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Can the US Be Transformed? :9 Conclusion |
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Part Nine
The United States can be Transformed
Sometimes I think Barack Obama agrees with two important points I want to make concerning what transforming the United States is not.
Transformation is not choosing between the traditional Republican philosophy that each person should stand on his own two feet and the traditional Democratic philosophy that the government should lend her a helping hand. Obama’s practice of collaborating with Republicans in the Senate and his intention to appoint Republicans in his administration may indicate that for him this traditional dichotomy is not an issue.
Transformation is not about choosing between charity and employment. To elaborate: It is not about choosing, or striking a balance, between on the one hand welfare checks, tax rebates, a guaranteed income for all, a negative income tax, or any way of giving the poor money in exchange for nothing at all in return; and on the other hand encouraging the poor to stay in school or return to school, stay off drugs, and not get pregnant or get anyone else pregnant, long enough to qualify for a job and earn a living. Obama probably learned from his anthropologist mother that there are other options.
Transformation is reforming civil society. In learning to cooperate and to share a society as a whole frees itself from excessive dependence on profit to motivate production. More caring social norms make the basic structure of society more functional, for, after all, the basic structure is made of norms. Obama seems to know this when he calls for more volunteering; for more service learning in the schools; and for churches to play a greater role in anti-poverty and at-risk youth programs, in building senior centers, in rehabilitating ex-offenders, and in coping with emergencies such as the flooding of New Orleans; and when he says that the United States will not be transformed from the top down but from the bottom up. Republicans too seem to know –even if they do not know that addiction to the profit motive is of all America’s addictions the sickest-- that the magnitude and nature of the problems facing the nation are beyond the scope and skills of government to solve, unless government partners with civil society organizations. The reverse is also true: they are beyond the scope of civil society unless government at all levels does what it can to help, which is one of the reasons why the traditional philosophical differences between Republicans and Democrats are no longer an issue. When Laura and George Bush agree with Michelle and Barack Obama, it is a sign that, as Henry David Thoreau once said, some things are obvious, like a trout in the milk.
Obama used the following words in a keynote address to a convention of politically progressive churchgoers on June 28, 2006: “After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten point plan. They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness - in the imperfections of man.
“Solving these problems will require changes in government policy, but it will also require changes in hearts and a change in minds. I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manufacturers' lobby - but I also believe that when a gang-banger shoots indiscriminately into a crowd because he feels somebody disrespected him, we've got a moral problem. There's a hole in that young man's heart - a hole that the government alone cannot fix.” (Obama 2006)
Obama sometimes uses the word “transform” and its cognate “renewal” when he speaks of faith. In the “Barack Obama on Faith” section of his website it says: “Government alone cannot solve all of our problems – we have an individual responsibility to be our brother’s keeper and our sister’s keeper. ‘And although government will play a crucial role in bringing about the changes we need, more money and programs alone will not get us where we need to go. Each of us, in our own lives, will have to accept responsibility - for instilling an ethic of achievement in our children, for adapting to a more competitive economy, for strengthening our communities, and sharing some measure of sacrifice. So let us begin. Let us begin this hard work together. Let us transform this nation.’ - Presidential Announcement Speech” (Obama 2008) (After the first sentence the language quoted from the website is taken from his February 10, 2007 announcement speech.)
I believe Obama’s discourse taps a broad and deep current of thought and sentiment in the United States. It can be called “liberal religion” or “religion that orients to the partnership model.” As Peter Benson and Dorothy Williams have documented (Benson and Williams 1986) in the USA candidates who do not profess a religious faith rarely garner enough votes to win an election. Members of congress divide not between secular and religious factions, but between two clusters of religious attitudes. Translated into Eisler’s terminology they are dominator and partnership religious attitudes. Both appear to be clusters of attitudes millions of Americans understand and support, because each characterizes roughly half of the people’s elected representatives. The former tend to emphasize the first of Jesus´ two commandments, “Love thy God;” while the latter tend to emphasize the second, “Love thy neighbor.” The first tend to distinguish one religion from another, while the latter tend to find the same social gospel in all of them. In the previously quoted speech to progressive churchgoers Obama said, “Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.” (Obama 2006) One of his “faith principles” is that religion should not be divisive. He wants to reach out to religious people who orient toward the dominator end of Eisler´s spectrum and to unbelievers. They may not want him, but he wants them.
Seen in the perspective I have been suggesting, transformation is about embedding the government and the economy in the wider context of social relations that Eisler talks about when she speaks of viewing the economy with a wider lens. It is about re-embedding the economy in ethics, as the Notre Dame economists Charles Wilber and Kenneth Jameson have proposed, recalling the historian Karl Polanyi’s concept of the “disembedding” of economic relations from social relations generally at the beginning of the modern age. (Wilber and Jameson 1983; Polanyi 1944) It is about older and deeper strata of social relationships. The beginning of government as we know it is usually dated at 1648, when the existence of the Dutch Republic was assured by the Treaty of Westphalia. The transition to a modern economy was gradual, but it is not usually thought to have been completed earlier than the discovery of America in 1492 or later than the constitution of the global world economy under British hegemony at the end of the Napoleonic wars ratified by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The basic cultural structures of the modern world are older and wider, as I have been pointing out in my précis of the history of private law, and as Eisler points out with her emphasis on family, gender, community, and nature.
One way to analyze what it would mean to transform the United States is to retrace the stages of the invention of modernity. I have located the beginning of the evolution of the juridical subject in the Roman institution of a paterfamilias who could be called before the praetor in case of a dispute with another paterfamilias. It was a procedure in which the women and the slaves, the people who did the work, were left out. The cattle and the soil were left out. The religion and the wisdom of the elders that made the paterfamilias a tribal chief with fiduciary duties to his tribe and to future generations were left out.
The evolution of the global economy can be thought of as a series of exclusions and simplifications, terminating in what Vandana Shiva calls a monoculture of the mind. (Shiva 1993) Transformation can be thought of as bringing in the excluded; filling in the details, enriching our lives with the caring human relationships omitted by what Karl Polanyi called the “starkly utopian” self-regulating market. The jus gentium, the historical source of our modern civil and commercial codes, specifically omitted kinship ties, religious bonds, and ethnic customs. It omitted the cultural complications that interfered with Empire-wide trade, at the cost of disregarding survival strategies that met people’s basic needs. This might not have been decisive if local communities around the globe had remained intact, engaging in trade only occasionally and peripherally. But that was not to be; in the early modern period (approximately 1400 to 1800) long-distance trade triggered processes that ended up dissolving the community bonds that had organized material life and made it viable. (Braudel 1981-1984)
Our task today is to reconstruct the cultural framework of material life. The mortgage crisis is a case in point. As homeowners lose their homes to foreclosure, the houses themselves remain standing. From the point of view of the old paradigm, massive inability to pay debts disables the system. Billions of dollars evaporate from balance sheets. Financial institutions go under and cease to exist. Investors lose confidence. Construction workers lose jobs as it becomes apparent that there are already more houses than can be sold. From a physical point of view, if walls could talk they would say that one family moved out and another family moved in. The one that fell behind in its mortgage payments moved out; the one that bought the house when the bank auctioned it off moved in. Rising prices, declining employment, strange weather, epidemics of violence, and fuel shortages add to confusion, disorientation, and discouragement. But all the elements of a satisfactory material life are still here, waiting for us to put them together in a functional pattern. Our task is to reconstruct culture to make the world work for people; in terms of the title of one of Dr. King’s books, it is to stave off chaos and build community.
Much can be learned from an earlier and smaller incident involving the mortgages securing loans against two deteriorating Washington DC apartment buildings, the Mozart and the Ritz. They were infested by drug dealers and other denizens whose ways of making a living were illegal and unhealthy. Since the owners had difficulty collecting enough rent to stay current on mortgage payments, they sought to unload the premises at a price that was low compared to normal values of Washington DC real estate but still a hefty sum for a small church to pay. Nonetheless, in 1972 a small church group did buy the buildings, first putting down a nonrefundable down payment as an act of faith, and later raising enough money to assume new mortgages and free the former owners from the old ones. I do not know the details of this particular transaction, but I do know that in transactions of this kind the owners of non-performing apartment buildings are lucky to find a non-profit who will take them off their hands. If a building goes to foreclosure, its owners are liable to incur an enormous tax bill, because the IRS will regard as income the cancellation of the mortgage debt that they will no longer be making monthly payments on.
The church (Church of the Savior, Gordon and Mary Cosby pastors) (O’Connor 1975) turned the buildings around. Secretaries from DC’s cavernous office buildings flocked to the Ritz and Mozart after their regular 9 to 5 work shifts, contributing to more than 50,000 hours of volunteer labor needed to correct more than 900 building code violations. The residents got involved, got religion, and got rid of the drug dealers. The Mozart and the Ritz became a model for others, the beginning of a movement that is now providing good affordable housing in American cities. (www.enterprisecommunity.org) They became a relevant beacon in a nation where there are so many distressed buildings, and where so many confused people are looking for concrete ways to come together to make the world work again.
The movement that began at the Mozart and Ritz demonstrates that a basic human need, housing, can perfectly well be met by a nonprofit agency. As an experienced thrift shop customer I can testify that another basic human need, clothing, can also be met by nonprofits. The thrift shops are easy on the environment because they recycle existing clothes instead of manufacturing new ones.
Indeed, if I were hungry and cold on the streets of an American city, hoping against hope that I would be able to spend the next night indoors, I would not expect any of my needs to be met by a for-profit organization. I would expect better luck at City Hall, where at least they would give me a form to fill out; but if, as may happen, the public sector of the United States economy –such as it is, or such as it may become under more enlightened administrations—is no longer able to fund entitlements, and has long since become unable to bail out big business, because it can no longer continue borrowing money due to its own insolvency, then I would have no option left but to go where I would usually go anyway. I would stand in line at the door of the Salvation Army.
Nonprofit provision of basic needs, including the basic needs to feel cared for and to be treated with respect as a person, is not just my theory about how to meet needs not met by the dominant paradigm. It is the private sector component of the existing social safety net, as it has grown out of the experience and the generosity of many people who have for many decades been on the ground building it. Both it and many levels of public sector provision, and many innovative combinations, can be expected to rise as the curtain falls on the neoliberal regime of accumulation. Neither the private nor the public alternative to the profit model is limited to distribution; both actually produce goods and services, as the Goodwill workshops actually produce furniture starting with broken old furniture, and as the Municipal Power and Light companies actually produce electricity.
Transformation by the renewal of our minds is a matter of attending to and responding to needs. It is patiently trying one route after another, and combining one route with another, not ceasing to serve until there is no tear left undried, or we are called home, whichever comes first.
In closing, I would like to explain briefly why during this extended and wide-ranging discussion, the problem of inflation, which tipped the balance against social democracy and in favor of neoliberalism in 1980, has gradually become a non-problem. It is because we have changed paradigms. The point of the “Keynesian” (I put the word in quotes because it is not clear that the “Keynesian” policies were what Keynes himself would have advised had he spoken from the grave) policies of the social democrats (today revived in the desperation of yesterday’s anti-Keynesians to come up with a way to get the economy moving again now that it has ground to a halt again in spite of low wages, in spite of global markets, and in spite of a huge military machine deployed to defend it) was to put more money in the hands of consumers so they would buy. More money in the hands of consumers meant more sales, which meant more profits, which meant more investment, which meant more employment. The downside was that it also meant inflation. But as we gradually wean ourselves away from addiction to capital accumulation as the drug we cannot live without, we find that we do not need inflationary policies to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless, and heal the sick. We can get the work of caring for our own and each other’s needs done in a variety of complementary ways, partly but not entirely through private business in the for-profit sector, without debasing the currency. Social programs will be paid for by taxing the people and corporations that have money, since we will no longer fear capital flight.
Complete List of all Sections: Can the United States be Transformed? Hopeful Answers from Barack Obama and Riane Eisler:
Part One
http://howardrichards.org/peace/content/view/103/1/
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