By David Gushee
Since the origin of Christian social ethics in the late 19th century as an Anglo-American academic-ecclesial discipline, economic problems have been at the center of our profession’s concerns. Christian ethics was born during the days in which the contrast between the vast prosperity of the industrial barons and the vast suffering of those who worked for them became unbearable. The moral concerns that drove early Christian ethics helped contribute to the regulation of industrialization’s excesses during the Progressive Era. The same social compassion supported the creation of a modest social safety net during the Depression and New Deal era.
As a Christian ethicist, I stand in a tradition that both rejected communism as an alternative to laissez-faire capitalism and recognized very early that the only way capitalism would or should survive was through legal regulation of its worst excesses. I don’t say moral regulation because, as Reinhold Niebuhr taught us in his formative work Moral Man and Immoral Society, huge group entities and social structures do not respond to moral suasion. If you are asking a corporation — or a group of corporations, or an entire economic structure — voluntarily to act in such a way as to limit profit, you will fail. You will have to coerce it to do so under the power of law or some other countervailing power, such as the organization of labor.
All of this comes to mind just now as a result of events both social and personal. On the social front, Congress is gridlocked about extending benefits for the long-term unemployed. On the personal front, a Christmastime trip to New York City this weekend with my wife and daughter revealed once again the vast power of our economy to produce experiences and products of the first rank.
We saved up for a while to have one last hurrah with our high-school senior. And so we went to Macy’s and joined thousands swarming through that commercial mecca. We strolled down 5th Avenue and looked in on the decorated shop windows of the ritzy boutiques that it would take a second mortgage for us to enter. We spent $54 on one cup of coffee, tea, and hot chocolate, a bowl of fruit and a pastry basket at the Plaza Hotel. We went to see a performance of The Nutcracker (puzzling over an article the next morning in The New York Times in which the ballet reviewer defended his view that the current Sugar Plum Fairy and her consort were a bit chubby). We went to the opera, and, for the highest price I have ever paid for any tickets, watched Don Jose lose his mind over Carmen one more time.
So we did Rich People’s New York. And we saw that this New York is doing quite well. There were throngs of people everywhere we went; well-coiffed and nicely accessorized women were visible in abundance. If America is in the midst of an economic crisis, you would not have known it where we were in New York over the weekend.
But that’s the problem. A 10 percent unemployment rate, sagging tax revenues, and declining public services would not be visible where we were. These are visible precisely where we were not. Oh, I caught some glimpses of it. New York has long had a homeless population, and the homeless were somewhat visible. I saw the consequences of the intense scraping for every spare dollar in the Delta baggage policy, which makes you pay for every bag and then gets angry if everyone carries their luggage onto the plane. I saw it in the fading Atlanta mass-transit system, with its infrequent runs and two malfunctioning trains last night.
My tentative conclusion is that wealthy America is doing just fine in the aftermath of the great economic meltdown of 2008 to 2010. There are still lots of people who have plenty of money to enjoy the finer things of life. It is hard to get much of a feel, in that rarefied air, for how bad things really are among, say, the long-term unemployed.
Our government has always faced the built-in structural problem that mainly those with vast means have the resources and connections to run for political offices in which they are supposed to be representing everyone. Our millionaire political leaders, now aided and abetted by a renewal of laissez-faire libertarian ideology, simply do not or cannot see the suffering of that part of the population that is a stranger to them. We face vast cuts in public services at the same time as cuts in taxes for the richest.
It’s the Gilded Age all over again, and it’s coming our way.