega-class.” Following are my question and Dr. Serene Jones’ response – I addressed the question to her because, after hearing the fabulous Gary Dorrien answer a half dozen questions on the AIG bailout, I wanted some theology. Also, I’m transcribing - and not linking to the video podcast of the course - because this way I get to edit my incoherence.
Q: Professor Dorrien said that neoclassical capitalism pays no heed to community, and that economic democracy is a brake on human greed. It seems that those two work together: community may curb greed, and greed harms community, right?
But on the human level, it wasn’t [Reagan-era] globalization that destroyed that community, it was industrialization and the ability to simply buy something from two towns away.
As Christians, we feel this anachronistic call to a community that began to decline with modernity itself. What do we say to a world which lacks the sort of robust community that can curb our sinfulness, curb our greed?
Serene Jones: Community is an interesting term because, like many of the things we’ve been discussing, community isn’t inherently a progressive or positive space. You can have really corrupt forms of community and when you get corruption going in deep, communal ways, it’s bad. So we can’t just sort of invoke community as if it’s a nostalgic, utopic space somewhere that if we just got reconnected to one another, we’d be alright.
But what I do think your question points to is that this is all transpiring in the context of a world populated by people who still have very fundamental desires for intimacy, for connection, for being seen and being known, for being held and being loved and being fed. Again and again, if those sort of basic truths that the Christian story lifts up in profound ways stay at the center of our reflection on this, then we stop thinking that we’re dealing with human beings who are creatures other than these kinds of creatures, and we stop thinking as if these systems have a life of their own and [realize] they’re systems that these kinds of people with these kinds of needs have generated. Then we keep coming back to the earth of our existence as the place in which we are most likely to find – not always the most immediately practical answer – but we will get the impulses and the desires that point us in the right direction when it comes to articulating those policies.
In one regard, Dr. Jones fixated on my use of the word “community,” when I was really trying to recall the broader litany of grievances Prof. Dorrien raised against “neoclassical capitalism.” However, inasmuch as I was trying to say, “we Christians want this deeper thing than a post/modern world has ever offered,” she rightly took me down several notches in reminding me that community is anything but a “nostalgic, utopic space somewhere.”
I think my choice of that particular word is unwittingly rather revealing; any who know me can attest to my deep reverence for relationships and the often sabotaging ways in which I can elevate the role of community.
The body of her answer, though, gets to the heart of why I feel called to seminary of all things. I’ve been fiddling around, trying to find what felt like a rationally sound way to simply say, “Christianity tells a story of truth.” A story, where analytic philosophy simply strikes out at the thing. Embodied as we are in time and place, aren’t humans always entangled in the story of our lives more than any Platonic forms?
Dr. Jones’ answer exemplifies that growing conviction of mine, that the Christian story pushes back against our willful belief that, “we’re dealing with human beings who are creatures other than these kinds of creatures [who have orchestrated the current economic catastrophe], and we stop thinking as if these systems have a life of their own.” Scripture is so troublesome, but humanity is still more so. I find a truth in the way the Christian story contains so much, and wraps all of it in God’s love and justification.
I explain myself these days by saying that I head to Union to give myself to God. Said less biblically, I go to recognize that my life is not my own. It may be God’s (I’m beginning to believe so), or it may just belong to fate, nature, the soil. That giving up makes increasingly little practical sense as job prospects dwindle in this economy, but I find the end of Dr. Jones’ answer deeply affirming. Places such as Union, study such as this, may “not always [be] the most immediately practical answer – but we will get the impulses and the desires that point us in the right direction when it comes to articulating [just] policies.”
I am eager to spend a few years seeking to form those impulses.
