SURPLUS

The power of language is clear in the expression “free market.” The market does many good things, but it does not set us free. The bars of market confinement are constructed of surplus. In the Old Testament wilderness, it was food that was not eaten in the day. Value it too much, save it for another day, and it spoiled. Now we call it profit. It is now compound interest. Surplus in the form of profit has become the sole criterion of value. It has become the point—even if nothing is produced in the process.

We live in a time when a great deal of money comes from making money on money. Debt penalties. Derivatives, carrying capacities, and externalities. What was once called usury is now called good business. It’s not just banks making money on money. GE at one point earned more money from financing aircraft engines than making them. Many businesses make more money on financing the customer purchase than on the product itself. That is why they give a discount if you open a credit card. Shipping and handling fees are a price increase if you buy online. Buy a computer, and then, at the register, you are urged to purchase a warranty. Guarantees that once came with a product now must be purchased separately as a clever form of price increase. Companies make money on rebates because, if they are complicated enough, 80 percent of customers won’t file them. When it comes to our own money we are sold on the idea of interest, annuities, mutual funds, because you have to put your money to work. Financial advisors hate savings. You tell them you don’t need any more money. They say you are a fool. No matter how much you have, it is not enough.

Andrew Carnegie sent out one of his people to find out how much money he had. The guy came back in two months and said, “I can’t answer your question. There is no way. You have so much money there is no way you can capture and measure it all.” And then Carnegie said he wanted to give most of it away. He couldn’t do that either. He was vexed by compound interest. Warren Buffet has the same problem.

In Joshua Chapter 7, when Israel suffers a great military defeat, Joshua does an investigation and traces it down to the offending tribe and the offending guy. Joshua discovered that they lost because this guy Achan took something from the common good to add to his private collection. Achan says, “I saw the gold and silver and it was so shiny that I wanted it”; the narrative uses the word “covet” and refers to the Tenth Commandment. The desire for more called Achan to violate the common good for his own sake. That’s today’s argument for addiction: It was so shiny. It’s also an argument for privatization.

The love of profit is central to the business perspective. The system keeps telling us that we have to have it. It explains why at the local Rotary Club meeting, the first thing they do is report on the stock market results for the day. “Welcome. We need to get started. The market was up seven points today. Now let’s get on with the meeting.” The Dow Jones Industrial Average has become a sacrament of modern times. It comes before the meal, goes together with breaking bread. It is the prayer and benediction.

That’s how love of surplus becomes a market liturgy. With sacraments like the DJIA, GNP/GDP, inflation rate, and economic growth rate, free market economics is raised to a spiritual practice. That discipline is what is under re-construction when we talk about the common good or a neighborly economy, especially if we talk of economic justice and equity and wealth redistribution, most commonly in the discussion of taxes and debt forgiveness.

The right use of wealth is an emotional and spiritual question. Most wealthy people are extremely generous, but the deeper generosity is willing to call into question who controls the capacities of production and wealth creation.

SPEED AND CONVENIENCE

The free market consumer ideology is not just about money and surplus. It also has a romantic relationship with speed and convenience, the two core promises of technology. Technology and money are of the same nature: They make the case for the love of predictability, speed, and disruption. We think we control money, but it controls us. We think we control technology, but it defines us. It is a modern form of magic. So we accept the value of technology as self-evident. It represents unquestionable progress. But technology’s place in our lives is a social construction, an artifact of the free market consumer ideology, not a given. And if it is a construction, then it can be constructed differently.

The Luddites understood that the machine was a challenge to a way of life and community. It was a fundamental change. It was the first manufacturing technology in human history that was independent of nature, geography, season, weather, sun, wind, human or animal power; it allowed humans for the first time to have an instant and unfailing source of production at their command.

The Luddite argument was that machinery destroyed community and the order of social relationships. The movement was against automation and, in an early form, globalization. The market’s demand was to make something for another place and to specialize only in what are you are best at—just do that and purchase the rest. The machine-driven looms of Scotland created the consumer.

The idea that somehow you can live outside technological society is an illusion because its discipline is total. To be technologically illiterate is to place yourself outside the basic talk of everyday discourse. Techno-literacy becomes another Mother Tongue.

THE SALE OF CONVENIENCE

Convenience is the major selling proposition for technology. Our technology-supported lives have now become so convenient that we experience the practices of neighborliness as being greatly inconvenient. Walking. Handwriting. Borrowing sugar. Convenience is what the market sells. It is a surcharge added to the cost of community. The market’s promised convenience and speed turn out to have a hidden cost.

The hidden cost of technology is an un-measured burden. What to do if my icemaker doesn’t make ice or my automatic teakettle doesn’t work? What if the computer goes down or is infected? In our romance with speed and convenience, the disruptions in our lives are masked. Plus, just because something is amazing, and useful and fast and cheap, doesn’t mean it improves the quality of our lives or relationships with one another. Speed and convenience don’t build neighborliness.

Technology has eradicated mystery and time. We need technology, but technology is not an adequate instrument for the maintenance of social life. When technology tries to operate as an end in itself, it magnifies its rightful place. To serve us well, technology has to be situated in some other explanatory narrative; in our case, it belongs as one small and useful piece of neighborliness and covenant.

CONVENIENCE DISPLACES CAPACITY

Convenience sells so well that we are no longer producers. At best we are hobbyists or do a little home repair. John’s colleague Stan Hallet was raised on a farm in North Dakota. When Stan saw something that he liked, he would go home and make it. And he could fix anything. If something went wrong, he just enjoyed fixing it himself. All this came from the fact that he had lived in a world where he had to be a productive person on the farm. Which is why farmers traditionally specialize in collecting baling wire. You can fix anything with baling wire. It is the agrarian duct tape.

As we watch someone like Stan fix things around the house, we do not think what great skill he has; we think we could hire somebody to do that. What the free market consumer ideology has taken away from the neighborhood is the need and skill to be productive. This has been exchanged for all kinds of specialized activity, no matter what the system. There are specialists in medicine, transportation, child care, gardening, safety, even the Bible.

In most any group of people, if you go around the room and ask, “What can you do?” no one talks about being able to make something. They give mostly service and relational answers. I can love people. I can pray. I have professional skills. We have been deskilled in what it takes to produce community. Our incapacity is like being disembodied. It makes us useless. This incapacity is epitomized in our teenagers. The teen years are that period in people’s lives when they are told that they are useless, except for performing in school. We think the job of teenagers is to go to school and get good grades. And if they don’t, they have failed at an early age. No kindness in this.

Neighborliness calls for reclaiming neighborhood community skill across whole array of possibilities. This is what E.F. Schumacher was talking about when he wrote Small Is Beautiful (1975). The Schumacher Institute was at the beginning asking what were tools that people could make locally and use locally that will solve all kinds of problems that we are paying big systems to fix. The focus was on tools for local production. This made the case for appropriate technology, the tools that build us.

The Amish are another example. The Amish test any invention against its impact upon their community. There’s a famous story about the guy who was surprised to see an Amish farmer using a motorized threshing machine. He stopped to ask the farmer about it and said, “I thought that the Amish didn’t believe in machines. That you never would go in a car, that you wouldn’t thresh your wheat with this machine with a motor in it.” And the farmer said, “We test all the machines. This threshing machine helps us be productive here, but the car separates us.” It’s a great insight. The Amish are looking at technology consciously. In deciding whether to allow technology, the test is: What does it do to our covenant?

DIGITAL SOLUTIONS

Technology is always expanding its ownership of the community space. Nextdoor.com is an Internet product to connect neighbors. It is constructed to be a vehicle for connection and generosity. When people need something—paint, someone to clean house, a way to recycle an unneeded mattress—they post it and find a supplier or a taker. Twenty-five percent of nextdoor.com is a home-based flea market. Another twenty percent promises safety. You use it to tell your neighbors about crime in the area.

In one sense this technology is an invitation to become engaged. Every day in any neighborhood you get thirty or so nextdoor.com messages. Every day they welcome five new members. Nextdoor.com is simulating the welcoming of community. Its limitation is that currently it isn’t collectivizing groups in the neighborhood. They are working on this; the face-to-face relationship is the next step they are after. The question is: How do you move to that?

We work with a couple of very creative college students who are trying to do something with that precise intention: to use the Internet to get people face-to-face in service or creating something. They tried it rather intensively in several communities, and by and large it didn’t work. The technology works to bring people together socially, commercially, and to invest, but has not yet built the productive capacity of a neighborhood.

MONEY AND THE MACHINE

Enclosure got people off the land, and the advent of the machine in the late 1700s accelerated their movement to the city. Mechanization required cheap labor and production control. Factories needed workers, and managers. In The Meaning of the City, sociologist Jacques Ellul (1970) offers the idea that the city was created because of Cain’s losing covenant with God and being punished by being allowed to live. Cain expected God to strike him dead because he had killed his brother, but God said, “No. I will mark you, but you are going to live.” Cain didn’t know how to cope with being alive and out of covenant with God. This created the need to huddle with others in order to manage their alienation from God, so Cain organized the first city, Nimrah.

Urbanization and the loss of community can be thought of as partly economic, partly a path to sustain empire, and partly the result of losing our connection with God and each other. In Scotland, if you were exiled, thrown out, or somehow detached from your clan, you would be called a “broken person.” Broken people are people without community, which is really a death sentence. In today’s terms, they are the casualties of empire and industrialization.

This is not an argument against urban life, in any sense. The city does bring us closer to each other. We do need to see clearly, though, that the large worldwide migration to the city, while driven by a desire for a better life, has the side-effect of separating people from their own culture, habits, memories, and ritual ways of living a life. Part of the promise of restoring neighborhoods is to create local culture, with memory and affection, to replace what was left behind.

WISHING FOR SAFETY, BELIEVING IN GROWTH

Everybody with some sense knows that what they are doing isn’t satisfying. For the last thirty years everybody in a leadership position, in every institution, has called for change. A common practice to initiate reform is to see what other systems are doing: It’s called benchmarking. You copy what others do and call it innovation. The market and system language for this whole process is change management. The benchmark is based on imitation; it is someone else’s standard. It gives hope where people are seeking methodology, but it is this way of seeking methodology that keeps anything fundamental from changing.

Practices like benchmarking do put the agenda of change on the table though. Unfortunately, no matter how serious we are, we immediately discover that the change is costly, risky, and not what we had in mind. In the Hebrew Bible, as soon as the Israelites took two steps into the wilderness, they were in freefall. They wanted to go back. They remembered the steady food supply. We don’t want to depart that far from our Egypt. “Egypt” is predictable. Secure. We hold the belief that predictability and control make us safe.

However, we are now at the place where the experience of more and more people is that the institutional empire’s protection is disappearing. The so-called well-being and safety that the system provides are now reaching their limits. We see limits to the planet, to jobs, to our health, to our children. They come in the language of student debt, income inequality, lower than expected health measures, pockets of deep unemployment, concern for the environment, balance of payments, stalemated politicians, and wars without end. It’s clear that the idea—supported by all of our elected officials, business and activist leaders, and the media—is to try to get back on the market and system track. The answer is growth. Growth, growth, and more growth.

In other words, we think that the force that took us to the limit is the solution. That what we need is more of a consumption-driven economy. Every public narrative is on that track, the track that led to the cliff. The free market consumer ideology has so captured our discourse that anybody who speaks of any other approach sounds like a nut. Especially in elected office.

Finding the right politicians, regardless of their beliefs, will make a difference, but only in limited ways. We will find the right politicians as soon as we have reclaimed our own place in the wilderness. No need to worry about the politicians at this moment, because they are a product of our consciousness. We are creating them.

CLASS BY DESIGN

One assumption in the free market narrative is that an underclass is inevitable. That it is in the nature of low-labor-cost capitalism and competition. What is the cost of an underclass? Who is to say there should be no underclass?

Theologically, the underclass is against God’s will. It also makes society unworkable for the vast majority. One manifestation of that un-workablility is violence. The prophets, particularly Amos and Jeremiah, talk about the violence that is perpetrated against the vulnerable. It’s a class war conducted from above. Class war is always conducted from above, but it’s the people from above who immediately cry war if you point out any social differentiations.

This claiming from above that economic justice is class warfare trumps friendship and reason. After we spoke about these issues once in Milwaukee, a good friend, a successful executive, an active and compassionate leader in his company and in the city, said at the end, “You are talking class warfare.” Maybe he was right. It appears that the wealthy characteristically want social differentiations to remain hidden, because if we make them visible, then something has to happen.

The argument goes like this: Lifting up the underclass is costly. The cost is that if they get a piece of the pie, then I get a smaller piece. Even if I have more pie than I can eat, I might get hungry in the middle of the night. But you never have enough in a competitive system. You will never have enough until you have the whole pie. And a pie to spare. Regardless of how full you are or how much you have.

CLASS WARFARE AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH

It is the triad of widows and orphans and immigrants who are the most vulnerable in a patriarchal, market-dominated society. If you are an orphan or a widow, you don’t have a man, with special rights, to defend you, and obviously immigrants don’t have any rights or protector either. So the argument of the Torah, particularly the Book of Deuteronomy, shows up in the Prophets: The community has an obligation to protect these three vulnerable types because they don’t have any other protection.

Alongside the issue of how to treat widows, orphans, and immigrants is the question of prisoners. The United States has the greatest mass incarceration of prisoners in the world. We also have the most private enterprises owning correctional institutions. The three texts related to this are Isaiah 61, Psalm 146, and Matthew 25. All are about reaching out to prisoners.

If we believe that economic provision must be made for these vulnerable people, the economy must be subordinated to the viability of society. The Torah is concerned that these people should not become a permanent underclass economically. And therefore you have the Law of Release, the provisions for welfare, and the Jubilee Year to keep them as viable participants in the economy.

It’s a Commandment in Deuteronomy 15 that says every seven years people have to be released from debt. The first verse just says people have to be released, but the rest of the law says that poor people have to be released from debt. This is a text that says you will always have the poor with you.

The class warfare discussion—the discussion of “Why don’t the poor work harder?”—is a mild collision between our free market narrative and the Torah. The consumer culture has marginalized the widows, orphans, and immigrants. What stands out is every time you teach about the cancellation of debts for poor people, someone raises a hand and says, “There is no evidence that they really ever did that.” That’s the only text in the Bible that holds an imperial danger: the text that speaks about subordinating the economy to the common good.