Lifting the Veil

Today’s troubling movement towards authoritarianism and militarism in today’s America has lifted the veil from our thinking that the structures and legislation of democracy were enduring. Regardless of who was in charge. We felt secure in our support for decades of social security, affirmative action, affordable health care, fair elections, and easing the burden of poverty. We have put in place efforts at economic equity through programs such as Community Benefit agreements, Opportunity Zones, and the Community Reinvestment Act. We now see how fragile they are. Perhaps the frailty was here all along and we found comfort in not looking too closely. This is the veil that is lifted, uncovering the reality that now underlies what were once genuine intentions to serve the common good.

It is useful to give language to the underlying narrative that is placing our communal well-being so at risk. This might offer alternatives to the conversations we are now flooded with about left or right, red or blue, inflation rising or falling, how much violence here and abroad, jobs up or down, their elected officials or ours. These plus social media and more are dramatic, comprise the news, but offer little insight other than to try harder and be more clever at what we are doing now.

When I am in moments of desperation, I return to quotes that keep echoing in my mind.* They stretch over decades, so they give clues to deeper patterns and help set aside the noise of today. Becoming clear about the context or narrative, if seen without judgment, offers a crack of light in the wall. It is a whisper offering more freedom and choice as to where our attention more usefully might belong.

Exodus and Departure

Walter Brueggemann is an Old Testament scholar who brings ancient stories into today’s world. In one text, he delves into the Exodus and the empire of Pharaoh.

Pharaoh has nightmares about cows feeding on each other. He calls on Joseph, an uncredentialed Israelite, to interpret the dream and to decode what the empire cannot discern. Joseph immediately grasps the point.

The nightmare is about scarcity. The one with everything dreams of deficiency. Pharaoh receives the interpretation of his nightmare and sets about to make imperial policy. The royal policy is to create a food monopoly. In that ancient world as in any contemporary world, food is a weapon and a tool of control.

Then Brueggemann translates the meaning for our world today.

“The kingdom of scarcity and its propelling ideology of anxiety are alive and well and aggressive among us. In the United States it takes the form of a national security state in which we are to be engaged in perpetual war in order to impose our will upon others, in order to claim the resources and develop the markets to our advantage. We are not inclined or even able to speak of the national security state frontally.

Our immediate experience of the kingdom of scarcity is our entitled consumerism in which there is always hope for more, in which we imagine that something more will make us more comfortable, safer, and happier.

The continuing force of empire specializes in denial that is propelled by euphemisms that misdescribe and by hopes for conforming despair that have no energy for dissent and alternative. The force of empire:

• counts loss as simply the cost of doing business

• wants grief to be voiced quietly and be over with––or not at all

• dismisses hope as fantasy

• gives assurances of security and well-being that ring false

• offers totalism that allows no contestation and

• imagines no departure because we are already there.

There is an alternative to this kingdom of scarcity––the practice of neighborhood. It is a covenantal commitment to the common good. Such an alternative is not an easy one, because the kingdom of scarcity is totalizing in its claim. The alternative requires a departure from that system that the Bible terms “exodus.” In that ancient narrative the Israelites did not want to go, and once they had gone, they wished to resubmit to Pharaoh. Departure is demanding, sustained work. It requires imagination that has dimensions of the psychological, the economic, and the liturgical.

The art of departure, Brueggemann says, sets us on a journey from scarcity to abundance to neighborhood that we must travel to be “maximally human.”

The journey must be taken again and again, lest we submit to the kingdom of scarcity, join the rat race, and imagine that living in a national security state is a normal environment for humanness. Such captivity of the human spirit must be again and again challenged. It is that captivity that makes it possible:

• to commit aggressive brutalizing war in the name of democratic freedom;

• to tolerate acute poverty in an economy of affluence, most especially without an adequate health-care policy;

• to sustain policies of abuse of the environment, all in the name of nurturing the economy.

Privatizing the Land

In 1600’s enclosure began. Aristocracy fenced in land with dense plantings. Raising sheep was more profitable than communal land. Citizens were forced to move to the city. The idea of laborer and wage was invented.

Historian and activist Rebecca Solint describes how George Orwell, author of 1984, looked at images of assembly lines and workers surrounded by machinery and came to a striking realization:

That belief in science and technology as a means to dominate the natural world and the misplaced confidence that those in charge would deploy those forces wisely were crucial to modernism.

She then traces the evolution of modernism through history to the present day.

The process of enclosing the commons began in the Middle Ages in England but peaked between 1750 and 1850 with a series of parliamentary enclosure acts. These acts gave to powerful individuals land that had long been collectively farmed, grazed, and administered, erasing villages and villagers and their self-determination and prosperity.

Then as now, she observes, in authoritarian societies,

False allegations were an easy means of revenge; the regime of lies encouraged and rewarded liars. This and constant surveillance made people fearful to communicate their real thoughts, hopes and experiences to others. This includes histories of violating their citizen’s right to privacy and concealing illicit and immoral government acts.

As a countermeasure, she suggests a form of action: “doing nothing.”

Those obsessed with productivity and in justice often disparage doing nothing, though by doing nothing we usually mean a lot of subtle actions and observations and cultivation of relationships that are doing many kinds of something. It’s a doing something whose value and results are not so easily quantified or commodified. And you could even argue that any or every evasion of quantifiability and commodifiability is a victory against assembly lines, authorities, and oversimplifications.

Orwell saw clearly the nature and impact of the British empire he was a part of. He captured it in fiction in 1949 in his book 1984. When I first read it, it seemed like a dark version of our world. Now it seems to be a prophetic version of what has come to be.

Military and Church Domination

John Mohawk is an indigenous leader and professor of philosophy who speaks of the impact of modernism. He summarized his thoughts in a lecture at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics.

As I studied Greek philosophy, I asked myself, who were these Greeks, who gave us what we think of as the foundation of our thought, of our culture, and gave us our ideas about nature and society? I soon made a distinction between what the Greeks said and what they did. My philosophy professor had described a group of men sitting under a tree philosophizing. But what were the Greeks actually doing? They were the creators of the most astonishing military organization in the world, building on centuries, even millennia, of military experience.

Mohawk turns to the role of the church in its belief that indigenous wisdom and its connection to the earth was a threat.

As the church grew in political importance, it began a “campaign against magic” during the three hundred years starting about 1450. Individuals who had a spiritual relationship with plants or animals were considered to be practicing magic. In the 1600’s it was believed that these people had renounced Christ and were in league with the devil, who promised them the powers over nature in return, and they then used these powers against their enemies. The war on witches and magic was a psychological war on nature. It wasn’t waged by individuals but by the major institutions in Western culture. They were not only waging war on nature, they were also cracking eggs along the way. People accused of being witches were frequently selected because they had property that was desired by local authorities, so quite often doing away with the witches proved profitable for the coffers of both town and Church.

Finally, Mohawk attends to the cost of industrialization. He also notes the privatization of public lands.

When the commons were enclosed––in effect privatized––the commoners were deprived of their guaranteed means of subsistence. They were thus thrown into the labor market to find money for water, food, clothing, and shelter. Natural disasters were no longer the main source of need––lack of money became the main source. And this is the origin of modern needs.

Amartya Sen became famous for showing that the countries that experienced some of the worst famines of the 20th century were exporting food while their people were dying of hunger. Strip mines, palm oil plantations, and even large-scale shopping centers are all modern forms of the enclosure of the commons.

Then he sums up the point.

The economic way of thinking is now so immersed in common sense that it is very difficult to perceive that the premise of scarcity is socially manufactured, not naturally pre-existing.

Colonization in the Name of Development

Gustavo Esteva was a Mexican activist, a self-styled “deprofessionalized intellectual.” And Zapatista. He speaks of the masquerade of development pretending to be a form of generosity.

Truman in 1949: We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.

Underdevelopment began on 20 January 1949. On that same day, two billion people became underdeveloped. From that time on, they ceased being what they were, in all their diversity, and were transmogrified into an inverted mirror of others’ reality: a mirror that belittles them and sends them off to the end of the queue.

Development goes on.

The Commodifying Effect of Technology and the Market

The title of Robert Inchausti’s book The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People tells it all. His books speak to reclaiming our humanity in the midst of the narrative around us.

If there is little intrinsic worth to anything outside its function within an ever-changing market, and if the market itself is built upon the rejection of all humanist assumptions and moral restraints, then everything becomes a commodity, and nothing is sacred.

Deitrich Bonhoeffer, convinced that Nazism was no simple historical anomaly, but a sign of the times, tried to comprehend how otherwise seemingly intelligent and sane people could fall under its sway. He decided that it was a sociological phenomenon––a species of folly––the psychological product of the modernization of information technologies. It’s not that the human intellectual capacities have been diminished, the sheer pervasiveness of collective opinion is so vast that individuals simply give up trying to assess things for themselves––after all, everybody already knows what’s happening already, don’t they? Why struggle to invent a map of the world when the media glove-compartment offers you thousands of maps ready-made?

"This lack of critical consciousness made them easy prey to ideologies that fed their parochial self-interests and self-aggrandization. Religion was to be their predictable opiate, and fascism their grand temptation.

The Veil of Economic Development and Freedom

Scotty Jones is a social innovator in Long Beach, California. He explained in a text to me the function of the veil. It does three things:

• Obscures what is really happening

• Legitimizes what would otherwise be questioned

• Protects those behind it from scrutiny

Behind the veil of progress, freedom, and safety are concentrated wealth, central control, and colonization. As in the time of Pharaoh, the fear of scarcity and the need for dominance have become public policy. The habits of the market economy, the rejection of any regulation, and the predilection for monopoly and global colonization are sold with the promises of progress and financial equality. These imperial practices have now become powerfully visible in the political arena of the United States. It is not a shift in type or design, simply a shift in venue.

The structures which were designed for democracy and care for our common good are not working. The challenge does not simply concern the people we elect to represent us or what legislation gets enacted. Something more is required.

Our attention needs to broaden to include what the quotes here call for.

Depart the scarcity mentality and attraction to modern Pharaohs. Brueggemann.

Reclaim local community control of our economy and the land. Orwell

Reimagine a church that restores our humanity and ends its support of centralized power. Mohawk

Terminate our participation in the myth of development and progress. Esteva

Stop romanticizing technology. And science. Restore our local memory and culture. Inchausti

One step we can take is to decide that the neighborhood is a vital center for our attention and effort. For this to occur we need to decide who will bring this about. Our habit is to focus our attention on the modern Pharaohs: the CEO, the Bishop or Priest, the Developer, the Elected Official, the Billionaire, the Healer, the Celebrity.

We project onto them the capacity to make transformation possible, which keeps us in the illusion that if we pressure them or replace them, something important will change. They may have the power to stop the violence, but they are not in a position to serve the common good. One reason we are drawn to projecting power and grace on these iconic figures is that it is a comforting diversion from our own agency and accountability. I once asked Brueggemann why it took four hundred years for the Israelites to leave Pharaoh. He said they could not imagine being free.

The Strategy of Doing What Seems Like Nothing

We can stop treating the Bishop, the Billionaire, the God of AI, the Elected Official as if they are the center of society. The most direct action we can take is to put our attention elsewhere. For example, on all that is local. All that is so visible on a large scale is also occurring nearby. The local councils, planning commissions, engagement programs are equally colonial.

Departure is constantly occurring in our neighborhoods but it is just barely visible. In the search for convenience and the professional answer, the neighborhood has become a modern wilderness. There are creative and gift economies all around us. They are not based on scarcity, or control, but on hospitality, reciprocal generosity, and a local economy.

The starting point of any transformation begins with questioning what we have treated as normal, inevitable, in the nature of progress and evolution. In departing this way of thinking, we will still actively participate in the structures of democracy. It is necessary for damage control. After the protest, the manifesto, and the vote, we decide to place our attention on where real democracy resides. What we can produce together, here. Reclaim what we have outsourced to the modern lifestyle. This is inconvenient and slow and uncertain. All seem like doing nothing: central features of creating what matters most.

* The sources of the quotes are: Brueggemann, Journey to the Common Good; Solint, Orwell’s Roses; Mohawk, “How the Conquest of Indigenous Peoples Parallels the Conquest of Nature,” Schumacher Lecture, October 1997; Esteva, “The Birth of Development and Underdevelopment,” in Esteva, Babones, and Babcicky, The Future of Development: A Radical Manifesto; Inchausti, The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People.

Photo by Derek Lee on Unsplash