What Is To Be Done?
by Rev. Colin Bossen, November 30, 2008
The prophetic function of religion is to provide alternatives to society's dominant orthodoxies. Not all religious communities are prophetic. Many support the status quo. The prophetic function of religion challenges communities such as ours to transcend an inward looking spiritual life and push both our members and the wider society to build a better world. During the present economic crisis the orthodoxy that we are called to challenge is that of the Market as God. That orthodoxy is responsible for much of the current economic turmoil.
During the internet bubble of the late nineties Harvard Cox, a professor at the Harvard Divinity School, penned an article for the Atlantic Monthly entitled "The Market As God: Living in the New Dispensation." In that essay he describes how many people in the United States have replaced the monotheistic God of the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament with the Market. Cox argued that followers of the Market as God believe that theirs is the one true faith as feverishly as any religious polemist of old. He writes, "The Market is becoming more like the Yahweh of the Old Testament--not just one superior deity contending with others but the Supreme Deity, the only true God, whose reign must now be universally accepted and who allows for no rivals."
Cox's essay reminds me of the story of the golden calf, found in the book of Exodus in the Hebrew Bible. Exodus details the tribe of Israel's escape from enslavement in Egypt and a portion of their wanderings in the wilderness as their God prepares them to conquer and occupy what is to be their new homeland. During their wanderings the tribe spends a good deal of time camped out at the base of Mount Sinai while their leader, Moses, communes with their God. While Moses is up on top of the mountain hammering out a pact between his God and his tribe the people beneath begin to grow restless.
Eventually they get sick of waiting for Moses to come down from the mountain. They ask Aaron, Moses's second-in-command, to build them another God. They say to Aaron "Come, make us a god who shall go before us, for that man Moses, who brought us from the land of Egypt--we do not know what has happened to him." So, Aaron tells them to give him all of their gold so he can melt it into a golden calf to worship. They do that. Pretty soon everybody is dancing around the idol, feasting and singing and generally having a great time.
Meanwhile up on the mountain the tribe's God tells Moses that he better get back because the tribe is getting unruly. Moses comes down from the mountain to confront his people. He brings with him two tablets that represent the tribe's pact with their deity. The pact is an agreement that if the people do what their God wants then their God will take care of them.
When Moses gets to the bottom of the mountain he sees the whole tribe dancing, praying and feasting around the golden calf. He becomes so enraged that he smashes the tablet containing the pact. Then he smashes the golden calf.
One of the provisions of the pact was that the people would only worship the tribe's God. When they worshipped the golden calf they violated the pact. In order to make it valid again Moses has to make sure that no one will continue to worship the calf.
Moses gathers up his most loyal followers. He arms them. Together they kill all of the members of the tribe who still want to worship the golden calf. The supremacy of the God of the tribe is thus ensured. From that day forth the members of the tribe know who they are supposed to worship.
This story is used to explain how the tribe of Israel became monotheists. They began to believe in only one God because the leaders of their community would not tolerate the presence of other gods. To be a member of the community one had to worship the tribal God. There could not be two gods at the same time. Only the tribal God could have a relationship with the tribe. All other gods must be destroyed and their followers killed.
The monotheism of Moses is inflicted upon the members of his tribe with violence. Anyone who deviates from the proscribed norm is a taint who must be removed. That removal can best be effected with the shedding of blood.
This story sets up one of the reigning paradigms in the contemporary world of politics and economics. There can be only one God at a time. If the Market as God is to reign then all of those who deviate from that God are to be cast out, ignored and in some cases murdered. Our community can be prophetic by saying that there is room for more than one god at a time. The market can be a god but it cannot be the only one. If the Market is allowed to reign supreme and unfettered then economic crisises like the one we are currently experiencing will become more common and dramatic.
To the uninitiated the reasons for the current financial crisis are difficult to comprehend. Reading the business pages one can quickly become overwhelmed with phrases like credit default swaps, bundled mortgages, sub-prime loans, toxic assets and liquidity crisis. At its root, however, the real problem is that the Market is held to be God. A steady stream of deregulation has allowed it to gain an increasing amount of power over human life and, at the same time, to become less stable. As Cox describes in his essay, we have come to a point where many consider the market to be "omnipotent (possessing all power), omniscient (having all knowledge), and omnipresent (existing everywhere)." Cox writes, "Since the earliest stages of human history...there have been...markets. But the Market was never God, because there were other centers of value and meaning, other 'gods.' The Market operated within a plethora of other institutions that restrained it." Over the past hundred years the other gods have been slain one-by-one until now the Market reigns supreme. There is little to check it when it swings wildly. It is the ultimate expression of human value. Things that cannot be quantified in Market's terms do not exist.
In October I witnessed just how pervasive the worship of the Market has become. I was at a ministerial retreat while Congress was considering the bailout proposal for the financial industry. One of my colleague's spent much of the retreat running around in a sort of panic. Every few hours she would give anyone who cared to listen an update on the debate in Congress and the stock market's reaction it. It was clear that she did not want the God she worshipped to fail. Throughout the week the most important thing that happened was what took place in the stock market. Her perception of it superseded her relationship with her religious community. The Market was the God that controlled her destiny.
The Market has not always been God. As Cox points out it is "only in the past two centuries [that] The Market has risen...to become today's First Cause." The Market has grown stronger over the last thirty years. The forces that have restrained it have been assaulted and dissolved.
Many of these forces were put in place as part of the New Deal during the Great Depression. The Great Depression had been brought about by a largely unregulated financial market. The New Deal contained within it many provisions to reduce the Market to the stature of one of a pantheon, rather than the Supreme Deity. Progressive labor laws, financial regulations and an acknowledged role for the state in both economic planning and employment held the Market partially in check.
This balance did not last long. In the late nineteen forties and early fifties the United States government used the threat of the Soviet Union as an excuse to tame labor unions and radical movements, two traditional checks on the Market. In the early eighties President Ronald Reagan demonstrated that the government was on the side of the Market in his response to a strike by the air traffic controllers union. He said union members had "forfeited their jobs" by striking and then fired over 11,000 of them. Reagan's action broke the union. He believed that unions formed an unnecessary restraint on the free market. By breaking the union he was demonstrating that under his watch any forces that held the Market in check would weakened. Companies were to be given an almost free hand in dealing with labor. The needs of shareholders and stockbrokers, the clergy of the Market, were placed above the needs of the workers. The Market would grow larger if workers received less.
During the Clinton Presidency other restraints on the market were removed. Free trade agreements lowered trade barriers that protected local businesses and small farmers from corporate monopolies. Other laws were passed that allowed for easier mobility of capital. The financial industry was deregulated and restraints on the Market that had been put in place during the Great Depression were removed. It was reasoned that such an environment would allow the Market to best flourish.
We now live in a world where the Market is viewed as God. It is omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient. As Cox explains in his essay, the Market is omnipotent in its "capacity to define what is real." The Market can take "Things that have been held sacred [and] transmute [them] into interchangeable items for sale." Water, land and air have all become commodities under the reign of the Market.
The Market is omniscient in that, as Cox writes, "we are taught, [it] is able to determine what human needs are, what copper and capital should cost, how much barbers and CEOs should be paid, and how much jet planes, running shoes, and hysterectomies should sell for." Through the oracles of Wall Street and the finance media on any given day we can learn the mood of the market. It might swing from 'nervous' to 'relieved' within the span of hours. As Cox describes it "On the basis of this revelation awed adepts make critical decisions about whether to buy or sell."
The Market is omnipresent. The Market can be found everywhere and in everything. People who are members churches earn social capital in exchange for their presence and pledges. Even the sacred has been reduced to a financial transaction.
The current economic crisis has been brought on by a wrathful God. The Market as God is upset because a collapsing housing market has made it difficult for high corporate profits to be maintained. Financial bailouts are now necessary to sustain the beast. Without them the economy is in danger of further decline.
In truth, such an economic downturn is part of the natural cycle of capitalism. If we want to live in a world where crisises like the current one we are experiencing are less frequent, less devastating and less pronounced then we must return the market to its place among a pantheon of gods. It must be regulated and restrained. It may be acceptable for the market to be a god but it cannot be the only one. Recent events have demonstrated that if the Market is a monotheistic deity then the consequences will be devastating.
The 19th century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker once said "to move men, it is necessary to know two things--first, What they think, and next, Why they think it." If the Market is to be dethroned as the one and true God then it is necessary to understand both why it is thought to be God and what it means to be thought of as God.
The Market is thought of as God because economics has been presented as a hard science, like physics or chemistry. If the Market is God then its priests are the economists of the Chicago School, a school of economic thought named after the University of Chicago where it was first formulated. Chicago School economists push the view that economics describes forces of human nature inherent in healthy societies. Naomi Klein describes the Chicago School's understanding of the scientific nature of the market in her book "The Shock Doctrine." She writes:
"The core of...[the] Chicago teachings... [is] that economic forces of supply, demand, inflation and unemployment... [are] like the forces of nature, fixed and unchanging...Just as ecosystems self-regulate, keeping themselves in balance, the market, left to its own devices,...[will] create just the right number of products at precisely the right prices, produced by workers at just the right wages to buy those products..."
The study of economics as a science means that the Market is like a force nature. It is something beyond the human grasp to control. We can either act in accordance to its wishes and thrive or struggle against it in vain and distort the natural order. By pretending that market forces are like the forces of nature the world of economics transcend the human realm. They become something, like the all-powerful and all knowing God of old, controls us rather than something that we control.
The Market is thought of as God because those who hold power in our society want it to be thought of that way. As Theodore Parker pointed out, "it is very few men who tell us how to vote, who make all the important laws." The editorial boards of most major newspapers, the economic advisors to both Democratic and Republican Presidents and many influential academics present the view of the Market as God. Such a view clearly benefits the elites whose interests they share. When the Market is God economic inequality rises and the wealthy have more while the rest have less. As Klein describes in her book, "cloaked in the language of math and science, [the Chicago School's]...vision coincided precisely with the interests of large multinationals, which by nature hunger for vast new unregulated markets."
The Market is also thought of God because, like Moses when confronted with the golden calf, its true devotees use violence to enforce their doctrine. The free market has often been developed and enforced through military means. The most famous instance of this enforcement is the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. Allende was a mild socialist who wanted to put some restraints on the Market by expanding social services, strengthening labor laws and nationalizing portions of the economy. Nationalization ensured that the wealth generated by vital natural resources could be used to benefit the whole of the country, rather than just the elites who laid claim to the wealth. The generals who replaced Allende imported Chicago School economists to run their economy. The economists in charge of Chile then proceeded to remove every barrier to the free market. This destabilized the economy. It allowed a small group to make fantastic sums of money while the majority found life much harder. In the wake of the coup and the implementation of free market policies inflation soared and the cost of staples such as bread became prohibitive. The generals helped maintain the new economic order by disappearing and terrorizing trade unionists and other dissenters.
If the Market as God is to be confronted the confrontation must take place at two levels. First, the core doctrine of the Chicago School, the idea that economics is a hard science must be challenged. Second, it must be made clear that in our modern world it is not acceptable to enforce economic doctrine with violence. The time for Moses's method of ensuring doctrinal purity has passed.
Economics is not a hard science. Economics is the branch of philosophy that seeks to answer three fundamental questions about human existence: What is wealth? How is wealth created? How does wealth get distributed? These questions are questions of moral value. Experiments can be devised to try to answer them. The scientific method can be applied to them. In the final analysis how they are answered depends upon what is held to be of ultimate worth.
How someone answers the three core questions of economics depends partially upon their social and cultural location. An environmentalist and a paper mill owner will likely have very different responses when asked what is wealth when looking at a forest. The paper mill owner might reply that the wealth is the paper that can produced by harvesting the trees. The environmentalist might counter that the forest itself is a form of wealth and represents the planet's lungs, a haven for wildlife and a thing of great natural beauty.
Adam Smith and Karl Marx offered very different answers to the question of who creates wealth. Smith believed that wealth was created by capital. Marx famously argued that labor is the producer of all wealth. Members of a labor union might agree with Marx. The Cleveland Council of Commerce almost certainly agrees with Smith. There is a grain of truth in both viewpoints. Without both labor and capital very little wealth would ever be created.
How wealth gets distributed depends upon what one thinks wealth is for and how it can be best spent. If you believe that wealth should be used for the public good then you might argue that it should be used on public works project, universal health care and education. If not then you might claim that wealth is better kept in private hands where through the magic of the Market it will provide the deserving with roads, health care and education.
If the Market is to be reduced in stature then we must begin by pointing out that economics is about values. This is the key to avoiding economic crisis like the one we are in the future. Reminding people that the market is not God and that economics is about values will allow us to pressure our government to regulate the Market. A regulated and restrained market will cease to be a monotheistic deity. It will be held in check and over the long term the economy will become more stable.
Towards the end of his essay Cox asks the question "in this era of Market religion, where [have] the skeptics and freethinkers...gone"? Just as the Unitarians of old challenged religious orthodoxy with a reliance on their reason we can challenge the new orthodoxy with a reliance on ours.
Denying that the Market is God and arguing instead that economics is about values will challenge us to make choices based upon our values. How we choose to live our lives and how we choose to spend our money should become reflections of what we hold to be of ultimate worth. Perhaps we will decide that certain things have high non-monetary values. Maybe we will come to believe that forests are worth more than the paper they can be made into and that farmland is more valuable than the subdivisions it can be converted into.
If we argue that economics is about values we must also remain ever vigilant against the violence that is inflicted in pursuit of doctrinal purity. We must say that the overthrow of governments who object to free market orthodoxy is unacceptable and hold both our government and the international community accountable when market friendly dictators receive their support.
Ultimately, the ensuring restraining the Market is up to us. If the Market is to become only one of a pantheon of gods rather than the Supreme Deity then we must constantly argue for and act from alternative set of values. A set of values that claims that the Market is good but other things have equal value.