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Musings on the Religious Left |
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The alliance that brought Bush to power can be described as the collusion of business, social conservatives, and religious groups. Now, as my colleagues have argued, many religious groups are beginning to question the wisdom of their Republican allegiance, as Bush’s agenda has not exactly furthered the causes of good will, social justice, charity, and tolerance in the world arena.
The Bush administration’s mistakes are many and widely known, and there is little point in hashing over them here. But the reaction the Right’s failings have caused among many formerly staunch supporters, especially among religious people, gives me hope that we may soon see the beginnings of a change in how Americans think about their nation and its relationship with the outside world. The main issue that keeps rattling around in my skull these days is consumer culture, which was spawned in the United States and is rapidly spreading all over the globe.
Here in Moscow, a pair of Levi’s cost 100 USD, and are considered the height of fashion. In Marrakech young women wear jeans and carry iPods under their jellabas, and sneakers and brand name T-shirts are favorites among the young men. Even in the High Atlas, in small mountain villages with rocky streets and goats living underneath the living rooms, there are Coca-Cola signs in the shops. The US has not only a massive economic and military influence on the rest of the world, but also a consistently increasing cultural one. If our nation could formulate a solid and consistent ideology of human rights and international charity, our potential for doing good across the globe would be virtually unlimited.
Before I traveled abroad, I was largely unware of the extent to which Western culture has permeated the world. I am particularly bothered by the way in which Western clothing, music, and gadgets are seen as superior to traditional types. Then again, perhaps the spread of computers, cell phones, and television are ushering in the beginnings of a world culture, something that can be shared and understood from Dublin to Vladivlastok. The problem with that, though, is that it’s corporate culture, consumption culture… Eh, who knows. Tatah Kim, what comes next? Consumerism is the bug in my ear, the itch I can never scratch because it moves around whenever I look for it, the concept I cannot formulate a solid opinion on because the impressions are too diffuse, too scattered, too contradictory.
My hope is that the emerging Spiritual Left will help to bring a less materialistic sensibility to American politics. After all, it was Jesus who said, “Go and sell all you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me” (Mark 10:21) A focus on good deeds and a you-can’t-take-it-with-you approach to materialism would be very powerful and compelling in modern America, where we are beginning to understand that no amount of objects can bring happiness and personal fulfillment. If we were to spend half of the money we’ve already spent on Iraq on social projects and international aid, we would probably have made life better for millions of Americans as well as reduced the ranks of our enemies abroad. It seems that, having watched the failure of war and gruff international diplomacy, many organizations on the Religious Left are beginning to develop platforms that reflect the concept of a more equal and sustainable distribution of wealth on our planet.
The Christian Alliance for Progress, for example, lists the following under “Our Values” on their website.
“Justice for All: We stand against powerful systems of human injustice in our world as Jesus stood against them in his.
Equality and Inclusiveness: Like Jesus did among women, tax collectors, Samaritans and others, we reject hurtful exclusionary distinctions between “us” and “them.”
Faithful Stewardship: We follow Jesus’ call for responsible stewardship - caring protection for the environment and sharing of our worldly treasure.”
These kind of values are eminently Christian, and also relatively liberal, especially when the Religious Right is campaigning against gay marriage, talking about a crusade against Islam, and rarely taking any interest in environmental concerns or world poverty. They also reflect a critical concept for the modern era - “the sharing of the world’s treasures.” I have been bothered for months by a BBC article which pointed out that it would take 3 Earths to sustain the entire human population at Developed World standards of living, and any kind of ideology that suggests or screams that the Developed World must start sharing its wealth is a good one by me.
It would be also be nice to have leaders who seek to follow the teachings of Jesus rather than the dictates of corporations and conservative pundits in terms of battling the current corruption in American politics. If we do not overcome the influence of money on politics, we can look forward to increased corporate power, fewer protections for workers (in the name of the free market, of course), and decreased corporate responsibility. At the same time, we cannot deplore the influence of big money on politics while simultaneously feeding corporations through our purchases. Every dime of those campaign contributions and “gifts” to senators, congressmen, lobbyists, and others originally came from the pocket of citizens, after all. The example of the church-led boycotts during the Civil Rights struggle were a powerful example of how an economically conscious religious organization can impact the status quo in the most effective way - by going after the profit margin. Such an approach is particularly important given the influence of business in politics, as economic pressure properly applied would be tantamount to political pressure.
The efficacy of faith-based politics has been proven time and time again, it is merely a matter of what the religious groups focus on - if we can get away from the old and oft-abused issues of abortion, gay marriage, and stem-cell research, sincerely charitable and tolerant religious groups will probably find the majority of Americans not only accepting of their goals, but also willing to work alongside them.
In short, if the Spiritual Left can look to the future and remember the examples of the past, it has great potential to aid in the long and arduous task of once again making America stand for something good, honest, and sincere in the eyes of the world, a change that is becoming more and more critical as we continue to alienate our allies and infuriate our enemies. Furthermore, something must be done to address the massive economic inequalities that plague many parts of the planet, and a ideology of human rights and charity will be critical to developing methods of supplying food, medicine, and housing to the millions of suffering people throughout the world.
Isn’t that interesting, the spiritual left - makes so much sense now. And why did it seem like a contradiction, growing up in a relgious right home - that a follower of Christ could have “left-wing” political tendencies..!
“again making America stand for something good, honest, and sincere in the eyes of the world”
something I constantly hear from the right, about how America stands for something ‘good.’ What if it was the left that actually brought that into word and action around the world?
Great site - I knew J-Ro in Evanston - hip-hop at Bill’s Blues… now I’m in back in my hometown - straight outta’ denver
A perspective on consumerism here in Sydney - hope its not too off topic
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Welcome to the selfish city
Brigid Delaney
February 2, 2007
IMAGINE you are a modern explorer. But instead of discovering a country, you wish to journey into the inner lives of its inhabitants. What you wish to discover is how much that country is in thrall to consumer culture and to the virus of affluenza. How much do people measure their self-worth by what they own, how they look and where they live? Have they developed antidotes to the disease? How strong is their sense of self?
What would such an explorer make of modern Sydney?
Driving from Sydney Airport to the city, the 53-year-old British author and psychologist Oliver James noticed a few things. The first was “those biscuit box” warehouses lining the landscape: “Flat container warehouses all bursting full to the seams with consumer goods. Then I got the feeling of getting into a particularly confusing traffic system.”
But on the streets of “this beautiful, spacious city” where the natives roamed, he started feeling more unsettled.
Oxford Street was like the “Tower of Babel, a confusing polyglot in its diversity”. There were people from “all the ends of the Earth”, creating a feeling of “identitylessness, so you feel like you could be anywhere”.
Bondi “felt a bit more Australian”. But there was also an aggressive vibe. “This kind of ‘f— you, we’re rich’ type thing.” And then there was the beach culture of the body, which made James reflect that it must be hard to be a woman in Sydney.
But it was only when he was invited into homes that James got the full measure of the sickness. He found house-proud citizens who had million-dollar mortgages and renovated kitchens but an emptiness that ran to the marrow.
In a “pokey flat” in Paddington he interviewed “Sandra”, 31, struggling to cope with her lack of status as a mother. She was mourning her 25-year-old self - and the perceived loss of her figure. She pulled out old photos and said: “In trendy areas like this one, the latest fashion involves really tight clothes; to wear them you have to lose weight.”
James says: “The virus impedes them from enjoying motherhood in a number of ways.” Getting stuck on the property ladder is one, as is “the feeling they have lost their physical allure to which they had become so addicted before marriage”.
He met “Will”, a psychiatrist-businessman who works 18 hours a day. Will, like many who have caught the affluenza virus, has commodified a range of values that used to exist outside the market place. As well as the home becoming a commodity, friendship is now increasingly being seen as “what’s in it for me”.
Will “mentioned no relationships in his life that are not in some sense professional … When asked what he hopes to achieve by working all his waking hours he seems to have no idea at all”.
Perfect bodies and houses but a “lack of authenticity” characterised many of his Sydney subjects.
In almost all of James’s case studies there is material wealth, but a terrible sadness at their core. This sadness, says James, is living in a society where you feel valued for your possessions, status, house and looks. The accumulation and maintenance of these things keeps you on a treadmill that leeches life of real meaning.
That meaning might involve reading a book, teaching a child how to thread a daisy chain or helping a friend move house. They are things that don’t lead us to “achieve anything”, and do not provide money or status.
James’s book Affluenza, released in Australia this week, is a culmination of research, interviews and an eight-country “mind tour”. The countries - the United States, Russia, New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Singapore and China, as well as Britain - are all at various stages of contracting the affluenza virus. Some countries, such as China, have built up immunities to it - such as coming to capitalism late, having a strong family structure, and the teachings of Confucius which say “your best is good enough”.
Likewise the Danes, with their progressive social policies and a relatively small gap between rich and poor, do not have a rapacious desire to keep up with their equivalent of the Joneses.
Cities struck by the virus, including New York and Sydney, have similar characteristics. Their residents are likely to feel insecure. “Constantly comparing your lot with others, especially those who have more than you, is not a prescription for feeling safe,” Jones writes. This creates anxiety, “the proverbial bottomless pit” of never being quite happy enough with what you’ve got. “Modern capitalism then comes charging in on its white horse with a host of false panaceas: antidepressants, booze, drugs, plastic surgery and shopping.”
Another symptom of the virus is alienation. A society, says James, that puts a low priority on connecting with family, friends and the community means that individuals will feel estranged from these bonds. Friendships become a matter of self-interest, while the high cost of child care sets up a pattern of “working to live” and places stress on relationships.
The virus has also warped how we love. “As people become more and more insecure and desperate for intimacy and someone they can trust, they place a higher value on intimacy. To that extent they invest heavily in the big relationship and of course relationships weren’t built for that. We need to be less novelty-seeking and kicks-based on our perspective of partnerships. There’s a big distinction between the illness of being in love - it’s like drugs - and finding someone you’re compatible with who you can make babies with and the very difficult task of raising children properly.”
People susceptible to the virus also feel a lack of control over their lives - they are less likely to turn down work they hate if the money’s good. They stay in relationships because they are uncomfortable being on their own, or they are serial monogamists, trading in partners in an elusive search for “the one”.
They have mortgages they can’t really afford because they don’t want to be “left behind” in a property boom, and their voting patterns are also likely to reflect this “selfish capitalism”. James sees a connection between John Howard’s policies of border control and the Tampa issue, and elections swayed by questions of interest rates, as further symptoms of the virus run rampant.
The diagnosis for Sydney makes grim reading, with an increase in depression running parallel with an increase in prosperity. “Statistics suggest a shift in hopelessness and despair as a large part of the Australian population are trapped with mortgages [and] trapped with American values. It makes sitting on Bondi beach even harder,” says James.
Yet still we sit on the beach, staring outward rather than inward, because escaping the virus requires “an exceptionally strong sense of self”.
Get out of Sydney and the virus may not be as strong. James believes that people who gravitate towards capital cities and high-powered jobs are a “self-selecting group of people”, many of whom “are made to feel worthless as children, who are now competing viciously with each other”.
Of surprise to James on his “mind tour” was that “the people I met who had wellbeing had some kind of spiritual practice”. For James, spiritual practice is yoga. Whatever your practice, having a sense of spirituality is better than having none, he says.
“Quite apart from the question of whether there’s a God, if you pursue ethical practices - for example with Christianity - you’re much less likely to sleep around or use drugs and come unstuck.”
James says values instilled by parents in children also have a major effect on immunity to the affluenza virus.
But what of the bleak warning in W.B. Yeats’s poem The Second Coming - “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/ Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” - where a kind of atomisation is irreversible?
If we are now generations away from values of close kin and community, and religion, can such values be retrieved if they are not in our lived memory? Have parents instead passed the values of “selfish capitalism” on to the next generation?
James is optimistic: “I’m beginning to feel a bit spooky about it but if human beings are miserable for long enough, they will start casting around for something different; there will be a rediscovery. Trying to get back to basics; it’s a very human thing.”
Global warming may be the wake-up call that we need. “I have a conviction that we are going in the right direction because of climate change. This requires that even the most insane person has to rethink things,” he says.
Selfish capitalism - the ethos that has has defined our age - could be something of a passing phase, akin to communism, says James. “Selfish capitalism gobbles everything in its way but it will lose like communism, where people felt ‘we don’t want this any more’.”
He predicts that a decline of the United States’ importance will lead to a decline of selfish capitalism. “The overthrow of the American empire is in sight because America is very vulnerable right now. China could fall apart and call in its debts.”
With the end of America as the dominating world power, its cultural dominance too will wane, and that can only be a good thing for Australia, says James.
When we wake up from sleepwalking though these selfish times, he thinks we’ll be angry - and we’ll take our anger out on politicians.
“The great deception is that we are part of the prosperity. Australians may have more money but a lot of it is eaten up by property - all the increase in actual wealth has been by the very rich. How much longer can you go on pulling that stunt?
“There may be a point where the English-speaking middle classes and the working class wake up and realise they are not rich at all. The deception is the idea of meritocracy. It turns out it was a con - there is no trickle-down effect.”
Look back in anger? That may not be a bad thing, says James, particularly if it’s the glimpse of our reflections in the mirror that acts as a catalyst for change.
Affluenza is published by Vermillion, $39.95.
OLIVER JAMES’S TIPS FOR AVOIDING AFFLUENZA:
> Be authentic (not sincere)
> Vivacious (not hyperactive)
> Playful (not game playing)
As part of my work I’ve come across several religious left organizations that work for poverty alleviation or to protect God’s creation. The recent growth in this area is encouraging and I think it will allow many liberal political candidates to have the courage to speak about their faith again.
I agree that the coalition of the social conservatives and Wall Street conservatives is splintering. But not for the reason you cite in your first paragraph, “as Bush’s agenda has not exactly furthered the causes of good will, social justice, charity, and tolerance in the world arena.”
Social conservatives never cared about these issues and the splintering was a result of the temporary, “permanent Republican majority” failing to achieve many of the regressive goals they were elected on. If the executive, legislative, and judicial branch we had from 2000 to 2006 couldn’t get a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, abolish Roe v. Wade, or prevent stem-cell research (albeit minor compared to the first two), then just how much more work do they have to do? Also, maybe they realized that Americans are not as passionate about their agenda as they originally thought.
To some extent, social conservatives are realizing that most elected Republicans don’t care about any of their issues. They care about protecting Wall Street and since most anti-choice, homophobes are not corporate CEOs, but reside in the middle class like the rest of us, they too have found it harder and harder to make ends meet. The time required fulfilling their basic needs of food and shelter is taking away from the time they can organize and be politically active.
Anyway, I do agree that using religious teachings to break the back of consumerism is an excellent tool in our tool box, but like everything for the progressive agenda, work will have to be done on many fronts. In fact, the ability of our values to fill so many niches is probably why I’m so confident it will work.
Let me start by saying that I appreciate all the comments that have been made on my piece - thank you one and all. In particular, I would like to address Phil’s addition in brief here, although I will probably write a long-winded article, or several, on the topic later in the month.
The irresponsibility and essential emptiness of the consumer lifestyle is something that Americans are experiencing in the extreme. We currently medicate a massive portion of our population, from children who are too rambunctious to adults that are not happy enough with their “perfect lives” of overwork, isolation, and personal/financial insecurity. America devours resources and excretes waste on a massive scale, so much so that we actualy send most of our refuse to other countries.
And it is the isolation, the fixation on objects instead of people or spirituality, that I think is the most damaging. Robert Putnam’s book “Bowling Alone” is a fantastic examination of the decline of American social networks, which are in many ways the foundations of democracy and responsible citizenship. Who knows where America will be in 20 years if the current trend of buying our way into massive debt and electronic satiation continues.
I ramble now, of course, late nights in Russia tend to destroy the cohesion of thoughts, but I felt something should be said about that.
Also, in response to Mr. Spalding, I do believe that the split between social conservatives and corporatists is a result of multiple policy failures rather than the essentially unChristian nature of Bush’s actions. But we are speaking of the Religious Left, and I do believe that many religious people who formerly supported Bush are swinging to the progressive movement because they have seen that the Republicans are essentially dominated, not by religious/family values, but by corporate influence. A social conservative and a Christian are not necessarily the same thing, a lesson that progressives must acknowledge if, as Mr. Spalding so eloquently phrased it, we are to “break the back of consumerism”
That’s my word.