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Permalink Reply by Joanna Hoyt on 10th mo. 28, 2012 at 2:43pm

Forrest, this questions fascinates me and I'd like to be able to read what you've said about it, but when I click the 'full article' link I get your blog header and the post title followed by a blank black screen.  I've tried several times...don't know if it's my net connection or something on Blogger.  Would you be willing either to post the article here or to mail me a copy?

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 10th mo. 28, 2012 at 5:36pm

The Bible is a good starting point, because it's among God's better teaching tools, connecting us with ancient civilizations sufficiently different to challenge our assumptions – as well as being remarkably like our own in ways we are likely to miss.

 

Poverty, and wealth, and the power relations that bring them about, were universal features of these civilizations.

 

Farming entailed risks, and the need to borrow. Village and family solidarity would sometimes cover the need; but when it did not, a borrower might have to pay interest and put up collateral – a family member's labor, his land, his own freedom. Interest, as a customary practice, was generally ruinous. For a trader with a reasonable expectation of using the money profitably it was a fair cost of doing business. For a small farmer it was a recurrent risk of homelessness and enslavement.

 

Michael Hudson, a financial economist with an active interest in the history of economic thought, says (in michael-hudson.com/1992/03/the-lost-tradition-of-biblical-debt-canc...) that: “discoveries of Bronze Age Near Eastern royal proclamations extending from 2400 to 1600 BC throw a radically new light on [the Biblical debt] laws... Mesopotamian royal edicts canceled debts, freed debt-servants and restored land to cultivators who had lost it under economic duress. There can be no doubt that these edicts were implemented, for during the Babylonian period they grew into quite elaborate promulgations, capped by Ammisaduqa's Edict of 1646. Now that these edicts have been translated and their consequences understood, the Biblical laws no longer stand alone as utopian or otherworldly ideals; they take their place in a two-thousand year continuum of periodic and regular economic renewal.

 

“Radical as the idea of canceling debts and restoring the population's means of subsistence seems to modern eyes, it had been a conservative tradition in Bronze Age Mesopotamia for some two millennia. What was conserved was self-sufficiency for the rural family-heads who made up the infantry as well as the productive base of Near Eastern economies. Conversely, what was radically disturbing in archaic times was the idea of unrestrained wealth-seeking. It took thousands of years for the idea of progress to become inverted, to connote freedom for the wealthy to deprive the peasantry of their lands and personal liberty. ”

 

Whenever, wherever the Torah took its final form -- Its laws on debt and property were based on practical ancient custom. But as David's monarchy was established, with the aid of a small professional army, the need for a large peasant infantry was lessened. From here on, we find prophets increasingly denouncing an elite class whose wealth is apparently gained at the expense of their poor neighbors. In the one example of jubilee practice we're specifically told of, Jeremiah convinces King Zedekiah [faced with a military threat from Babylon] “that every one should set free his Hebrew slaves, male and female, so that no one should enslave a Jew, his brother... but afterward they turned around and took back the male and female slaves they had set free, and brought them back into subjection as slaves.” After which the Babylonians return to conquer.

 

After the Exile, tension between needy neighbors, greedy neighbors, and Torah continued. Deuteronomy had said: “You shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be. Take heed lest there be a base thought in your heart, and you say, 'The seventh year, the year of release is near;' and your eye be hostile toward your poor brother, and you give him nothing, and he cry to the Lord against you, and it be sin in you.” But in Herod's day, Rabbi Hillel had to institute the prosbul, an arrangement that allowed borrowers to sign away their traditional rights, because in actuality the poor were not finding anyone willing to lend without interest and the option of foreclosing. And under Roman administration, their Hellenistic economic practices – which were dispossessing their own small farmers in Italy – became the rule in Israel as well. By Jesus' time there were many of his people dispossessed, indebted, eking out a desperate living by agricultural itinerant labor until malnutrition and illness reduced them to beggary.

 

It was these people Jesus spoke of when he said, “Blessed are the destitute, for God's reign is theirs.” It was their debts he went about promiscuously forgiving, most often their diseases and injuries he healed, their petty crimes he overlooked. The story he tells in Luke, about 'Dives and Lazarus,' suggests that poor people have a nicer afterlife than rich ones...

 

And now I'm in this adult Christian Sunday school class, discussing 'What are the most helpful ways of helping poor people?'

 

This is very rich, for one assumption has been that we should be “developing” their economic possibilities, “curing” them of poverty. Not even Jesus tried to do this...

 

What do we want to accomplish? – Why? – What should we?

 

We can't doubt that poverty is a bad thing. The material lacks, the intellectual deprivation that normally accompanies it, the associated emotional pains and afflictions all demand to be alleviated. But if, by some wild stretch, we should make a significant difference in poor people's lives, do we want them to seek to achieve what our own culture calls success?

 

Shouldn't we want this? Should we be sentimental about “the poor”, romanticize them and their ways of life? Are they better than us; does God like them better? What have they got that we don't? Only poverty.

 

What's that about? The theological difference, between 'rich' and 'poor' is elusive. But church traditions from James to Dorothy Day, including some profoundly confusing observations from Jacques Ellul, insist that it matters.

 

Certainly poor people aren't “better.” In general they “play the same games” as the rest of us, merely for different stakes. If some of them will give their last dime to help a person who needs it, some will eagerly rob or cheat him of it.

 

Does God like them better? That's not it either. We may need to give the poor preferential treatment, because they need more help and have a harder time getting any at all, but from a larger perspective this is merely correcting an imbalance. While Jesus does imply that rich people's “wealth” reflects mistaken priorities, poverty is no sign of freedom from misplaced greed.

 

Rather than think of “two sorts of people,” it helps to think of two states of life in one fallen world.

 

Both states do, as our book insists, belong to God's perfect Creation; but this Creation is the sort of perfection that develops, like a plant or a growing child; and while it remains immature we remain subject to death. That subjection takes many forms; one is our addiction to violence. Another is the desire for forms of “wealth” that imply poverty for other people. Dorothy Day rightly described the resulting state of affairs as “this filthy, rotten system.”

 

When the “rich” game the system to perpetuate unfair, unproductive advantages – while the system works to reward that kind of behavior – we have what is called 'systemic injustice'. John D Crossan sees this concept as underlying Jesus' first beatitude: “If... we think not just of personal or individual evil but of social, structural, or systemic injustice—that is, of precisely the imperial situation in which Jesus and his fellow peasants found themselves—then the saying becomes literally, terribly, and permanently true. In any situation of oppression, especially in those oblique, indirect, and systemic ones where injustice wears a mask of normalcy or even of necessity, the only ones who are innocent or blessed are those squeezed out deliberately as human junk from the system’s own evil operations.”

 

A church can offer people help toward escaping poverty – but escape into what? The system we're embedded in is neither humane, just, honest, very much functional – or even guaranteed to remain viable for the next twenty years. We ought to take care, not to fall into or promote illusions about finding anyone a secure place in it. And yet – this system does not permit anything or anyone to exist freely outside itself.

 

I've been forced to concede that 'the rich' and 'the poor' include good people and bad, happy and unhappy, sophisticated and clueless, with a wide range of blessings and afflictions... and that both conditions entail being implicated in “this filthy rotten system,” whether securely within it or painfully entangled. What then, is the difference?

 

Jacques Ellul – like William Stringfellow – considers money to be 'a Power.' That is, 'Money' is a spiritual influence which people can quite literally worship. When Jesus says that we can worship God or Mammon – but not both – this is precisely what he is talking about.

 

We pray to God, participate in worship services addressed to God. We don't do anything of the sort for money. But which object of worship do we devote the most time to? Which do we worry most about, take most seriously as a force of practical import in the world? Which do we most rely on for our security?

 

You are 'poor' in the sense Ellul values: when you can rely on God for your security, knowing you have nothing else to depend on. This is not a theoretical sort of knowledge, but something people recognize deeply and automatically – or not. The people we call “rich”generally feel, and often believe, that they have something else to keep them safe. The actual amount of money anyone does, or doesn't have – while significant in other contexts – is not the issue. “Wealth” works to blunt this awareness; while poverty renders it obvious.

 

A friend wrote me once, that “hardships and suffering of many kinds have left me with an unshakable faith – in Something.”

 

That is not a recommendation for hardships and suffering, but it does serve to clarify their purpose. That “unshakable faith”, so far as we can acquire and convey it, can do far more to promote happiness and mitigate suffering than anything more concrete we have to provide. That is, a church can and should serve whichever needs people find most pressing – but its specific mission is to promote the distribution of spiritual goods. Why is that so much harder than handing out bread?

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 10th mo. 28, 2012 at 5:37pm

Joanna Hoyt said:

Forrest, this questions fascinates me and I'd like to be able to read what you've said about it, but when I click the 'full article' link I get your blog header and the post title followed by a blank black screen.  I've tried several times...don't know if it's my net connection or something on Blogger.  Would you be willing either to post the article here or to mail me a copy?

 

I don't know why, because for my browser it definitely works. But okay!

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Permalink Reply by Joanna Hoyt on 10th mo. 29, 2012 at 7:15pm

Thanks a lot for posting the full piece here--I still can't get the blog page to load so that I can comment where I should and see others' comments. 

There's more going on in this post than i feel adequately able to respond to. But these bits especially jumped out at me:

"But if, by some wild stretch, we should make a significant difference in poor people's lives, do we want them to seek to achieve what our own culture calls success?"

--this one is live for me, since I've been living at the Catholic Worker for the last eleven years and have attended some events where earnest professionals talk about helping poor folks to acquire middle-class virtues and therefore to Succeed.  That goal looks unrealistic to me--the filthy rotten system requires a certain number of 'losers' to do the grunt work which the professionals now consider beneath themselves; anyway if all the world lived like us we'd need four more planted to mine from and dump into. It also looks unhealthy--many of the 'successful' people I know seem exhausted and alienated.  So I keep trying to figure out how we make a system that allows people to have enough  without having too much--enough work, enough leisure, enough food, clothing, shelter, transport, medical care...  Some people seem to have a clear vision of how to accomplish this through legislation. m I;m glad for them, but right now I don't see it.  i do see, though, how households and local communities can start toward it.  And it looks to me as though starting is apt to require some form of voluntary poverty from those who are coming from a more middle/upper-class place...

I do know, though, that this isn't all; that what you write about the false security money provides, and about the need to rely rather on Something unshakeable, is essential. 

The odd thing is that some of the fairly well-to-do folks I know don't seem to have a sense of false security about money, rather the opposite; it is odd from where I now stand to hear people who have second homes worrying aloud about money, but it;s happened repeatedly... At first this sounds to me like self-absorbed and imaginary misery. Perhaps it's more a recognition that you can never have enough money to provide security, because security just doesn't work that way...sort of the way that you can't have a large enough military to provide security.  Maybe we'd all be a little saner and more faithful if we acknowledged that we are not and never will be safe, and that that's all right.

Of course, that's easy for me to say about money and weaponry.  Other people's approval is the idol I get stuck worshiping, even though I know there's no real security there either...

This question from your post also is sticking in my mind:

 "That is, a church can and should serve whichever needs people find most pressing – but its specific mission is to promote the distribution of spiritual goods. Why is that so much harder than handing out bread?"

I will need to keep thinking about that.  Maybe because spiritual goods require time and quietness in which to be nurtured, and our culture tends to crowd quiet time with a host of distractions? Maybe because bread can be obviously given once and for all and spiritual good has to be evoked not just given?

I think, too, that  the two need not always be separate--that it is possible to move toward a way of life that makes work, worship and bread more available for everyone.

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Permalink Reply by James C Schultz on 10th mo. 29, 2012 at 9:59pm

it is not the church's job to bring people up to a society's standards.  It is the Church's responsibility to take care of widows and orphans.  That is true religion.  Jesus said we would always have the poor with us.  We are supposed to not consume everything we can which you could interpret to make sure we give a tithe to the poor but it's not our responsibility to do more than that.  With that we also have to love our neighbor.  But again that doesn't mean we make him into a western consumer.  We have lost site of the simple life.  We are a "stuff" culture, not a need culture.  We should certainly teach people how to and when to  fish as Jesus did but we have no obligation to buy them a bassboat with a 150 hp motor.

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 10th mo. 30, 2012 at 4:01pm

James C Schultz said:

it is not the church's job to bring people up to a society's standards.

You are reading this as if the scriptures gave us a job description for churches. But it's not laid out like a Meeting's Faith & Practice.

I gather we got together and studied Torah (== "the Way') like other synagogues, practiced that as we understood it (including group meals & providing for your widows & orphans), and also worked to spread the word about Jesus having come & planning to be back. As far as we've got specific instructions from Jesus, they look to be pretty open-ended.

The trouble with "teaching people to fish" is that it doesn't remove the natural limits on 'how many fish are out there.' People are constantly needing to put in limits on how many people are allowed to practice any particular economic activity -- because without some such limitation, whether it takes the form of 'licensing' or 'union membership' or plain practical constraints, market forces drive the price down to less than a living wage.

One Halloween, where I ended up waiting late for the shop to finish printing advertisements and start printing my newsletter, I had this conversation with the guy who ran the xerox machines. They had a sale on copying service... and this was because photocopying was an easy business for retired mom-&-pops to get into.

Every few years, the big established businesses would put their prices below cost for awhile. It would rain small failing copy shops for awhile; and then the surviving companies would raise their prices back to where they wanted them.

This kind of business condition/practice is resolutely ignored in discussions of 'helping poor people.'

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Permalink Reply by James C Schultz on 10th mo. 31, 2012 at 4:46pm

One of us has strayed from the topic.  Since it's your topic I will accept that it is me.  I think the word "Christianity" is my problem.
 
Forrest Curo said:

James C Schultz said:

it is not the church's job to bring people up to a society's standards.

You are reading this as if the scriptures gave us a job description for churches. But it's not laid out like a Meeting's Faith & Practice.

I gather we got together and studied Torah (== "the Way') like other synagogues, practiced that as we understood it (including group meals & providing for your widows & orphans), and also worked to spread the word about Jesus having come & planning to be back. As far as we've got specific instructions from Jesus, they look to be pretty open-ended.

The trouble with "teaching people to fish" is that it doesn't remove the natural limits on 'how many fish are out there.' People are constantly needing to put in limits on how many people are allowed to practice any particular economic activity -- because without some such limitation, whether it takes the form of 'licensing' or 'union membership' or plain practical constraints, market forces drive the price down to less than a living wage.

One Halloween, where I ended up waiting late for the shop to finish printing advertisements and start printing my newsletter, I had this conversation with the guy who ran the xerox machines. They had a sale on copying service... and this was because photocopying was an easy business for retired mom-&-pops to get into.

Every few years, the big established businesses would put their prices below cost for awhile. It would rain small failing copy shops for awhile; and then the surviving companies would raise their prices back to where they wanted them.

This kind of business condition/practice is resolutely ignored in discussions of 'helping poor people.'

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 10th mo. 31, 2012 at 5:12pm

James C Schultz said:

One of us has strayed from the topic.  Since it's your topic I will accept that it is me.  I think the word "Christianity" is my problem.

Hmmm, I don't know that anybody has strayed here; the word 'Christianity' should maybe always be the problem...

Does that word imply things that we'll be 'held responsible for' vs 'things that are not on the Exam'?

I tend to think that it doesn't, that what we've been given is a strong indication that God cares about certain things and therefore we should too. Figuring/asking "What to do about that?" makes this a potential collaboration with God, which is probably what's made for the best Quaker works of the past...

I wrote this thing in response to an Episcopal adult Sunday-school class that was starting to sound a little too much, to me & others, like: "What's the best way to decorate a Tower of Babel?" But we're all different branches of 'Church'; and we seem to be wrestling with the same problems.

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Permalink Reply by James C Schultz on 10th mo. 31, 2012 at 7:21pm

I find Christianity implies living from the heart of God but in submission to man's free will.  Accordingly I cannot use it as a reason to violate another's free will even if that free will is controlled by greed.  I can only use it as my own personal guide.  So while I can love my neighbor as myself, I cannot make my neighbor love anyone.

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Permalink Reply by Joanna Hoyt on 10th mo. 31, 2012 at 8:32pm

No, I can't make my neighbors love people either (though I have sometimes tried)...so far I haven't even gotten to unadulteratedly loving my neighbor (or even following the rather more limited command two verses earlier, not to profit from my neighbor's blood). . . .especially in the economic realm, where I find that I keep buying and using things that contribute to a system that keeps people poor.  Doing less of that seems like a good idea. Doing what I can to help some folks squashed by said system also seems like a good idea.

James, I might be totally misreading you here, but I've heard some Christian friends use the 'not trying to make others love their neighbors' argument as a case against voting for government safety-net programs.  I always find this puzzling.  Presumably neighbor-love also includes not robbing or murdering your neighbors, but most Christians don't seem to object to the government trying to stop people from exercising their free will by robbing or murdering.

James C Schultz said:

I find Christianity implies living from the heart of God but in submission to man's free will.  Accordingly I cannot use it as a reason to violate another's free will even if that free will is controlled by greed.  I can only use it as my own personal guide.  So while I can love my neighbor as myself, I cannot make my neighbor love anyone.

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 10th mo. 31, 2012 at 9:53pm

James C Schultz said:

I find Christianity implies living from the heart of God but in submission to man's free will.  Accordingly I cannot use it as a reason to violate another's free will even if that free will is controlled by greed.  I can only use it as my own personal guide.  So while I can love my neighbor as myself, I cannot make my neighbor love anyone.

I think that what God actually does is something like wise parental practice, except for having more wisdom available than human parents:

God is considerate of our 'free will' because continually overwhelming people from outside, imposing the "right" choices against our wills, would do violence to the identities God seeks to foster in us. But where we would intervene if we saw a small child playing on the freeway -- preventing consequences that would be 'fatal' as human beings see matters -- One who can truly see "death" as a change of address will have a different perspective as to what consequences warrant interference, and of what sort.

And where God hesitates, we would be fools to go heedlessly. Sometimes I can be grateful for outside interference; but that's a real stretch; it's not often the way to treat anyone I like. So yes, certainly respecting human free will.

Equally, it's not good to let your friends drink themselves to death; you may have to do it but you'd rather find an alternative. Likewise for them being "controlled by greed."

Governments, however... The present maldistribution of concrete goods and services results from human political activities, from policies that facilitate large scale institutional fraud and robbery. We haven't been granted any real control over the organizations that set those policies, but whatever we try to do to help each other, it takes place in their shadows. We can help set up co-op alternatives, but their incomes will be limited by the economic desertification currently affecting the 'real economy'. Poor wretches can dream of becoming rich wretches, but we don't get to promise them that.

What to conclude from any of this; I dunno either. Don't rouse false hope; try to rouse faith in that Power we truly live by... If you've got two shirts and your friend doesn't have one, see if one of yours will fit... as John the Baptist was saying. "Spare no deceit" as Fox said: or as I say in this context, "Friends shouldn't let Friends buy into excuses for blaming victims -- or for abusing them in the guise of 'Tough Love'." [Tough love wears high-heeled leather boots and wants its toes sucked; love is something else!]

Prayers for Illumination and Guidance, because I think we're going to need these a lot!

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Permalink Reply by James C Schultz on 10th mo. 31, 2012 at 11:24pm

I don't want to make this a political topic as I don't believe I have any special wisdom in knowing which government program is truly needed.  Since I am not a legislator I haven't prayed for such wisdom.  If I was I would and I pray that the people I vote for will. 
 
Joanna Hoyt said:

No, I can't make my neighbors love people either (though I have sometimes tried)...so far I haven't even gotten to unadulteratedly loving my neighbor (or even following the rather more limited command two verses earlier, not to profit from my neighbor's blood). . . .especially in the economic realm, where I find that I keep buying and using things that contribute to a system that keeps people poor.  Doing less of that seems like a good idea. Doing what I can to help some folks squashed by said system also seems like a good idea.

James, I might be totally misreading you here, but I've heard some Christian friends use the 'not trying to make others love their neighbors' argument as a case against voting for government safety-net programs.  I always find this puzzling.  Presumably neighbor-love also includes not robbing or murdering your neighbors, but most Christians don't seem to object to the government trying to stop people from exercising their free will by robbing or murdering.

James C Schultz said:

I find Christianity implies living from the heart of God but in submission to man's free will.  Accordingly I cannot use it as a reason to violate another's free will even if that free will is controlled by greed.  I can only use it as my own personal guide.  So while I can love my neighbor as myself, I cannot make my neighbor love anyone.

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