William A. Walker III

Pastor, Professor, Theologian, Spiritual Director

Category: Ethics (Page 4 of 4)

Precarious Life: On the Invisible and Ungrievable

I was shocked, recently, and seriously saddened by humanity’s potential depravity and estrangement from God, as I read the first few pages of Michelle Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, which gives a terribly graphic account of a public torture and execution episode in Paris in the late 18th Century.  It just absolutely blew me away to be reminded that soon-to-be, so-called “modern,” “developed,” or in cruder and more ironic terms, “civilized” nation-states used to do this kind of stuff to people – truly indescribable evil that reminds of Ellie Wiesel’s story from Night, which takes place in the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, when the tragedy is told about a child being hanged while others are forced to watch, and someone asks, “where is God now?”  “Here he is,” another replies, “hanging on these gallows.”

If we haven’t felt this anguish at some point – really felt it – and carried for at least a moment the weight of the world in our minds and on our hearts, then I do not think we are prepared to do theology, to be the church, to love and serve others, or, in sum, to live the Christian life.  It can and perhaps should bring us to tears and to our knees – for a time.  I believe human beings also have potential for great good, but ignoring or being ignorant about the bad is perhaps the fastest way to fail at achieving the good.

But alas, our society does not let us grieve, for it tries so hard to keep suffering invisible – especially the suffering that we as a country have caused others and ourselves in recent times.  Foucault makes this argument as well about the function of the prison system, even to the point of saying that the modern life itself is a prison without walls.  Out of curiosity, for example, I have listened to a dozen or so sermons in the past year by pastors in a variety of churches, given on September 11, 2011 – the 10-year anniversary of the attacks – and only one of them even thought to mention to Iraqi death count since the U.S. invasion.  And in that one case, no further comment was made about it – their sermon was still a reflection on how we must learn to forgive – ten years later mind you, and over 100,000 dead Iraqis later.  I’ve expressed my discontents about this elsewhere, so I won’t say anymore here.  Rather, as I was preparing to deliver a sermon myself for the weekend before July 4th, I wanted to stress the relationship between the invisible and the ungrievable, as indicated by the title.  This important reality was better underscored and uncovered for me by Judith Butler in the following passage which I believe is worth quoting at length to conclude:

Indeed, the graphic photos of U.S. soldiers dead and decapitated in Iraq, and then the photos of children maimed and killed by U.S. bombs, were both refused by the mainstream media, supplanted with footage that always took the aerial view, an aerial view whose perspective is established and maintained by state power.  And yet, the moment the bodies executed by the Hussein regime were uncovered, they made it to the front page of the New York Times, since those bodies must be grieved.  The outrage over their deaths motivates the war effort, as it moves on to its managerial phase, which differs very little from what is commonly called “an occupation.”

Tragically, it seems that the United States seeks to preempt violence against itself by waging violence first, but the violence it fears is the violence it engenders.  I do not mean to suggest by this that the United States is responsible in some causal way for the attacks on its citizens.  And I do not exonerate Palestinian suicide bombers, regardless of the terrible conditions that animate their murderous acts.  There is, however, some distance to be traveled between living in terrible conditions, suffering serious, even unbearable injuries, and resolving on murderous acts.  President Bush traveled that distance quickly, calling for “an end to grief” after a mere ten days of flamboyant mourning.  Suffering can yield an experience of humility, of vulnerability, of impressionability and dependence, and these can move us beyond and against the vocation of the paranoid victim who regenerates infinitely the justification for war.  It is as much a matter of wrestling ethically with one’s own murderous impulses, impulses that seek to quell an overwhelming fear, as it is a matter of apprehending the suffering of others an taking stock of the suffering one has inflicted.

In the Vietnam War, it was the pictures of the children burning and dying from napalm that brought the U.S. public to a sense of shock, outrage,  remorse, and grief.  These were precisely pictures we were not supposed to see, and they disrupted the visual field and the entire sense of public identity that was built upon that field.  The images furnished a reality, but they also showed a reality that disrupted the hegemonic field of representation itself.  Despite their graphic effectiveness, the images pointed somewhere else, beyond themselves, to a life and to a precariousness that they could not show.  It was from that apprehension of the precariousness of those lives we destroyed that many U.S. citizens came to develop an important and vital consensus against the war.  But if we continue to discount the words that deliver that message to us, and if the media will not run those pictures, and if those lives remain unnameable and ungrievable, if they do not appear in their precariousness and their destruction, we will not be moved.

– from Judith Butler, “Precarious Life,” in Radicalizing Levinas

Invitation Letter from Javier Sicilia to Join the Peace Caravan

I got to hear Javier speak at Loyola Marymount University last week, and he made a call for a  peaceful but courageous North American resistance effort to end the failed war on drugs (he also spoke at Pomona/Claremont and the LA public library while he was here).  Below is his letter to us.  For those who don’t know, Javier is a well-known poet in Mexico whose son was tortured and killed last year by narcotraffickers.  Javier has since been instrumental in mobilizing hundreds of thousands Mexicans in a movement to oppose narcoterrorism and the Mexican government’s strategy of aggression that only seems to be causing further violence.  Now he is taking on the biggest culprit…

Dear Neighbor,

The Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, MPJD sends greetings to you and your organization.
We are a movement that emerged last year in response to widespread violence in Mexico stemming from the policies of the war against drugs and drug cartels. The 60,000 deaths, the 10,000 disappearances, and the 160,000 internally displaced people during the past six years is a tragedy caused directly caused by failed security policies. Importantly, only 2% of all crimes committed in Mexico are investigated and solved.
We are dedicated to giving voice to the families of victims of this violence and to publicizing the real costs of this war. We have made it clear that the Mexican state must stop denying its responsibilities, which it does by criminalizing the victims of violence. Instead, it must accept that there are victims, and that it is the Mexican government’s responsibility to provide justice and reparations to them. With this in mind, we have asked for a change from the current security strategy to one focused on human security.
To these ends, the Movement has organized two “caravans” that have traversed the North and South of Mexico. These actions prompted meetings with the President and Legislature to seek policy alternatives to war. These experiences have allowed us to see first-hand the grave situation we face as a society.
As part of our quest for peace and justice, the Movement would like to extend to you a cordial invitation to be part of a new endeavor: the US Peace Caravan. This caravan will leave this August from San Diego, CA and arrive in Washington, DC in September. This initiative seeks to promote dialogue with American civil society and its government regarding the following themes: the need to stop gun trafficking; the need to debate alternatives to drug prohibition; the need for better tools to combat money laundering; and the need to promote bilateral cooperation in human rights and human security in two priority areas: promotion of civil society and safety, as well as protection and safety for migrants.
The MPJD seeks the support of the diverse array of groups we believe would be interested in promoting and end to, or alternatives to, the aforementioned policies. We believe that the solutions must emerge from within civil society and from a regional dialogue. For these reasons, we invite you to be our counterpart in an exercise of civilian diplomacy that can return peace, justice and dignity to the victims of this war. We hope we will be able to count on your valuable participation as an ally and partner in this historic event.
Sincerely,
Javier Sicilia
Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad 

Los Ángeles CA, April 24th, 2012

Faith in what kind of Economics? Past and Future Paradigms

The earth is full.

In fact our human society and economy is now so large we have passed the limits of our planet’s capacity to support us and it is overflowing.  Our current model of economy growth is driving this system, the one we rely upon for our present and future prosperity, over the cliff.  This in itself presents a major problem.  It becomes a much larger challenge when we consider that billions of people are living desperate lives in appalling poverty and need their personal “economy” to rapidly grow to alleviate their suffering.  But there is no room left.

This means things are going to change.  Not because we will choose change out of philosophical or political preference, but because if we don’t transform our society and economy, we risk social and economic collapse and the descent into chaos.  The science on this is now clear and accepted by any rational observer.  While an initial look at the public debate may suggest controversy, any serious examination of the peer-reviewed conclusions of leading science bodies shows the core direction we heading in is now clear.  Things do not look good.

Paul Gilding, The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World

In response to this quote, I’ve copied below a schematic comparison between “eco-institutional heterodox economics” and conventional economics as expressed by Julien-Francois Gerber and Rolf Steppacher in their edited volume, Towards an Integrated Paradigm in Heterodox Economics: Alternative Approaches to the Current Ec0-social Crisis.

Open Systems Approach OR Closed systems approach

Economy as a social construct with its history and specificities OR Economy as a deduced structure based on a set of axioms

Heterogeneous, socio-ecologically embedded and institutionally conditioned agents OR Universal self-centered utility-maximizing, rational, well-informed agents/ unlimited wants

Social and environmental ethics (incl. needs fulfilled, equitable distribution, sustainability) OR Utilitarian ethics (incl. optimal welfare, Pareto efficiency, externalities)

(Co-)evolution OR Optimization

Metabolic view of society OR Marginalist view of the economy

Methodological Pluralism OR Methodological Individualism

Experiential and Algorithmic knowledge OR Algorithmic knowledge (mathematical formalism)

Value pluralism (incl. incommensurability) OR Monetary commensurability

Circular and cumulative causation OR Competitive equilibrium model

Focus on virtual, real, and real-real [?] economic levels OR Focus on micro- and macroeconomic levels

Steady-state and selective degrowth OR Conventional growth

Property and possession OR Focus on private property

Funds/services, stocks/flows and their control OR Natural capital

Biophysical and social indicators, multi-criteria analysis OR Monetary indicators, cost/benefit analysis

Focus on the community, within the biosphere OR Focus on the individual, within the nation-state

Focus on disadvantaged social groups and classes OR Focus on capitalists and managers

I Pledge Allegiance to the World…

The vows below were taken from Thomas G. Pettepiece’s “Shakertown Pledge” in Visions of a World Hungry:

Recognizing that the earth and the fullness thereof is a gift from our gracious God, and that we are called to cherish, nurture, and provide loving stewardship for the earth’s resources; and recognizing that life itself is a gift, and a call to responsibility, joy, and celebration, I make the following declarations:

  1.  I declare myself to be a world citizen.
  2. I commit myself to lead an ecologically sound life.
  3. I commit myself to lead a life of creative simplicity and to share my personal wealth with the world’s poor.
  4. I commit myself to join with others in reshaping institutions in order to bring about a more just global society in which each person has full access to the needed resources for their physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual growth.
  5. I commit myself to occupational accountability, and in so doing I will seek to avoid the creation of products which cause harm to others.
  6. I affirm the gift of my body, and commit myself to its proper nourishment and physical well-being.
  7. I commit myself to examine continually my relations with others, and to attempt to relate honestly, morally, and lovingly to those around me.
  8. I commit myself to personal renewal through prayer, meditation and study.
  9. I commit myself to responsible participation in a community of faith.

Image

The Prophetic and the Contemplative

People like to emphasize different aspects of Jesus’s life and teachings.  He taught that the pure in heart would be blessed, for example, seemingly indicating that the inward life is what truly matters.  Yet the miracles, warnings about judgment, and commands to care of the distressed and outcast are equally stressed.  A few weeks ago we discussed this passage at church from Mark Scandrette’s newest book, Practicing the Way of Jesus:

The baptism of Jesus provides a compelling picture of the kind of intimate union with God we were created for.  As he stepped out from the water, he heard a voice saying, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:16-17).  The Spirit then led Jesus into the wilderness where his identity as the beloved was tested.  He emerged after forty days a resolute son prepared to do “his father’s business.”  Subsequently, Jesus often withdrew to gardens and other lonely places.  In the most difficult hours leading up to his arrest, torture and crucifixion, he went into a garden one last time, kneeling to pray, “Abba, not my will but yours be done.”  A hidden life of solitude fueled his courageous public acts of love and service (p. 105).

Maybe it could be said then that the Christian life is meant to be lived out on the razor’s edge between prophetic action and contemplative reflection.  And it is not so much that one of the steps in this dialectical process must come before the other.  Nor do they necessarily coalesce, really, but remain in tension and are mutually reinforcing.  They form the two pillars that buttress discipleship.  Politically speaking, for instance, we can therefore work for justice and even invest ourselves in certain legislative reforms, electoral changes and grassroots movements.  The role of the contemplative in this case, however, will be to keep our expectations and emotional attachment in check and somewhat disinterested.  The contemplative reminds us that at the end of the day, a Christ-follower still must ultimately find rest in her Sustainer rather than in the outcome of political proposals.[i]  Duke theologian Paul J. Griffiths calls this approach “political quietism.”[ii]

On the other hand, the contemplative gives inspiration, energy and vision to our prophetic and “courageous public acts of love and service” (see above).  It enables one to meditate on the “agonistic weight of the world.”[iii]  At the same time, it also serves to critique and safeguard the extent to which our identities can become too closely aligned with nationalism or any other parochial allegiance.  It is the corrective to all our idolatries.  Accordingly, a Christian citizenship then is understood to be a revoked and “crucified” vocation – that is, it is self-emptied.  We act, but we act with a knowledge that the problems we face in this world can at best only be imperfectly resolved.  As she surveys the bloodshed in our world, it’s not easy for the Christian citizen to really expect the proposal she advocates to substantially curtail all the violence and oppression.  Occupy Wall Street might be a good example of this – a movement with so much positive potential but the lasting effect of which is still to be seen.  Thus, Griffiths also talks about three other  “notes” of Christian political agency: skepticism, hope and lament – skepticism with regard to over-realized eschatological promises, hope for the coming Kingdom, and lament over the real and terrible suffering in the meantime.

Activism remains, and indeed we must act – especially in solidarity with those on the underside of history – but it is only the spiritually and prayerfully formed person whose heart is prepared for the trials of a cross-bearing lifestyle.  Too often we are content with the contemplative or running dry in the prophetic.  May we remind and spur each other along to traverse the path between the two.

How does this tangibly play out in the rhythms of congregational and communal life?


[i] I’m using the term political here in the broadest possible sense to include practically all corporate civil activity – not just official or formal participation.

[ii] Douglas Harink, Paul, Philosophy, and the Theopolitical Vision: Critical Engagements with Agamben, Badiou, Zizek and Others (Cascade Books, 2010), 190.

[iii] Mark L Taylor, The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011).

The Myth of Individualism

It seems pretty clear that the most determining fact of our existence is when and where we are born, and into what family or social class.  This makes all the difference. Obviously there are exceptions and stories of social mobility that are part and parcel of the American identity, but the vast majority of the possibilities for our lives on average are nonetheless limited or expanded by these conditions.  And almost every story you hear that defies this has a back-story that illustrates how all these divergent pieces had to come together at just the right time for that person’s “rags to riches” dream to come true.  The most significant thing about our birth though is that we have absolutely nothing to do with it.  Contemplating this truth alone can bring even the most pretentious of us to our knees before God.  Yet we take so much pride in our accomplishments and are very quick to think that what we have is earned and achieved… is somehow ours to claim – despite that the very basis of those accomplishments is grounded in something utterly contingent and beyond our control.

At the same time, it’s also common to hear people in the church admit that everything is God’s and that we are just stewards of our money, but there can be a strong dose of superficiality even in this seemingly humble statement.  In fact, this idea can very easily serve to justify doing exactly what we want with 90% of our possessions, rather than to encourage us to take our God-given collective responsibility seriously and to make legitimate sacrifices.  Why?  Because this statement is almost always followed by a disclaimer like, “it’s not a crime to be ‘successful’ . . . as long what I’m doing doesn’t harm anyone, or as long as I give a tithe to my church, etc.” etc.  But is this view not oblivious to why some “have” and others “have not”?  What are the social conditions that permit us to live in relative peace and to have the chance to accumulate wealth?  What is the history that gave us access to prosperity?

With all things held constant, with “perfect competition” as economists like to say, if all of us begin with relatively equal access to opportunity, and all basic resources are available in relative plenitude, than it might just be true that to accumulate excessively is not a crime.  The complication is, no such constants exist.  The point – which is definitely not a new one – is that in today’s world, it is never enough to just give money away and avoid “doing harm.”  We must work to transform the societal structures that perpetuate poverty and disability in the first place.  If our standard of living is at a level such that everyone in the world could feasibly live at that same level, then our wealth might be justified – as long as we are doing our part to create that kind of world.  If most or all of our charitable donations go to a church, for instance, then additionally we’d better ask what our churches are doing to build such a world.

So yes, I submit that if there are those who are oppressed and dying by no fault of their own at the same time that there are Christians living in the world abundantly, then this situation itself is a crime.  But here is the key: our culpability for the death and destruction going on around the world is not primarily individual in nature.  Individuals ought not be exonerated, but I am not pointing to any one prosperous person and accusing them of ill intent.  Rather, there are structural and systemic forces at work that have long histories that have led us to this particular moment.  These forces amount to more than the mere sum of their parts and take on a self-preserving life of their own at the expense of the interest of society as a whole.  Great transfers of wealth occurred during the slave trade and various European (and more recently American!) colonial conquests whose consequences are still being felt today.  Generational sins are passed down, and we come into this world already conditioned by a past with which we are not very familiar and constantly take for granted.  This shortsightedness is kind of like what the philosopher Martin Heidegger liked to call “the forgetfulness of being.”  Christians everywhere, in the U.S. especially, are suffering from a fatal case of this forgetfulness.  The lesson to be learned is this: the essence of human life is one of thorough interdependency.  The second we fail to remember this, a foolish sense of entitlement creeps in, which, I suggest, produces the single greatest blind spot in American political and economic ideology.  Consequently, the most counter-cultural imagination available to Christians in the 21st Century is one that runs directly against the current of individualism – individualism being understood here as the values of liberty and independence gone awry.

Now, it should go without saying that individual responsibility and the potential weight of the choices we make can still be affirmed.  Choices matter – just not nearly as much as a lot of people think they do.  Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the choices and the options with which we are presented are all-too-often already narrowed down before they get to us.  Our horizons are anything about limitless.

We are our sisters’ and brothers’ keepers, and we don’t get to ask, “oh but what did you do to end up in this situation?  Did you work hard like me?”  The arrogance of this sort of question is equal to the ignorance of the sinner who says to Jesus, “but when did we see you hungry?”  Admittedly, Jesus did not seem terribly concerned about necessarily changing the power structures of his day, but he was very intent on subverting and exposing them for what they were – especially when it came to social hierarchies.  He did this every time he healed or forgave people who were unclean and who, in the eyes of society, had brought certain misfortunes upon themselves.  What we’ve learned since Jesus, however, is that human beings are capable of being transformative agents in history working toward either a more just social order or a more disparate gap between classes.  The Bible doesn’t answer all of our contemporary questions when it comes to matters of faith and practice.  It does, however, give us the foundational principles, not the least of which is to plead the case of the afflicted and needy (Jeremiah 22:16).

In sum, individualism is not just one worldview to choose from among others with neutral value.  Individualism is an inherently illusory, naïve and pernicious perspective.  We must diagnose ourselves by taking off the rose-colored glasses handed to us by unmerited privilege – with their lenses that would otherwise give the status quo the benefit of the doubt.

That to which Your Heart Clings: Diagnosing Consumerism

I try to be conscious of what I buy and what I eat, and to take an interest in where things are made, by who, for how much, and so on.  And yet, no matter how well I manage to do this, I remain a consumer.  I might purchase fair trade coffee and chocolate, but I’m still addicted to coffee and chocolate.  My wife tries to shop only for clothes made in the U.S., but she still really likes to shop.   So I started wondering how much of this is just human, and how much of it is culturally constructed.

Despite the fact that many Christians themselves get caught up in this pattern of behavior, there seems to at least be some level of awareness in the church about the problem.  This is a good thing.  Less understood though is the extent to which society is able to increasingly produce in us an insatiable desire for consumption in the first place.  You also hear the word materialism, but this could be a misnomer.  Material-ism implies the absolutization of the material, when in fact the lie we are fed is that the material offers something else: happiness, fulfillment… a certain image or experience.In their genuine intent to encourage counter-culturalism, we might hear pastors talk about the innate human drive to always want more.  But how much of this is rooted in a universal anthropology vs. just a modern Western phenomenon now gone viral?  I mean, people aren’t just born with preferences for television sets.  Our preferences typically  emerge from a context of social relations.

Of course there is a difference between our basic needs and deepest desires.  Theological anthropology has said that human beings live with a kind of openness directed toward possibility in the world, always becoming and searching.  Some people say there is a “God-shaped hole” in each us – a void.  This too can be a good a thing.  But this desire can be distorted.  It can be harnessed by market forces in such a way as to induce complacency in our individualism and trivialize any concern about our unsustainable standard of living.

Even more troubling, this desire is very difficult to control.  Theologian Joerg Rieger argues that in today’s world the drive to consume is frequently propelled by economic mechanisms and reinforced by the advertising industry.  The deceit of this system is increasingly taken for granted.  Obviously recognizing this, one of my former seminary professors Roger Olson recently wrote a blog post asking whether Christians should even work in marketing at all!  Rieger further contends that economic and religious desires often parallel each other.  This is illustrated by the way we tend to project our desires and ideals from the physical world onto the divine and thus replace the transcendent God with an idol.  If desire is shaped by the production of wealth in a given society, this process can have a subconscious effect on people’s deepest convictions and ultimate values.  This means that the way culture teaches us to view wealth has a tremendous impact on the kind of people we become – not to even mention the potential social costs that can be incurred on society’s most vulnerable citizens as a result.

As communities that are supposed to be convicting, healing and nurturing us on the path to holiness, churches have a vital part to play in resisting co-optation by the marketplace.  Sadly it’s not uncommon, however, for Christian congregations to become complicit in the cycle of consuming and selling as well, even if only in very subtle ways.  To a degree this might be unavoidable, but it’s imperative for us to be sensitized and attentive to how we succumb to various addictive, superimposed desires.  I’m interested in how the church can be a place that enables Christians to subvert the status quo in this regard.  I know there are many tangible ways to do this, but I’m curious as to what others have seen and discovered about how our local practice can transcend systems that resist and suppress change.

Speaking of which, I really liked what David Fitch had to say recently in a post he made about branding as the ultimate anti-missional act.  Seems very related to this struggle.

Page 4 of 4

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén