Capitalism and the Peace Testimony

August 8, 2014 § Leave a comment

Capitalism is predicated on competition: competition between businesses for markets, resources, capital, research breakthroughs, and labor; between labor and management for the terms of contract agreements; between workers for jobs; between industries for government support; between corporate nation states and other economic macro-systems for all of these things.

Competition assumes shortages or limits—there is no need for competition if there is already enough of what everyone wants. Competition within the context of limits, real or assumed or artificially imagined or created, often leads to conflict, and conflict sometimes leads to violence. Capitalism is inherently, if not necessarily in any given instance, violent.

A classic historic example is the violence against unions in the early days of labor organization, a violence that has never really ceased, except that businesses no longer hire paramilitary organizations like the Pinkertons to murder and assault workers. And God help you if you’re a teacher, or work for any level of government.

Does competition have to lead to violence? Enlightened business owners, labor leaders, and political leaders can rely on cooperation and mutual understanding to resolve competing claims, and we do have a fairly robust infrastructure of negotiation and arbitration, from the United Nations to the National Labor Relations Board. Cooperation is most possible when the system is working well and no parties are near the particular edge or shortage that they fear. But the system does have these edges—these divisive thresholds—that necessarily separate the participants when we reach them, when oil becomes really expensive or when job shortages make dependence on military spending attractive. And the disparity between those at the top and those at the bottom—between economic classes at home or between the overdeveloped and the developing countries of the world, for instance—these disparities create a distance of experience and worldview that undermines understanding even when intentions are good, making conflict and violence more likely.

For a truly eye-opening and compelling look at how the unbridled global expansion of capitalism—what we call globalization—often collaborates with superficial democratization to unleash ethnic violence, I highly recommend Amy Chua’s World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. She describes how, when elections finally give power to an ethnic majority that has historically been dominated economically by an ethnic minority, that majority tends to turn on their minority oppressors. That is part of what is happening in Iraq right now, with a majority Shiite-dominated government paying back the Sunni minority for decades of oppression and disenfranchisement, except that in Iraq the religious identities are even more important than the ethnic ones.

This dynamic has played out in country after country, in the Balkans, in Indonesia, the Philippines, in Rwanda, and southeast in Asia, just to name a few. We have even seen it in the United States sometimes, as in the occasional tensions between Asian small store owners operating in mostly African American neighborhoods.

It’s true that business competition is extremely creative. It drives innovation. But even this dynamic is destructive. “Creative destruction” is the term of art for the fate of established businesses that can no long compete against upstart innovators—Kodak, for example, or the manufacturers of floppy disks, or the publishers of printed, multi-volume encyclopedias. This creative destruction almost always hurts workers; they lose their jobs to the technological advance. And it almost always disadvantages the lower-wage workers most, because they are the most easily replaced by technology. In this way, and in many others, the system tends to increase inequality, especially in mature economies that have more or less finished the process of industrialization.

We value—and measure—this destruction of jobs. We call this measure “productivity”. Productivity tracks how much work a worker can do in a given period of time. Increased productivity means that human energy has been replaced by technology. Economists and politicians love high productivity numbers, gleefully glossing over the fact that it means fewer human jobs, fewer humans needed to do the same work.

R. Buckminster Fuller defined another measure that economists seem to have ignored—the energy slave—which measures goods, services, and processes in terms of how many years of human labor have been replaced by technology. The energy slave is the only economic measure that, if only indirectly, acknowledges capitalism’s debt to the Atlantic slave trade. In places that can’t come up with enough energy slaves, they tend to come up with human ones.

Most importantly, perhaps, the moral system that is capitalism has no inherent interest in the fate of those who suffer at its hands, those whom it grinds down or even out of the system. The system has never done even the obvious, basic thing of providing for those who lose their jobs to layoffs or technological advance. That it leaves to government; that is, to you and me.

More importantly, it actually takes unemployment as a given and accepts 3–5% of the workforce trying to live without an income as a “good” number. This reflects the fact that the capitalist system needs at least a modicum of unemployment, of competition between workers for jobs, as a means of keeping wages and benefits down. And the system leaves it up to external actors to care for these victims, making the government and even the workers themselves pay for the human cost of this inherent competition. And we all accept this as normal, as a given, even as appropriate. We are all praying for an unemployment rate below five percent, as if that would be a great thing.

Furthermore, the competitive genes in capitalism’s DNA have always driven it to expand its influence beyond its own spheres of activity in the market, to seek to distort the behavior of external actors in its interest. Capitalism corrupts the political class, especially, and the entire social fabric, as well, with the ideology of the market as god, as the preeminent, most pervasive, and most valuable social system we have, as the “creator of wealth” and the pathway to, and even guarantor of, democracy (ironically, given its own quasi-feudal structure), and as the set of values and needs that should trump all others in social policy. That is the message of, and the reasoning behind, the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision: the legal “personhood” of a corporation is even more valuable and important than democracy itself, certainly more valuable than real human persons.

And, of course, capitalism corrupts other systems, especially the political system, directly sometimes, through outright graft. Companies seek advantage, and inevitably, some politicians are willing to give it to them. For some people in high places, being a slave to capital, being ideologically captive to the system, is not enough. They want to remodel their house or go on an expensive vacation, too.

Back to the creative effect of capitalist competition, because this is a credible and compelling argument for it. We humans are going to compete, especially when faced with shortages. Furthermore, this competition has historically driven incredible advances in human well-being over the last three centuries or so. That’s the trade-off for the destruction and subjugation of indigenous and traditional societies, the rape of the earth, the infection of all other social systems with market values. And yes, the social-economic systems of the past have also been unequal and oppressive, though none has been as rapacious. And meanwhile, we see no clear alternative. We have to work with what we’ve got.

Nevertheless, I believe that capitalism historically and inevitably, if not necessarily, has and does lead to violence. That Spirit that leads us to avoid all occasions of war calls us to bring peace to our economic system, as well as to all other theaters of conflict.

I might pose the queries for Friends regarding competition thus: Is the trade-off between innovation and technological advance and the violence the system does to everyone, but especially to workers, worth it? How can we promote cooperation in a system that is adversarial to the core? How do we protect the weak and disadvantaged when shortages heighten the competition to the point of violence, whether physical or “just” economic, especially since we are approaching severe shortages of some basics around the globe—food and water, particularly, and many other resources regionally? How can we make economic “households”, especially corporations, inherently careful of the needs of all the stakeholders in the system—workers, consumers, and non-workers—and not just careful for owners and stockholders, while retaining the innovative energy that competition provides rather than chasing after them with regulators and economic ambulances after the fact of their violence?

How can we speak to that of God in the men and women who run our economic households? To that of God in those who find themselves the victims or the adversaries of these people and the systems they manage? To that of God in those who set social and economic policy? How do we speak to that of God in the legal “person” that is a corporation, if there is such a thing? What if there isn’t such a thing? How do we bring the gospel of peace to our economic institutions?

Capitalism—The Carcinoma Economy

August 6, 2014 § 5 Comments

Capitalism is predicated on growth. Unique among all physical systems in the universe, capitalism pretends to disobey one of the laws of thermodynamics by claiming to produce more energy than you put into it. It pretends to be a perpetual motion machine that not only keeps going, but actually picks up speed. Capitalism calls the allegedly surplus energy it produces profit. The energy you put into it is capital plus labor, or, following the Quaker economist Kenneth Boulding, materials, energy and know-how. Capitalism claims that after you account for costs, there’s still some energy left over for humans to use as they please. Never mind that we did not really factor in the true costs to the Earth and to wider society, let alone future generations, of irretrievable resource destruction, thorough waste management, worker basic education, infrastructure building and maintenance, and the support of other social systems that provide capitalism with numerous necessary services.

Profit—growth—is the goal, the fictitious end towards which the whole system strives. Furthermore, the growth itself is expected to grow. The curve is supposed to climb, producing more profit all the time, and it is best if the growth of the growth grows—the ideal system has periods of acceleration and expansion.

In a biological system—in an organism—growth that never stops is called cancer. 

The earth is a biological-physical system, a super-organism in which the biological subsystems—its ecosystems—interact with each other and with the earth’s physical systems, such as the atmosphere, the rivers, lakes, glaciers, and seas, and the rocks and soils, in a billions-year-old process of evolution that has been self-regenerative throughout all those geologic epochs. 

Capitalism is a cancer in our Mother Earth. Like a cancer, it never stops sucking up resources that other organisms in the super-organism need to survive and thrive. It never stops consuming Mother Earth’s finite supplies of captured energy, water, and industrial minerals. It never stops displacing other systems and organisms as it consumes, grows, and excretes its poisons. It never stops debouching its wastes into earth-cleansing systems that increasingly cannot keep up with the load.

Capitalism has metastasized. It has always needed fuel, water, and minerals. But at first, the fuel was wood, the water was local, and the mineral was iron. Now the fuels are several and most are poisonous, all the water of the planet is at risk, and the mineral and other material resources it requires include virtually all of the periodic table of the elements. At first, only local ecosystems were fouled by its waste. Now the vast oceans, all the waterways, virtually all the underground aquifers, and the entire atmosphere of the earth groan in tortured poisoned pain and unsustainable drawdown. Now even the electromagnetic fields of the planet are distorted and extra-planetary radiation rains in through its holes, killing off the primary source of oxygen on the planet, the phytoplankton off the coasts of Antarctica. We even put junk on the moon.

This describes the global capitalist system as a whole in the Mother Earth. But the smaller organisms in the system follow the same patterns. The cancer operates at all levels of capitalist organization. Tiny individual companies hope to sprout branches in nearby neighborhoods or cities. Startups dream of becoming big enough to go public or be consumed by some larger engine of consumption and profit. Whole new industries rise up to drive the expansion exponentially. National companies seek to become transnational. Some trans-national corporations are already meta-national—they no longer have any meaningful national identity and exist only as global entities with no meaningful allegiances except to profit. It seems only a matter of time before one of them makes a small country into a company nation, the way smaller corporations used to create company towns with their growth and hegemony (I think of Johnson & Johnson’s purchase of New Brunswick, New Jersey), trading meta-national status for the gift to a nation’s people of economic development, and thus acquiring a seat in the United Nations General Assembly. I expect Exxon Mobil to be the first, since it already has made Trinidad Tobago into a company country.

The system is predicated on a simple model of mass-production and mass-consumption. Companies produce goods that consumers consume or services and experiences that consumers purchase and internalize. In doing so, the companies themselves consume goods and services that other companies produce, and so on, back to the Earth as the ultimate source. Venders, producers, and consumers alike consume fuels in order to consume and they release wastes back into the system as an inevitable byproduct. All this takes place on a mass scale. Capitalism is a mass-production, mass-consumption, mass-excretion economic system.

Are you an organism in this system, a business, or a worker, or a consumer? Stop producing and you start to die. Stop consuming and you start to die. Run out of supplies or suppliers, you start to die. Run out of energy, you start to die. Lose your job, you are diminished. Have a really old computer or mobile phone? It breaks down and we lose touch, we lose our productivity, we die a little consumer death. We run out and get another one.

This economic system has to keep producing, keep consuming, keep growing, or it starts to die. The only thing worse than a recession, in which a nation-state organism in the system gets ill and starts shrinking instead of growing, is a depression, in which the organism goes into a coma.

Capitalism is carcinomic. Mother Earth’s immune systems cannot keep up. What reforms can we imagine that would halt its rapacious growth while continuing to deliver its benefits? This fantastical outcome seems impossible to me. Constant growth is part of capitalism’s basic DNA. 

So I might present the predicaments of capitalism for Friends in these queries: Can you imagine an economic system that is not predicated on continual growth at the expense of all the other physical and biological systems of planet Earth? Following the Quaker economist Kenneth Boulding, who popularized the phrase “spaceship earth”, can we envision a system in which all of its production, consumption, and waste generation take place in a series of completely sustainable cycles of reuse and regeneration as we travel through the galaxy in this finite vessel made of earth and air and fire and water? 

No—these are not true queries. They only have yes or no answers. The true query is not can we, but how do we, deliver the benefits of industrial and post-industrial capitalism without carcinomic growth, without the fiction of profit?

The deeper question is how can we redefine wealth as weal-th, as well-being for all organisms on Mother Earth, without embodying this well-being in things that must be produced and consumed, in experiences that must be produced and purchased? How can we organize the natural and necessary processes of an ecos, an organic household economy—providing food, fuel, shelter, clothing, health and healing, art, study, entertainment, and other forms of human expression and fulfillment—in a system that treats all the material and social resources required for these things as gifts to be returned, to the Earth and to each other? How do we build an economic system out of mutuality, reciprocity, respect, and renewal, without continual consumptive growth?

Gathered in the Spirit at New York Yearly Meeting

August 3, 2014 § Leave a comment

I have been away from this blog for a while, mainly because I attended New York Yearly Meeting Summer Sessions, held July 20–26 at Silver Bay YMCA in Silver Bay, New York, on the shores of Lake George. Because I’m staff (I’m the Yearly Meeting’s communications director), I have been extremely busy preparing for, attending, and following through on the Sessions.

The gathered body of New York Yearly Meeting was truly gathered in the Spirit this year at its Summer Sessions. 

This took place during a called meeting for business in worship on Friday afternoon, July 25, a meeting called to further consider the report and recommendations of the Yearly Meeting’s Priorities Working Group (PWG), which the Working Group had expressed in a written Statement of Leadings and Priorities (see also an interpretive document for the Statement). After earlier business sessions in which the body was markedly NOT in unity with the Working Group’s recommendations, the Working Group brought a revised version of the Priorities section of the Statement to the called meeting and, one after another, Friends rose to express how pleased they were with the new version and we gradually realized that we had been transformed in love. Rejoicing filled our hearts. We were renewed in our faith that love for each other and faith in the Spirit that guides us and trust in our process could bring us into joyful unity.

The Priorities Working Group (PWG) had been convened in 2011 to visit local meetings and worship groups around the Yearly Meeting to listen to local Friends’ concerns about, and desires for, the Yearly Meeting organization, and to discern from these visits the priorities of local Friends and local meetings as they should apply to the Yearly Meeting organization’s work and budget. In this context, the Yearly Meeting organization comprises the Yearly Meeting committees and the Friends under appointment to those committees, the apparatus for conducting Yearly Meeting Sessions (Fall, Spring, and Summer), and the Yearly Meeting’s staff and institutions. 

The event that precipitated the convening of the Working Group was the Yearly Meeting organization’s extreme difficulty in approving a budget in 2009. The main issue underlying that precipitating event is a long-standing disconnect between local Friends and local meetings from the Yearly Meeting organization in general, and from its budget process, in particular. The Priorities Working Group was New York Yearly Meeting’s sixth formal attempt to address these issues since the early 1990s.

The initial Statement of Leadings and Priorities included six Priorities, general vision statements distilled from PWG’s extensive visitation, and intended to express the priorities that local Friends and local meetings hoped would guide the work of the Yearly Meeting organization and its budget. Each Priority had a paragraph elaborating on the Priority. After the Priorities section, there followed a short section on accountability and two sections of “Leadings”, actions they were recommending for implementing the Priorities, one set for the coming year and another for the coming five years. The Priorities were as follows:

“We, the Body of Friends gathered through our New York Yearly Meeting, recognize as a priority for the Yearly Meeting . . .

  • the development of programs to teach and share our spiritual skills with each other, and to help meetings to revitalize themselves;
  • the development of programs to help sustain our monthly meetings financially and to increase membership;
  • the pursuit of greater contact and spiritual relationship among Friends;
  • assisting Meetings with developing First Day School curricula, building skills for working with our teens, helping rejuvenate First Day Schools, and providing support for parents of young children;
  • the responsibility to be an active voice for Friends’ faith, values, ministry and witness in the world;
  • the responsibility to hold itself accountable to the above priorities, ensuring their faithful fruition.”

The paragraph introducing the five-year vision for the Priorities provided what I felt was a truly inspiring general vision for the Yearly Meeting:

In approving this Statement of Leadings and Priorities, we commit to focus the energy and resources of our Yearly Meeting for the coming five years on achieving a vision of growing and vital monthly meetings [that] are open and loving communities, effective in their outreach, active in the world, and skillful in nurturing the spiritual lives of Friends of all ages. We envision a yearly meeting structure [that] is devoted to furthering this vision, is an effective focal point for organizing our collective work in the world, and [that] communicates that work broadly. We envision a yearly meeting structure [that] is accountable to these priorities, transparent in its finances and integrally connected to the monthly meetings it represents and supports. We envision a yearly meeting where there will no longer be “yearly meeting Friends” and “monthly meeting Friends,” but rather one, whole yearly meeting devoted to faithfully living out the leadings of the Spirit. We reaffirm our commitment to utilize these Leading and Priorities in “preparing budgets, staff work plans, and other services and initiatives of the Yearly Meeting and its committees and constituent parts.”

Initially, we were only to consider the Priorities section plus the accountability section that directly followed it, and not the one-year and five-year recommendations for implementation. 

As general statements of intent, the Priorities seem pretty straightforward to me. Yes, I had quibbles, but it was clear what their general intent was and the details are always a problem. So I was ready to approve them straight off. I felt differently about the accountability section, which I believe was fraught with real problems, and I had serious questions about the Leadings for implementation, as well.

When the document was presented on the floor of the meeting, it was presented in its entirety, and many members of the gathered body were very disturbed by many aspects of it. While the clerk had asked that we consider only the six Priorities and the accompanying accountability section, Friends soon lost track of those instructions and began to focus on the Leadings, the recommendations for implementation. 

Fear drove most of this ministry. In particular, I believe that many Friends rightly sensed—but could not necessarily have clearly articulated—that, if approved, the accountability recommendations would mean the end of the Yearly Meeting’s committee structure as it now stands, and thus, apparently, the end of ministries they hold dear. Additionally, many Friends felt that even the Priorities had left out some key constituencies in the Yearly Meeting and some key aspects of meeting life. Most of this discontent focused on youth and young adults, and on our witness life.

During several sessions, held both in small groups and in plenary, Friends became more and more dissatisfied. At the end of Thursday’s meeting for business in worship, with only two more business sessions left, and one of them the celebration of our Junior Yearly Meeting program with all the kids and a final reading of the Epistle to consider, the clerk called a called meeting for Friday afternoon and the Priorities Working Group was directed to bring us a new draft of the Priorities to consider.

PWG changed little of the original draft of the priorities. They shortened the elaborating paragraphs while developing them a little more, and they restated the Priorities on youth and witness, as follows:

We . . . recognize as a Priority for the Yearly Meeting . . . 

  • the nurturing of our children, youth, and young adults;
  • the responsibility to be an active voice for Friends’ faith, values, ministry and witness in the world, and to support Friends active witness.

This was enough. Probably the many informal conversations held offline and the ministry during the earlier sessions in support of the Priorities helped Friends focus more clearly on the Priorities and hear the intentions behind them. Furthermore, we considered the new draft without the accountability section, which was easily the scariest and most problematic part of the original document. I suspect that the accountability section would have presented a stop to many Friends’ approval, mine included.

But Friends approved the direction envisioned in the Priorities for the Yearly Meeting organization and the broader Yearly Meeting proper, with an ease and a sense of joy that testified to the faithfulness of both the Working Group and the gathered body, and to the guiding presence of a Spirit of Love and Truth. 

This was a bit different than most of the gathered meetings I have experienced during meetings for business in worship. In most others, the gathered body has experienced some remarkable, even dramatic turning point, usually brought on by some powerful vocal ministry. You can feel the lightning strike; you can watch the winds of the Spirit billow the meeting’s sails into a rich, taut pulling toward a new direction, you can feel the ship surge into this new current.

By contrast, this gathering built gradually. As one Friend after another rose to support the Priorities, our expectation of gusts and waves of dissatisfaction slowly dissolved. The more we began to expect messages of support instead, the more peaceful the room became. After a while, we knew that we had arrived at the farther shore. We knew—perhaps with some residual anxiety, I’ll admit, for we could clearly see some storm clouds in the distance—we knew that we were ready to try a minute of approval. And approve we did.

From the safety of that little harbor, we acknowledged that we still have a long journey before us. And we are likely to revisit our complaints with both the new process for accountability to the Priorities that the Working Group develops, with the details of how we will implement them, and with the implications for the whole Yearly Meeting organization that real accountability entails.

Moreover, now the local Friends and the local meetings themselves have an important role to play. This is not just a vision for the Yearly Meeting organization. If this is what the local meetings want, they have to welcome and support the ministries—the leadings, whatever they are—that these Priorities generate for implementation. And they have to pay for it.

Local Friends have long complained that they have no input in the numbers in the budget, that they ship money off to the Yearly Meeting organization without knowing what that money does and without getting meaningful services from the Yearly Meeting organization in return. Now, if the Yearly Meeting organization begins developing the kinds of programs envisioned in the Priorities, as local meetings have asked, the local meetings better recognize that and pay for it.

And for its part, the YM organization has much more work to do.

It has to come up with a structure and process for holding itself accountable that Friends can accept—and Friends have to accept some discipline and let go of some fear. We do need an accountability structure of some kind. 

And it is true that many of the YM organization’s committees do not do much to serve the needs of local Friends. Many of the ministries they pursue are worthwhile and in many cases Spirit-led, but they do not really serve local Friends or these Priorities very directly.  What will be the fate of these ministries and their committees under the new priorities?

Finally, the gathered body did not find fault with the Leadings offered by the Priorities Working Group for the first year and the next five years so much as they found things that were missing. They felt that the Leadings did not reflect all of the voices in the Yearly Meeting. They therefore felt that those voices had not been heard. So the Working Group will have to revisit its notes from its visits and its discernment and recover those missing voices. They will need to bring us a fuller vision for implementation.

I do not doubt their faithfulness, so they will do their best. I guess I am a little less certain of the wider body of “Yearly Meeting Friends”, as we call ourselves, those Friends who regularly attend Sessions and are often under appointment to the Yearly Meeting committees that are being asked to completely re-envision their charge in light of the Priorities from local Friends. But we answered G*d’s call this July, so I am full of hope for the future.

And I have faith in the Spirit that Jesus promised to send to us in the gospel of John, for we have just been visited most wondrously. As long as we remain in love and commit to real worship, we can expect that promise to be fulfilled again.

If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. . . . The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. . . . I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. (John 14:15-17, 26; 15:15)

Owner Autocracy—Economic Non-democracy

July 18, 2014 § 1 Comment

Capitalism is inherently vertical in organizational structure. It consolidates power in the hands of the few and the power radiates down in a pyramid through management structures. This dictatorship can be varying degrees of benevolent, but, ultimately, the only power inherently vested in the worker is the power not to work—the power to strike or quit. It took a long time for the power to strike to become a legal right, we are still not completely there, and, since Ronald Reagan sacked the entire air traffic control community as his first official act in office, it’s been losing ground again. Moreover, it stretches things to call the power to quit or strike a “power”, since it makes workers so vulnerable.

Owners and managers decide virtually everything that’s important about your job: who gets to work, when, how, where, with whom, and for whom. They design or determine the time, space, body movements, and actions of your labor, sometimes even your speech. They monitor and evaluate your performance and they hold the ultimate power over you, as well—they can fire you.

Whether ownership is private, corporate, or public/bureaucratic, the system is barely post-feudal in its vertical structure. Since the transformation of European political feudalism and the fall of the sovereign monarchies, we have come to define democracy as the sine qua non of social justice: people should have a say in the things that affect their lives. But we take the tyranny of capitalism for granted. Capitalism is undemocratic.

This power corrupts, of course. Given the complete absence of any inherent, structural limits or mitigating counter-forces in the system, we must rely on outside social-political forces for protection against the misuse of this power. For this, we have turned to government. Gradually, centuries after capitalism’s rise to power, we workers have been granted protections from abusive hours, unsafe working conditions, harassment and discrimination according to a very slowly growing list of vulnerabilities.

Capitalism hates this advance in human rights. Naturally, therefore, the handlers of this power do all they can to limit the regulatory power of government. Thus the corruptive influence of power that is built into capitalism’s DNA inevitably infects the political system, and our protection is routinely and systematically undermined. 

Conservatives, whose mouths are constantly shaping the words “liberty” and “freedom” and “individual rights”, define these terms over and against the government only—against the only countervailing advocate we have against capitalism’s tyranny. Capitalism gets a pass. In fact they often worship the power and freedom of the market with a kind of religious fervor. Only our weak, compromised, and late-comer protectors in the government are to be feared.

I might summarize the predicaments for Friends regarding the power structures of capitalism in the following queries:

  • Given that the quasi-feudal hierarchical structure of our economic life inevitably if not necessarily leads to quasi-feudal patterns of discrimination and oppression, what can we do to bring the testimonies of justice and equality to bear on behalf of capitalism’s victims?
  • As a community that has proven over more than three centuries that horizontal power structures do work, how can we do a better job of transforming the vertical power structures of our economic system?
  • As Friends, how can we better promote the concepts and practice of servant leadership, a phrase coined and a practice first championed in the modern era by our own Quaker Robert K. Greenleaf? (Read an article by Larry Spears, the Quaker champion of Greenleaf’s work and servant leadership in our time, published in Quaker Life, titled Servant-Leadership and Quakers.)
  • Does your yearly meeting have a coherent, Spirit-led testimony on labor and worker rights?
  • Most importantly, how can we leverage our education and our Spirit-led testimonial power to begin conceiving a true alternative to this abusive system?

Private Ownership—The Moral Structure of Value in Capitalism

July 14, 2014 § Leave a comment

Capitalism is predicated on the private ownership of capital and of property in general. Only the owners or stockholders are entitled to the profit, the surplus wealth, which the system generates. They usually benefit from other privileges, as well.

By separating the owners of capital from the rest of the participants in the economy for profit and other privileges, capitalism creates a system of value that has moral implications. It says that capital, or property, is more valuable to the system than the labor which transforms it into something of worth in the market, and that the people who own the property are more valuable to a particular business, and in the wider social-political economy, than either those who work for it or those who buy the end product.

The practical consequence of this investment of value in capital and profit is that workers, consumers, even other businesses and industries, are relatively devalued: their needs are of secondary concern to the owners of a particular business, especially when those needs are in conflict with the pursuit or protection of either capital or profit. Workers are always in this position, because they are a cost to be cut.

I might summarize the predicament for Friends, then, in these queries: How does the quasi-moral aspect of an otherwise secular social system influence the actual ethical choices of individuals, especially the people who make the decisions about a business’s behavior? How might the investment of value in capital, property, profit, and owners/managers distort the moral framework of society as a whole? How do we build into our economic system the moral freedom to value appropriately the interests of other stakeholders in the system besides the owners and shareholders? Does your yearly meeting have a coherent, explicit, and Spirit-led testimony on economics and economic justice?

Quaker Testimonies and the Predicaments of Capitalism

July 11, 2014 § 4 Comments

I believe we have to question whether participation in the capitalist economy brings Friends into conflict with our traditional stands on peace, simplicity, economic justice, earth stewardship, community, and the right sharing of world resources. I am led to believe that it does. This is a predicament.

I use the word ‘predicament’ deliberately to mean not only the dilemmas that capitalism presents to Friends but also to indicate that capitalism is predicated on assumptions that necessarily bring Friends into conflict with their traditional witness testimonies. I am not arguing that enlightened participation in a capitalist economy is impossible, or that capitalism does not have its good points. Only that it has structural evils that one cannot avoid, that dynamics of human behavior and interaction are built into the system that necessarily lead to conflict, violence, social and economic injustice, materialistic excess, and damage to Earth’s ecosystems. Oh, and it violates the gospel of Jesus.

I see five basic predicaments of capitalism that challenge Friends’ lives in the light of their own testimonies. These are quite inter-related and sometimes it hardly makes sense to separate them, except that it’s so hard to make sense of them if you don’t. The five predicaments are:

  1. Private ownership of capital: Individuals (or the stockholders of corporations) own the goods and services that generate income when sold in the market, and they own the means to produce these goods or provide these services. It puts into private hands things that properly belong to the community and to future generations: mineral resources, agricultural resources, water, the wealth of the oceans. As currently structured, the community is cut out of the deal.
  2. Capitalism violates the Quaker testimonies of community, equality, and right sharing of resources.
  1. Competition: Capitalism is inherently competitive and assumes an ‘open market’ relatively free of direct government or collective social control. It competes for everything—resources, labor, energy, markets, customers, attention, even our dreams. Competition inevitably leads to conflict; inevitably over time, though not in every instance, conflict leads to violence.
  2. Capitalism violates the Quaker testimonies of peace, economic justice, and right sharing of world resources.
  1. Owner autocracy: Capitalism concentrates economic sovereignty—the right to make decisions—in the hands of the owners of capital and, by delegation, their managers, in an overall system of vertical organization. Until recently, the social history of capitalist economies in the over-developed world has been evolving toward increasing democratic governance; those for whom free-market capitalism is a religion give capitalism the credit. However, capitalism itself remains feudal in its governance structures; it is inherently undemocratic.
  2. Capitalism violates the Quaker testimonies of community and equality.
  1. Growth: Capitalism determines the health of a business and of the system as a whole in terms of growth; at all levels, its command is to expand—or die. Furthermore, the primary locus of value, the goal of the whole system, is profit, that is, surplus wealth, which is also a kind of growth. Capitalism assumes that economic growth has no limits and it pursues this goal with no structural limitations. Tissue that grows without limits is called cancer, and this disease is killing Mother Earth.
  2. Capitalism violates the Quaker testimony of caring for the earth.
  1. Mendaciousness: In terms of both its accounting methods and its conduct of competition in an “open market”, capitalism lies to itself and to its participants in three ways: about the nature of capital, the nature of overhead, and in its advertising.
  2. It does not take economic responsibility for the real value of the resources it treats as capital, which it almost always consumes without replacing, and it does not build into its pricing either the known real value of these resources or their unknown potential value to future generations. Meanwhile, it is drawing down the resource capital of the entire planet at a now catastrophic pace.
  3. Furthermore, capitalism does not figure in its pricing the real, final cost of disposing of its wastes safely, which is part of its overhead. When—if—the bill ever comes due for cleanup, capitalists inevitably try to squirm out of paying; it hurts profits and equity value.
  4. Finally, capitalism depends on advertising for growth in an environment of competition for market share. This tempts it to psychologically manipulate its consumers through advertising. Advertising invades and distorts our worldview, our understanding of the good life, and thus our very dreams, with desires that drive human behavior independently of real human need or broader social welfare; and that’s even when it is telling the factual truth.
  5. Capitalism lies—it violates the Quaker testimony of integrity.

Capitalism’s meta-predicament lies in the very structure of the system itself as a whole, the way it structures our relations with each other socially and politically and our relations with our Mother Earth. Capitalism wrongly structures these relations and it cannot do otherwise.

But the meta-argument about the rightful role of an economic system in civilization will have to wait for another post, as will fuller discussions of each of these predicaments. And then there’s Jesus.

Reparations to African Americans

July 6, 2014 § 1 Comment

I feel that one of the first steps we take in the New Lamb’s War should be to champion black reparations.

In its Fall Sessions in November 2013, New York Yearly Meeting approved an Apology to Afro-Descendants, which I have discussed in an earlier post. Now, in its June issue, The Atlantic has published “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. On page 61, the article mentions that Friends historically have supported the idea of reparations to African Americans:

“A heavy account lies against us as a civil society for oppressions committed against people who did not injure us,” wrote the Quaker John Woolman in 1769, “and that if the particular case of many individuals were fairly stated, it would appear that there was considerable due to them.”

As the historian Roy E. Finkenbine has documented, at the dawn of this country, black reparations were actively considered and often effected. Quakers in New York, New England, and Baltimore went so far as to make “membership contingent upon compensating one’s former slaves.” In 1782, the Quaker Robert Pleasants emancipated his 78 slaves, granted them 350 acres, and later built a school on their property and provided for their education. “The doing of this justice to the injured Africans,” wrote Pleasants, “would be an acceptable offering to him who ‘Rules in the kingdom of men.’”

As I describe in my earlier post, way opened to approval of the Apology in New York Yearly Meeting with some force applied to the hinges, what with some slamming and wrenching, though the frame seems undamaged. Some Friends exited out the door when it seemed it would not go forward. Not all Friends walked through that door in the end.

I approved the Apology in principle, though I wasn’t happy with its wording. Unlike the words of Robert Pleasants, and like many of our witness testimonies, it could have been written by almost any socially conscious secular community; it never mentions God and never presents a religious argument, only a generally moral one. It never mentions sin, repentance, or forgiveness; that’s not my natural language, either, but I do believe in sin, and these particular sins are grievous and have real victims, so now I feel we should ask for forgiveness, and also ask forgiveness for not asking for forgiveness.

Still, the Yearly Meeting has held to its commitment to continue laboring over the issue, and there is still opportunity to recover the “Religious” in the Religious Society of Friends in the matter. The Yearly Meeting has been collectively considering a series of queries drafted by its Ministry Coordinating Committee and some Friends are still actively working on further next steps.

There was talk at the time about reparations. I would not be surprised if the Yearly Meeting moved on to considering collective support of black reparations, at least in principle. I haven’t finished the Atlantic article yet, but its arguments so far are truly compelling to me. Just the lead-in on the front cover of the magazine is compelling (see below). And now we have no less a Quaker prophet than John Woolman urging us on.

And then there’s Jesus. “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Debt, sin as debt, redemption as release from debt, these lie at the very center of the gospel of the Christ. In his inaugural statement of his ministry in Luke chapter four, Jesus defined his role as the Christ, the Messiah, as the one who would set free the slaves and bring relief to the poor. 

Jesus walked farther than any previous Hebrew prophet in this path, but it was already well-worn. Coates starts his article by quoting Deuteronomy 15, which is the covenantal foundation for dealing with debt and debt slavery in Torah, along with Leviticus 25; for Israel had been a debt slave nation itself and had been redeemed by its God at the Passover and in the Exodus. This is why so many African American spirituals, like “Samson and Delilah” and “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho” tell stories of liberation from Hebrew Scripture; under the surface, they are anthems of release from slavery.

Insofar as Quakers follow Jesus, we must bend especially lithely toward economic justice and be extra mindful of our tradition’s stand against slavery—and never mind Paul.

Here’s the cover text of The Atlantic:

250 years of slavery.

90 years of Jim Crow.

60 years of separate but equal.

35 years of state-sanctioned redlining.

Until we reckon with the compounding moral debts of our ancestors,

America will never be whole.

Lessons for the New Lamb’s War from the First Lamb’s War

July 4, 2014 § 2 Comments

Early Friends heard the Word and then invaded public spaces with it, bringing to steeplehouses and marketplaces the prophetic announcement of a new age. My sense is that early Friends were less concerned with exactly where they were going with the Lamb’s War and whether they were “winning” than with being faithful to their call. In the short term, they certainly shook things up and made impressive gains in bringing about the transformation they believed in. But in the long term, of course, the Lamb’s War seemed to fail. The Restoration of the monarchy, the collapse of the Puritan experiment, the decades of persecution that followed, all meant that the Lamb’s War had been lost. 

Or had it? On its own terms, yes. But . . .

Like all apocalypses, the Quaker apocalypse of the Word understood the problems of the time and their causes brilliantly, it flared brightly in its initial vision and passion, and it failed, ultimately, to understand the nature of its own fulfillment and the timelines involved.

Early Friends sought to usher in the new age as the second coming of Christ. They succeeded in building a vibrant and incredibly creative religious movement and they did in fact totally transform the world—but not by turning all souls toward Christ. They ended up jump-starting industrial capitalism instead, even as they declared a truce in the Lamb’s War and retreated from the battlefield. 

Is this what Christ had had in mind all along? That’s hard to imagine, that he told his followers, the early Friends, one thing—that he was coming again, right then, through them, to remake the world spiritually—and then turned them toward science, industry, technology, and commerce, instead, giving them the genius to create an all-new kind of economic system and make them rich in the process.

Did early Friends abandon Christ when they abandoned the Lamb’s War? Did Christ abandon them? (Doug Gwyn raises these questions in his important book, The Covenant Crucified.) What did the Christ, the Consciousness that gathered this peculiar people into such a dynamic movement, actually have in mind for them? With thousands, and tens of thousands, of quiet murmurings to their souls, he led them to Darby’s railroad, and Cadbury’s chocolate, and Barclay’s bank, and Huntsman’s cast steel. Apparently.

I find stuff to ponder here.

From the history of the first Lamb’s War I take this lesson: listen for the call; answer the call with faithfulness; don’t be too attached to results, or fuss overmuch about the path you find yourself on. You cannot know what the divine purpose is. G*d is in charge, not us. Apparently.

Religious movements evolve according to dynamics of emergence that are invisible and even unknowable to those who start them. This is because human history is an evolving ecosystem, not an arrow with a target. Organisms in that ecosystem—individuals and especially, communities—play their roles and sometimes they play a dominant one, as the Religious Society of Friends did in 18th century Britain. But their actions immediately begin interacting with all the other organisms’ contributions, and those interactions are out of human control and often even out of human purview.

All movements waiver and then decay and ultimately dissolve or collapse. But something comes out of it. 

Likewise, in my own personal experience, in the history of this individual. We each seem to be born with a certain spiritual “DNA”. However, as you mature and move through life, passion, right intention, and right action interact with the DNA of your soul as a kind of spiritual RNA, decoding and expressing the elements of your true self. Somehow, ultimately, you are likely to arrive at some fulfillment, but by a path you could never have predicted and in a form that you could never have imagined. 

One example from my own life: From an early age, I wanted to be a minister and for a while in college, I was headed toward seminary. But I could not have been a Lutheran minister, or any other kind of minister I knew of at the time, and I dropped the idea. Now, here I am a Quaker with several ministries that have my full commitment and passion. G*d led me here after all.

And this is what I mean by “G*d led me here after all”: In this process of purposeful yet unpredictable spiritual evolution, the spiritual RNA—the factors inside us that help us decode and express our basic nature as we encounter forces outside ourselves and evolve and mature in the Spirit—this internal and external dynamic is what I call G*d. 

This is my experience. This is what I know of G*d “experimentally”. I could ascribe all this to some utterly external and utterly spiritual entity and call that God—but that’s not how I experience it. My testimony is that there is something within me—let’s call it the Light—that works to turn me toward the good, toward creativity, toward love—and toward full expression of my true self. Furthermore, this principle within me is awake to possibility and opportunity in the world, and to sympathetic external forces, actors, and movements of the spirit in the world around me, in ways that my conscious consciousness is not. 

But this—something—is not just inside me. There is “something” outside of me, as well. I experience the Light within me as my teacher and guide. But the Light is not confined within the boundaries of my individual soul. It seems to work upon me from the outside, also. For one thing, it’s inside of everyone else. But it’s also in the living world around me. In fact, I have at times experienced it quite profoundly within rock, climbing a talus formation in the Shawangunks of New York or walking through a boulder field in the Sourlands of New Jersey, laying my hand upon the bones of our Mother Earth. Communion is real, and it comes in many forms.

So, too, with religious community. Religious communities form in answer to some collective experience. Israel was formed in the Exodus. The Christian movement seems to have gelled in the Pentecost experience. Quakers were gathered at Firbank Fell. Receptors are built into the community’s collective consciousness that are capable of recognizing and responding to the galvanizing Spirit of its birth. The new religion is the community’s spiritual practice, the things it does to commune again with that Spirit, for which it yearns. This yearning for its Truth, for fulfillment in the full expression of its “DNA”, is the emotional drive behind the religion’s actions and its evolution. 

When the community is aligned toward G*d; that is, when it is aligned toward the good, toward creativity, toward love, toward the unique gifts the community possesses—and above all, toward the collective consciousness that is its Source and its guide—extraordinary things happen. For Friends, the gifts are the core elements of our tradition, especially the faith and practice of Quaker ministry. Our Source Consciousness is the Christ, the consciousness in which Friends were first gathered and in which it has enjoyed continuing revelation. The mission is worship—waiting for the Holy Spirit to prompt us toward understanding and action—and then faithfully answering the call.

Thus, the Lamb’s War today depends on individual Quakers and Quaker meetings that know how to pass on our gifts, our tradition; that know how to listen for the call; and that know how to nurture, guide, and support those who hear and answer the call. It depends on Friends who are alive to the movement of the Spirit, who know humility—who are ready to submit—and who live in simplicity honest enough to free them for action.

Thus, for me, the lesson for the new Lamb’s War from the first Lamb’s War is to remain spiritually focused on the Light within me, as an individual; to remain focused on our collective Teacher and Guide, as a community; and to retain the faith that this religious practice actually works—that prayer, meditation, and worship deliver communion.

Theoretically, this faith is not some blind leap in the dark, but a confident walking in the Light, in the knowledge that it has happened before, not just to our forbears but also to ourselves—to you and me and our meetings. In the experience of personal moments of communion and collective moments of gathering, we expect that it will happen again. If we are faithful.

The Lamb’s War, the Peace Testimony, and the Third Way

June 28, 2014 § 2 Comments

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the land  * ; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. (Matthew 10:34)

Peace testimony—I love the way that Friends continue to expand and deepen our understanding of this testimony. But I do think that we sometimes lull ourselves into a false sense of righteous complacency with the phrase. For, by focusing on peace, we distract ourselves from the reality of the struggle. 

We do not narrowly define the peace testimony in terms of war, but in the broader terms of all violence and conflict. We reject war, yes, and we seek a peace that is not just the absence of armed conflict, but a dynamic wholeness and inter-social well-being that is better defined as shalom, as a condition in which armed conflict will not arise. And we know that this kind of deep-rooted peace requires justice, not in the judicial sense of law and recompense so much as just-ness, a state in which people are encouraged and free to do the right thing. 

But some people and some societies are addicted to violence and un-just-ness, and they resist any attempt to bring true peace. American society suffers from this addiction. Thus, the way to peace quite often is anything but peaceful; it often means embracing struggle. Just ask Medgar Evers; or George Fox; or Jesus. 

I have always found the bumper sticker saying, “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way”, a bit platitudinous. I shouldn’t; it actually expresses the Third Way. It is a kind of peace koan. I have a similarly curmudgeonly attitude toward the iconic image of “the Peaceable Kingdom”. Lions do not lie down with lambs. Lions kill lambs, in this world, and this is the world that matters, the world we actually live in. Or put another way, even in the world we seek, real lions will eat lambs. The hyperbolic promise of a world completely remade invites belief and prophecy, but it defies common sense and fulfillment. Predation persists; prey abound. We will never stop struggling against oppression because there will always be oppressors. 

Thus the Lamb’s War is a war! Like the prophet Jesus, we will not be coming to bring peace, but a sword. But what are our weapons? Of what kind of steel is our “sword” made?

All bloody principles and practices, we, as to our own particulars, do utterly deny, with all outward wars and strife and fightings with outward weapons, for any end or under any pretense whatsoever. And this is our testimony to the whole world.

The Declaration to Charles II, from which this passage is taken and which Friends often quote and put up as a poster on the meetinghouse wall as the first clear statement of our peace testimony, consistently refers to “outward weapons”. These words imply a willingness to use inward weapons. 

This is the key, I think, to understanding the Lamb’s War as a Third Way. The struggle against violence, oppression, ecocide, and hate is an inward one. One fights the Lamb’s War first of all on the battleground of one’s own soul as a constant turning toward the Light instead of toward one’s shadow-side. And one brings the Lamb’s War to others and to the world inwardly, as well—not to the outward selves of other people, but to their inner life. We “answer that of God” within them; that is, we speak the Word to that within them that yearns for God, for goodness and wholeness and Truth. As the Declaration puts it:

So, we whom the Lord hath called into the obedience of his Truth have denied wars and fightings and cannot again any more learn it. This is a certain testimony unto all the world of the truth of our hearts in this particular, that as God persuadeth every man’s heart to believe, so they may receive it. 

This is how the Lamb’s War is waged.

And as for the sword . . . Early Friends drew upon the book of Revelation for the imagery and the strategy of the Lamb’s War. In Revelation, the Lamb is a warrior whose sword comes from out of his mouth:

I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. . . . He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God. . . . Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. . . . He treads out the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. (“He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored”) (Revelation 19:11, 13, 15)

Early Friends identified this rider in Revelation as the Word of John chapter one, and as the Lamb in Revelation 17:14 and elsewhere. Thus . . .

The sword of the Lamb is the word of the Lord,
and the Lamb’s War is a war of the Word.

Early Friends waged the Lamb’s War by preaching the Word. Not just preaching the words they found in scripture, but seeking with their own words and actions and lives to bring people to Christ, to the Word, to the light within them that would save them from the darkness within them.

Thus the Lamb’s War is a Third Way. It resists the violence of the oppressor, but not with the violence of the resistor. Rather, it stabs into the human soul with divine Truth. It opens the possibility of life in the Spirit as it warns against death out of the Life. It answers that of God in others.

And it does this, not just with words, with speech, but with the Word, with the presence of the Christ, within us and within them; that is, with love and the Truth.

But to wield that weapon, one must actually know the Truth. One must have heard the Word.

How do we know the Truth? How do we get ears that hear? And what would a Lamb’s War look like today?

*  Most translations give “earth” here, but the Hebrew/Aramaic word eretz that Jesus would have used means land, in general, and a range of things in specific, depending on context. It can mean “earth” in the more cosmic sense of “the world”, or the creation, and, since Paul, Christians have jumped to this cosmic meaning whenever they can because it exalts God. But eretz also has specific “legal” and cultural nuances that Jesus invokes quite often. It can mean your land, your family farm, your inheritance (note that in the very next verses in Matthew, Jesus sets “man against his father . . .”, family members against each other, quite possibly a reference to conflict over inheritance. Many of Jesus’ sayings are midrashim on inheritance law.). And eretz can mean the land of Israel. I believe that this is what Jesus intends with this saying. He is saying, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to Israel.” He was always more concerned with the local and the concrete than with the global and the cosmic (except in John and Paul, of course). Our cosmic-ifying of eretz in our translations is one of the main reasons we moderns don’t see this as clearly and as often as we should.

Jesus and the Third Way

June 25, 2014 § 5 Comments

 

In my previous post, I argued that Liberal Friends have abandoned the traditional prophetic voice, steeped in biblical ideas and the righteous emotions of judgment, testimony, and witness (though we hold onto some of the words, which for me prompts queries about integrity), without developing a new, effective voice. We can’t invoke the wrath of a judgmental God we no longer believe in, and we don’t know how to articulate the consequences of wrongdoing or the “mechanics” of the impending consequences—how and why those consequences will occur—in alternative religious language. 

Most of the time, we explain our testimonies and back up our witness work by invoking our belief that there is that of God in everyone, especially in the case of the peace testimony. However, that belief is NOT the source of any of our testimonies. Furthermore, it misrepresents what the phrase originally meant to George Fox and I believe it even misunderstands what it’s intended to say: we do not resist wrongdoing because there is that of God in other people; we resist wrongdoing because there is that of God IN US—because the Light within us reveals the truth and we turn toward the right instead of toward the wrong.

As a result of this spiritual and rhetorical impoverishment, the witness minutes that come out of our meetings, at least in my circles, almost never mention God and often do not give a religious, let alone a recognizably Quaker, rationale for our stand. Often, they don’t even make a secular moral argument. Usually, they rely on science, rights-based legal argument, or other secular reasoning. Very often, you would never know that a religious community had written the thing, let alone a Quaker meeting. I can’t tell you how often I have seen this happen.

Meanwhile, the tradition we have let go from our hands and minds often offers us the most powerful language and rationale we could hope for. For the first master of the Third Way, before George Fox and Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr and Bayard Rustin, was Jesus the Christ.

One of the greatest contributions to Christian justice work in modern times comes from theologian Walter Wink in his unpacking of Jesus’ sayings about resistance. Here’s what Jesus had to say:

 ‘You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.

Some religious pacifists have used that line “Do not resist an evildoer” and the subsequent sayings to justify meek submission in the face of oppression. Jesus means no such thing. When you understand the practical implications of the sayings themselves in their historical context, you see that he did not mean to resist not evil in the literal sense, but not to resist evil with its own tools of violence, hate, and fear.

In fact, he did teach his disciples to resist, but with the tools of nonviolence, love, and boldness.

Here’s how Walter Wink opens our understanding of these teachings:

If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to them also the left.

In first-century Palestine, you did not touch other people with your left hand if you could help it. It was unclean because you used it to do your toilet. Some conservative men would even keep their left hand hidden within their robes when in public as a matter of propriety. So to strike someone on the right cheek meant that you gave them a backhanded slap with your right hand. This was an offensive expression of disrespect, just as it is now—but it wasn’t illegal; it wasn’t assault.

So, if you turned your left cheek to this person, you invited them to strike you outright—to punch you in the face. That is assault. Such an attack is against the law. You are inviting them to break the law, and if they take you up on it, then you can press a case in the assembly of the elders.

This is moral jiu jitsu. This turns the oppressor’s hate back upon them, undoing them with their own malice.

If someone asks you to walk with them a mile, walk with them two.

Roman soldiers were allowed by Roman military law to press civilians they encountered along the road into porter service, forcing them to carry their gear for them. But Roman law only provided for one mile of such service—and the Roman roads were all clearly marked with mile markers. 

Offering to carry a soldier’s gear for a second mile invited him to break his military code, and the penalty for this infringement was a flogging.

This is moral jiu jitsu, using the oppressor’s law against him.

If someone demands your coat, give them also your cloak.

The coat of Jesus’ time was a special garment with a special weave designed to shed water and it was used as a shelter at night, since people often slept outdoors at night, either on their roofs or in the fields or vineyards. For the very poor—the homeless—their coat was their only shelter. The coat also was used as a marker in economic exchanges, just as sandals were. Thus the coat had considerable intrinsic economic value because of its quality, and symbolic economic value as a marker of debt. Specifically, speaking of its symbolic value, if you fell into dire debt, more debt than you could pay, your creditor could claim your coat as a token of your debt, though they had to return it to you at dusk for sleeping.

To offer your cloak, your under-clothing, however, was to go around virtually naked. This was not just an embarrassment to the debtor, as it would be to us; in the traditional society of Jesus’ time, it also was a considerable embarrassment onlookers. But it was even more than an embarrassment to the creditor, for taking this extra garment was against the law of Moses. Your creditor had no right to anything more than your coat. If he took your cloak, you could take him to court.

This is moral jiu jitsu, turning the tables on economic oppression.

Jesus employs the Third Way.

The gospels give us a handful of scenes in which Jesus employs the Third Way against his enemies. For example . . .

In the week leading up to his arrest, Jesus was accosted by scribes in the temple court and asked whether one should pay the Roman tax. This was a setup: if Jesus said yes, he contradicted his mission against the Roman occupation of Israel; if he said no, he could be tried as an insurrectionist—the very charge for which he was soon to be tried and executed, in fact.

Jesus asks to see the coin, and someone provides one. He asks whose picture is on the coin. “Caesar’s,” they answer. The people in the story and the readers of the gospels at the time all know that above that image the inscription reads, “Son of God.”

There it is. Jesus’ enemies have brought an unclean and blasphemous thing into the temple complex, in violation of the law. He hardly needs to say more. They have just indicted themselves. But he goes on to say, famously, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.” 

Like the resist not evil sayings, this passage has often been used to justify obedience to the state. But Jesus means the opposite. For what is God’s in this context? Everything is God’s! All your heart and all your soul and all your strength. I have unpacked these three items in another post, but the point is that, after giving God his (sic) due, there’s nothing left for Caesar. Jesus has said, do not pay Roman taxes, but in a way that avoids getting arrested.

Jesus has thrown his enemies onto the mat and pinned them with the moral jiu jitsu of the Third Way. He has revealed them as hypocrites and he has answered their question in a way that avoids prosecution, by quoting the heart of the very law his enemies claim to represent.

Jesus was a tactical genius. But he offers us more than just clever method. The gospel of Jesus is full of real content, too: teachings that radically challenge the political, social, and especially, the economic oppression of our time, and an argument and language that carries real weight in much of our society. Most especially, it offers a powerful antidote to the lies of the Christian right, for they have got their putative master completely wrong. I want to return to this content soon.

But in the next post, I want to explore the Lamb’s War of early Friends as the Third Way.

 

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