Dorothy Day Caucus of the American Solidarity Party A Revolution of the Heart
Menu
by Zeb Baccelli In my twenties I was a Christian anarchist. This stance was rooted in my pacifistic reading of the Gospels. I did not want a revolution to overthrow the government, I just couldn’t support the violence that is necessary for a state to exist. Nevertheless, any time I told people I was an anarchist they thought I must support the kind of street violence practiced by Black Bloc anarchists and that my ‘naive’ anarchism would lead to the kind of chaotic violence seen when governments collapse in places like Somalia and Afghanistan. It was while working in Detroit at a Franciscan-run urban farm that I found a metaphor for the kind of anarchism I espoused. The urban tree is the ideal anarchist. Even now, as a non-anarchist in the American Solidarity Party working for radical political change, I see a valuable lesson in the example of the urban tree.
Detroit has become a mecca for urban agriculturalists because there is so much open space interspersed throughout the city. Fifty years of economic decline left 90,000 open lots and 70,000 abandoned buildings scattered through every district and neighborhood of the city. Those empty lots grew up into thickets and meadows which are ready to be cleared by industrious community groups and entrepreneurs if they are lucky enough to find uncontaminated soil and a way to contact the owner. But most of the empty lots and abandoned buildings are left to grow wild, and there we see nature reversing the process of urbanization and industrialization. City is turned back into wilderness through a slow and peaceful revolution. How do trees and grass overcome the might of man without having the use of mobility, thought or technology? You don’t have to go to Detroit to understand this. Next time you’re in town look at a tree, even an intentionally planted one, growing in the swale between sidewalk and street. The tree doesn’t know it, but it is a foot soldier in the revolution. And it is much more effective for not knowing. The tree merely follows its God-given nature. It never looks at the city and says “Damn you, I will defeat you eventually!” It looks up, always up, reaching for the light of the sun which is the source of its life. With total disregard for the row homes that shade it, the pedestrians that scuff it, the cars pollute it, the tree seeks only the light. And it doesn’t hurry around seeking allies and looking for the best spot to attack; it sends out roots wherever it is. Slowly pushing and digging, following the path of least resistance just enough to find the nutrients and water it needs, the tree begins to break up the concrete and black top, lifting slabs of sidewalk millimeters per year. By the end of its life a single tree won’t have made a big change. A few cracks in the concrete, a few hundred pounds of carbon dioxide turned into organic matter, a few thousand seeds scattered mostly where they will never grow. But those cracks will serve as sites for the next generation to grow and that organic matter will serve as food to feed the next generation. And a few of those seeds will grow. And in a scale of time much longer than man is capable of considering, nature to turn the city of man back to wilderness without ever raising a hand in violence. Of course unlike trees we do have mobility, thought, and technology, and we should use them. As a political party with a radical agenda we must use every tool we have. But we should use them the way the tree uses its roots, digging in deeper where we are, reaching out to what is nearest us. And like the tree we should not be looking at our enemy, searching frantically for its weak spots and scheming to exploit them as quickly as possible; rather we should simply look always toward the Light that enlivens us. Let our every act be an act of fidelity to our God-given nature and calling. Let us simply speak and live the radical truth as faithfully was we can, not watering it down to fit in and gain allies. The urban tree neither combats nor compromises: it simply is itself, and by being so it wins the slow revolution.
0 Comments
by Patrick Harris "Nobody had sex until roughly a century ago, and even then, it didn’t really become fashionable until the Sixties.
Let me qualify that: nobody “had sex” until about a hundred years ago, give or take. Google ngram’s survey of the corpus of English literature reveals that very few writers using that phrase in print until around the First World War, or even the mid-1920’s. The exact results vary depending on the wording, but essentially our most basic language for one of our most basic human activities is about as old as Girl Scout cookies or the Boeing corporation. The real linguistic take-off occurred in the mid-to-late 1960’s, however. If we allow a little time for the written word to catch up with facts on the ground, then it coincides with Phillip Larkin’s famous couplet: Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (which was rather late for me) - Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban / And the Beatles' first LP. Funny thing about Lady Chatterly’s Lover: aside from providing the occasion for a groundbreaking 1960 obscenity trial in Britain, D.H. Lawrence’s novel was also the one of the first notable works to use “sex” to refer to erotic behavior, as opposed to the male/female distinction (sex meaning “split” in Latin). Back in 1928, phrases such as “the sex act” or “sex relations” were in circulation, but Lawrence’s clipped, three-letter transition from adjective to noun was a relative novelty. In retrospect the reader can see the ambiguity being worked out in favor of its modern meaning: “Well, Charlie and I believe that sex is a sort of communication like speech. Let any woman start a sex conversation with me, and it’s natural for me to go to bed with her to finish it, all in due season.” Or: It’s the one insane taboo left: sex as a natural and vital thing…You have to snivel and feel sinful or awful about your sex, before you’re allowed to have any. Academics are fond of calling what’s going on here “reification:” sex is being made into a “thing” that one can have or not have— and indeed, Lawrence speaks of “this sex thing” several times over the course of the book. “Sex” may still be related to the man-woman pair, but the primary meaning has shifted. To borrow a line from the estimable Carlo Lancelotti (h/t to him for part of the idea behind this piece), it has become an “abstract consumable.” This, of course, is the primary meaning of “sex” for all of us now. It ought to be clear by now that this change is of more than just etymological interest. Even those who dissent from the social revolution Lawrence was helping to inaugurate speak in its peculiar dialect. In this way of speaking, sex is not just an alternative gerund for a much older four-letter Anglo-Saxon word- it is something a person can get, or withhold, or demand. If it can’t exactly be counted, it can still be quantified, whether a lot, a little, or “any,” as in Lady Chatterly. It is less a quality than it is a commodity. One consequence of this shift is the conceptual ease of separating “sex” from the male-female distinction at all: the word “sexual” for us moderns mainly denotes anything related to the erotic drive, not things pertaining to males or females as such. In a larger sense, though, it is the “thingification” of sex that represents the real legacy of this past erotic century. Even if humans beings have always been tempted to view sexual behavior in impersonal terms, that assumption is now embedded in our language at a fundamental level. In assessing what we have gained or lost in the process, it’s worth looking back to the very first known appearance of our sense of “sex,” in H.G. Well’s Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900): "He thought of the bitter words of an orator at Hammersmith, who had complained that in our present civilization even the elemental need of marriage was denied. Virtue had become a vice. 'We marry in fear and trembling, sex for a home is the woman’s traffic, and the man comes to his heart’s desire when his heart’s desire is dead.' The thing that had seemed a mere flourish came back now with a terrible air of truth." “Sex” first appears not as an expression of rebellious exuberance, but as a melancholy, transactional business. The very passage in which the word was coined is a protest an older sexual ideal, one that Wells found to be a dead faith. By the latter half of the twentieth century, most people in the West had internalized many of Wells’ beliefs; virtually everyone in the English-speaking world had adopted his language. A century and more later, the question for us is whether we are any closer to our “heart’s desire,” or any further away from a gloomy “traffic” abstracted away from human persons. If not, it is worth considering whether the past several decades of “having sex” have been enough, and whether we ought to start doing something else. by Christopher Zehnder The American Solidarity Party is facing a crisis. How it weathers this crisis will determine whether it will offer a real political alternative for American society or sink into the morass of confusion that is American political thought today.
This morass is precisely the American inability to rise above the dichotomy of "left" and "right," "liberal" and "conservative.” It is the penchant to see all questions as lying on a political spectrum that is defined by its extremes – extremes that represent no coherence in themselves but operate from the presupposition of radical individual autonomy. What separates the extremes is merely how and where they apply the principle of “personal freedom.” And even this distinction has increasingly become blurred. Pornography, for instance, is where the “left” and “right” principles of sexual license and economic freedom find their common locus. It is thus a sorrow to find that those whom one might expect to think outside the political box continue to define themselves by “left,” “right,” and “center.” Of course, culture is powerful, and it is hard to escape its influence; and our culture insists on such a dichotomy. Still, one would hope that that the failure of the left-right cultural paradigm would stir people to an awakening. But it does not. Rather, we see desperate attempts to collapse the extremes into a center of compromise. A little bit of left here, a little bit of right there, mix them together, and, lo! We have a new recipe for – more of the same. One finds that even American Solidarity Party members cannot pull themselves from this mire. We continue to identify ourselves with the dichotomy and thus fail to outline a real, alternative political vision. Ironically, we do not have far to seek for that vision; it is the tradition of Christian Democracy: the CD on our party's logo. That tradition calls us to seek a real alternative vision not in the weary and boring schools of a failed Enlightenment but in a politics of the transcendent – a politics founded on an understanding of the integral, human common good and the justice that it demands. We are doomed if we want to be a left party, a right party, or a centrist party. We have plenty of these already. This real alternative vision is what our people need, not a rehashing of failed political programs and ideologies. What is the common good? It is simply human perfection and all the means necessary to achieve that perfection. It is that good for which are made and exist. It is the good not only of one class, of the few or even of the greatest number, but of all. It is the good all people share in common. It is human fullness. It expresses itself in material goods (food, shelter, and all means of livelihood), but more eminently in culture and, finally, those spiritual goods by which we rise above the level of mere beasts. It is common, moreover, because it includes every single person; and it is common because only by life lived in and dedicated to community can we obtain it. The means of attaining the common good are justice and solidarity. If the American Solidarity Party is to speak to the deepest social and political longing of our age, it must be willing to go forth boldly and break old paradigms. Or, rather, it must be willing to embrace the oldest paradigm – the premise of the common good, the only foundation of a natural, human society. We cannot simply take some solutions from, say, the Republicans and some from the Democrats and stitch them up into a crazy quilt of a political platform. To do so would be to define ourselves in terms of other parties, whose fundamental problem is that their basic principles are wrong, for they are founded on the primacy of individual autonomy, not personal devotion to the good of all. We have to operate from clear principles that derive from the integral political vision of the common good and then examine issues in light of that vision. In doing so, we won't please everyone, but pleasing everyone should not be the goal. Offering real solutions to our society based on and advancing the common good should be our goal, our only goal. There has been much talk about making the party a “big tent” as a means of advancing candidates and winning elections. But this is to see the party merely as a mechanism for power with only a passing nod to the content of its principles and platform. Indeed, in this view, these seem to exist only to serve the goal of political expediency. Such an approach is good, old-fashioned American politics, but it is corrupt to the core. Even if the approach could win us elections (and I doubt it could), it would be tantamount to gaining the whole world and losing our souls in the bargain. We should want political victories because they would allow us to implement sound policies. We should not create policies in order to win elections. That's what the major parties do, and people are sick of it. Younger people, today, are looking for something better. We need to speak to their longing, casting our seed, not onto rocky ground, but in the deep loam of the best inspirations of our Christian tradition – the radical, integral common good. by Tara Ann Thieke Several days ago I spoke with a stranger as we were off to the side of the same event. He asked how I knew a mutual acquaintance.
"The American Solidarity Party," I answered. His eyes stepped back. "Ah, the magician. I voted for him." I waited to hear what else he wished to say. The gentleman shook his head, and when it became clear I wasn't about to engage in a soliloquy on the virtues or vices of the party (I've saved that for here!), he continued: "For one brief shining moment in time I was able to say 'Yes' to something. To a political party. To do more than choose between 'No's.' But your platform changed, and the way they talked changed. It became so terrible. Well, that was that. A lost moment." He looked back at me. "I'm sorry," I said. "You're not the first person to have that reaction." And then I changed the topic, because he wasn't the first person. Over the past six months I have had some variation of that conversation many, many, many times. The individuals are not combative. They do not wish to participate in the ugly rhetoric far too many indulge in. They are not part of the very small, prolific block which now dominates the discussion pages at all hours. For the main part, they are simply the people who saw something promising in the ASP in the second half of 2016. They cast their vote for a magician and hoped they were voting for more than a glimpse of an alternative, as the gentleman said. Some became very involved; others stayed on the periphery. What they shared in common was none of them wanted to partake of a long drawn-out fight for the soul of the American Solidarity Party. When the sea-change became clear, they quietly bowed out with dignity (and grief). If their frustration tells us something, so does the reaction that many of these departures received. When they are referenced, the response is a shrug, a sneer, or outright glee. These reactions also come from the most vocal and prolific online voices, who have all too often engaged in outright slander and celebrated the departure of those who disagreed with them. This is concerning enough, but even more confusing is that faction's loud and repeated commitment to solidarity and creating a "big-tent." How can we possibly build something when people celebrate the departure of so many who came to help carry the weight? Yes,we have morale and structural problems. In my view they are the result of discord within the party that has two sources. The first source of discord is strong differences of opinion about what the party should stand for, how it should conduct its business, how it should be structured, and how it should orient itself towards our current political system. The second source of discord is personal ill will, a breakdown of trust and good faith among different factions of the party. The first part of this discord is inevitable. Strong disagreement is inevitable in any political party, and especially a grassroots third party made up of people of different perspectives who all have their own story for turning away from the major parties. Fortunately, the answer to this problem lies right there in our name. Affirming our commitment to solidarity recognizes that we will not always agree, but that we must work through our disagreements in pursuit of the common good. But while solidarity is the answer to the first type of discord, solidarity is difficult, nearly impossible, in the presence of the second kind of discord. Fortunately, the second type of discord is avoidable. It is avoidable if we treat each other respectfully. Treating each other respectfully means speaking honestly with one another, even when we know our honest sentiments are disagreeable to the listener. The blog of the DDC is titled "The Kitchen Table" because it is meant to mimic more of a familial atmosphere than typical online spaces. When we sit across from loved ones at the kitchen table we may disagree fiercely and passionately, but we remain bonded by something stronger than our disagreements. We feel a mutual sense of obligation that calls us to something higher than simply winning the argument, something that prevents us from treating the other person as merely a means to an end. I am proud to say that in its short history the Dorothy Day Caucus has lived up to this ideal; not perfectly, since we are all sinners, but to a degree I take great joy in. We have many disagreements, and those disagreements can get heated, but focus stays on the substance of the arguments and not the person making them. We invite anyone to come on our Facebook page to participate in these discussions, asking only that they refrain from personal attacks and spamming. I will not pretend to be neutral on either the vision for the party or personal conduct within the party. I have a side in these debates, and I believe my side is right. On the question of party vision, I will be writing a post this weekend for the The Kitchen Table renewing our vision for what the ASP should be and the type of politics we should be practicing (if you're unfamiliar with the DDC and would like some idea right now, you can scroll through our blog or read my recent talk at the ASP Midwestern Conference here). On the question of personal conduct, I believe the greatest cause of discord on this count is duplicity. People saying one thing in private and something else in public. "Let your ‘yes’ mean yes and your ‘no’ mean no. Anything more is from the evil one."(Matthew 5:37). Duplicity is wrong in any context, but is especially wrong for a party rooted in solidarity. Solidarity is premised on everyone not getting exactly what they want, but making mutual sacrifices towards the common good. That requires, however, honest discussion about who is making what sacrifices, and what the vision of the common good is. A party rooted in solidarity can have no pawns. A party rooted in solidarity can have no elite guarding their personal mission of the party while conniving how to get the rank and file to follow along. It is quite possible many will hear that our chair dismisses them as "f'in theocrats" or that the National Committee member chosen to moderate our Facebook operates, by his own admission, under only an "appearance of impartiality," and still conclude that the American Solidarity Party is the best political home for them. That is the choice I make, because I believe the ASP is more than the actions or statements of a few members. It is, however, a choice everyone is entitled to make with open eyes. Everyone deserves to know what they are putting their time and energy towards, and how the people chosen as stewards for the party intend to hear their voices and direct their energies. If a new leadership faction privately believes large sections of the party are undesirable, members deserve to know that information. It is a good thing, an outright good thing, if multiple persuasions are recruiting like-minded folk into the ASP. Yes, it is good if progressives, centrists, or conservatives are drawing in fellow travelers. The outside political world will be hostile to a third party. We have an uphill battle. If we cannot work with one another then we have already failed. The aim of this self-examination and call for accountability is to make sure we really do work together, we really do listen to one another, we really are aware if good faith disagreement is devolving into slander and private machinations. And if a few people are conspiring to remove or verbally attack anyone who disagrees with them, then we will never be taken seriously. A "real party" brings people together without destroying their differences. Anyone who wishes to lead this party should speak openly, clearly, and honestly about what their vision for party is and what role they see for people of different views within the party. Anyone who is unwilling to do so should step aside and go work in one of the many political parties built on artifice and tactics (under the guise of realism and professionalism) rather than solidarity. Solidarity is not a brand to be managed, it is a principle to be lived. Maybe once we live it ourselves, beginning a revolution in our own hearts, then those seeking a party they can say "Yes" to will return. by Dr. Stephen Beall Two weeks ago, Tara Ann Thieke gave an address to the Midwestern Conference of the American Solidarity Party, entitled ‘Politics and Eggs’. Her remarks have important implications not only for the external messaging of the ASP, but also for its internal culture. I would like to touch on a few of these implications with the help of one of my favorite spiritual writers, Joseph Tissot (The Interior Life Simplified and Reduced to its Fundamental Principle). According to Fr. Tissot, any major undertaking, including the spiritual life itself, must take into account three things: the goal or end of the undertaking, the way that leads to the goal, and the means that one uses to achieve it. The ASP is on an uncertain journey, and we should make sure that we take the right road to the right destination, using reliable equipment. So what is the goal of the ASP? Some of our friends say that it is ‘to build a real party’, presumably on the monumental scale of the two establishment parties. Tara takes us in a different direction with a striking quotation from the Japanese author, Haruki Marukami: ‘Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.’ Tara develops this image to contrast the fragile structure of the individual human being with the monolithic indifference of ‘the System’, sustained by numbers-crunchers in the Beltway and on Wall Street. The distinguishing feature of Christian Democracy, she argues, is that ‘it places the human person at its very core.’ Human beings are so many eggs, and the goal of the Christian Democrat is, quite simply, to prevent them from being crushed. To change the asymmetrical relationship of the person and the System, however, is no easy task. It requires a complete re-ordering of our attitudes and social practices—what Dorothy Day called ‘a revolution of the heart’. Anyone with a little ambition can be (or pretend to be) a politician; to be a Revolutionary of the Heart requires mental and moral discipline. The project outlined by Tara obliges us to be on guard against a number of distractions, the most dangerous of which is the worship of power. As a tiny third party, the ASP is exempt, at least for the time being, from many of the temptations that beset public servants. But the worm lurks deep within the apple. In the last few months, we have seen an increasing preoccupation with issues of control—control of the the party’s platform, its governing structures, its name and symbols, its external and internal media. Most of us have been caught up, at one time or another, in earnest discussions of personalities, alliances, and committee resolutions. Surely this is grabbing the wrong end of the stick. Our Lord himself warned us about this when he said: ‘You know that the princes of the Gentiles lord it over them; and they that are the greater, exercise power upon them. It shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be the greater among you, let him be your minister: And he that will be first among you, shall be your servant’ (Mt. 20:25-27). In other words, we cannot be on the side of the egg while building our own structures of dominance and oppression. We need to be and support the kind of leaders Jesus was looking for—servants of the servants of God. Some of us are uncomfortable with the word ‘revolution’, as it conjures up images of guillotines, unruly mobs, and burning palaces. But if we sincerely desire a transformation of society, what is the surest way to that destination? The Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and National Socialists chose the path of simplification: they conceived a procrustean model of society and tried to squeeze people into it, relying on violence to overcome resistance. Revolutionaries of the Heart must go in the opposite direction and embrace the complexity of properly ordered human relationships. This is why Tara insists on the defense of marriage and the family as the bedrock of our political program. The family is the school of the heart, which is ordered to the good of others. Likewise, she insists on political and economic subsidiarity, which she refuses to qualify with concessions to technological efficiency and economies of scale. Society, she believes, should be scaled to the human person; the test of our institutions is their sensitivity to the egg. It goes without saying that the principle of subsidiarity should regulate our internal policies, as well. We will know that the ASP is truly gaining strength when candidates step forward with clearly articulated policies on local issues, when state committees raise their own funds and present their own platforms, when families are the public face of the party, and when every individual member receives a direct accounting from leadership and is allowed to participate in decision-making. A stronger and less centralized party will not be tempted to ‘partner’ with more powerful interests or, worse yet, imitate their elitist modes of communication and fund-raising. We understand, of course, that these developments require a critical mass of energetic volunteers, as well as a firm confidence in a common ideology. We must come to terms with the fact that the ASP is a very small organization, and that many local chapters number less than a dozen souls. Nevertheless, we can design our structures in such a way that the party will eventually reflect the kind of society that we wish to live in. To summarize: if our goal is a ‘revolution of the heart’, the way to the goal is a respect for persons and the communities that persons naturally form: families, churches, clubs, unions, neighborhoods, towns, and cities. Our political program and our internal governance should mirror each other; we should be building a new politics within the shell of the old. But knowing the way is not enough; we must consider the means we would employ to make progress along the way. This is the most challenging aspect of Tara’s talk. Classical theory looked at politics as an art; we moderns have transformed it into a technology. Our political language reflects the modern preoccupation with ‘machinery’ and ‘markets’, with ‘professionalism’ and ‘expertise’, with ‘quantitative measures’ and ‘problem-solving’. In such an environment, ends and means are easily confused; ‘solidarity’, beautifully represented by the self-sacrifice of the Pelican, becomes a ‘brand’. In keeping with her desire for a human-scaled alternative, Tara proposes that we put down our electronic megaphones and ‘meet our neighbor, not just with words on our lips, but with ears to listen.’ Persons are more than votes. They must be encountered, not manipulated, and certainly not vilified as rubes, racists, and reactionaries. Lest we think that these challenging neighbors are only the Trump-voters in fly-over states, Tara brings her observations home to the ASP. ‘We must treat one another in good faith,’ she writes. ‘We must not harass, bully, or deliberately choose to assume that someone acts from malice or hate.’ We know how far we have fallen from this standard, especially since the 2016 campaign. It is easy to blame it all on the platforms we use to communicate, as if the demons that inhabit Facebook would vanish if we resort to some other medium. Don’t believe it. 'Homo homini diabolus'—we are devils to each other, if the heart is not right. Nevertheless, it is true that information technology has weaponized the frustration, resentment, and mistrust that have vitiated American political discourse. How can we turn this around? Perhaps we can recover the ‘technologies’ that characterized the early Christian church: the works of mercy and the fellowship of the table. The example of Dorothy Day is particularly instructive: mass communication, in the form of a newspaper, was inseparable from houses of hospitality. If we cannot open soup kitchens, we can certainly break bread with each other from time to time. To the extent that we need the internet, we might learn to practice ‘custody of the fingers’. A friend once suggested that before every post or comment, we should repeat the verse, ‘Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth: and a door round my lips’ (Ps. 140:3). An occasional internet fast might not be a bad idea, either. It will help us develop the interior silence required to become better listeners. In Rome, there is a small church beside the road on which, according to legend, St. Peter traveled as he was fleeing the persecution of Nero. At that very spot, the Apostle met Jesus, who was carrying his Cross and heading in the other direction. ‘Where are you going, Lord?’ he asked in surprise. Jesus replied, ‘I am going to Rome to be crucified again’. Peter got the message. The well-traveled road is not always the way to the destination. He turned around. by Alastair Roberts In his insightful, if often quixotic, series of essays on the subject of economy, Unto This Last, the Victorian art critic and social thinker, John Ruskin, challenged some of the leading capitalist thought of his day. While most work in economics operates in terms of fundamental convictions that aren’t directly examined, the work of Ruskin, like other thinkers such as Marx or Proudhon, sought to unearth and unsettle what he regarded as the tendentious and mystifying metaphysical assumptions upon which much of the superstructure of capitalist economy and thought is based.
Ruskin addresses the question of value, upon which he argues against the thought of John Stuart Mill. Mill claims that “The word ‘value,’ when used without adjunct, always means, in political economy, value in exchange” and elsewhere that wealth “consists of all useful and agreeable objects which possess exchangeable value.”(1) Exchange value rests in turn upon the usefulness of an article to satisfy a desire or serve a purpose: if no one wanted or had use for an item, it would have no exchange value. Ruskin contends that Mill’s account is neglecting some key elements of the picture. In particular, Mill’s approach carefully brackets certain moral considerations. While Mill draws some distinctions between money expended by a capitalist to purchase more luxuries for his private consumption and that which he might expend to increase the production of items for wider consumption by hiring more labourers, the distinctions that he draws are not the necessary ones. Ruskin wants to know whether, if the capitalist reduced his private consumption in order to produce more bombs or bayonets, he would still be employing ‘productive’ labour and producing ‘valuable’ goods. Mill’s approach, with its emphasis upon an exchange value freed from moral considerations, leaves him incapable of answering such a question satisfactorily. Ruskin proceeds to argue that “the economic usefulness of a thing depends not merely on its own nature, but on the number of people who can and will use it.”(2) A horse is of no use if there is no human who can ride it and there will be no market for a painting if no one can be taught to appreciate it. Consequently, political economy and our account of wealth “must be a science respecting human capacities and dispositions.”(3) Yet Mill’s insistence that political economy shouldn’t be concerned with moral considerations implies that human capacities and dispositions have nothing to do with moral considerations, an unsustainable position. Ruskin proposes that value needs a better definition, proposing that to be ‘valuable’ is to “avail towards life.”(4) By extension, ‘wealth’ should be defined as “the possession of the valuable by the valiant”: unless valuable items are possessed by worthy people who can make good use of them, they are of limited use or even detrimental.(5) Developing this point further, he writes There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others. (6) In Ruskin’s critique of Mill some much deeper issues are raised, issues that are profoundly relevant to contemporary society, for which certain questionable understandings of value hold very considerable sway. Ruskin’s approach, though it may seem eccentric and quite impractical at points, reveals the degree to which the economic notions of Mill and others invite the detachment of our notions of value from the actual flourishing of human life. The narrow equation of value in the realm of political economy with exchange value and of wealth with those things that possess such value has the effect of blinding us to the deeper issue, substituting an abstract notion for the true and actual wealth of a people—their concrete well-being. Ruskin writes: [T]he wealth of nations, as of men, consists in substance, not in ciphers; and ... the real good of all work, and of all commerce, depends on the final worth of the thing you make, or get by it. This is a practical enough statements, one would think: but the English public has been so possessed by its modern school of economists with the notion that Business is always good, whether it be busy in mischief or in benefit; and that buying and selling are always salutary, whatever the intrinsic worth of what you buy and sell,—that it seems impossible to gain so much as a patient hearing for any inquiry respecting the substantial result of our eager modern labours.(7) The notions Ruskin is challenging have given rise to the beliefs that value and wealth are principally measured by money. Money is our chief means of exchange and the way in which we can render items commensurable. Our focus upon money as the measure of value and wealth has encouraged an indifference to the actual ends towards which we use our money: whereas for Ruskin, consumption is the most important matter. We consider that the wealth of a nation is to be measured largely in monetary terms, rather than requiring a close investigation of our actual well-being, seeing how our labour and resources are being employed. The agnosticism or ill-founded presumption concerning the actual commonweal of a people that results from this blinds us to the many ways in which our supposed wealth may even leave us poorer off. It also prevents us from asking the more searching questions that need to be asked. Beyond this, however, such a measure of value and wealth in political economy has also increasingly set the terms in which all value in society is considered. The concept of value seems commonsensical to us, yet when we look more closely at it we discover that it disguises a great deal. Marx exposed something of the mystification of value in Das Kapital. He drew his readers’ attention to the bizarre character of commodities. While a commodity might appear to be a concrete object with physical characteristics, the commodity’s concreteness and characteristics are quite accidental to its character as a commodity. Rather an object is rendered a commodity by virtue of its possessing exchange value. While this exchange value may be grounded in the use value of the object, it can float free of the material properties of any given object: one commodity can be exchanged for another, while the value remains. This abstract value comes to be regarded as the substance, while physical commodities are just a rapidly cycling series of accidents. Indeed, we find it almost impossible to regard objects without perceiving them as bearers of this mana-like quality of ‘value’. When we look at commodities, it is as if they were surrounded by an aura of value; we unreflectively perceive items as expensive or cheap, sometimes in ways that render us blind to their natural properties. Their character as commodities is an aspect of their very phenomenology in our society. Much as we would perceive the weight of an item, so we perceive its exchange value. This isn’t just an external ideology, but a stubborn feature of our perception, an issue of how we see the world around us. Recognizing the true weirdness and perception-altering potential of money is important here. Money is a medium of exchange and of expressing value. However, money is also the arch-commodity, an object that functions purely as exchange value. You can’t eat money, wear it, or use it to keep your family warm (Pablo Escobar’s burning over a couple of million dollars to keep his daughter warm while on the run being a very rare exception). Goods were once largely produced to serve the immediate needs of a community, with only excess goods being exchanged. Within such a context, goods would be principally perceived in terms of their usefulness and only on occasions in terms of their exchange value. Even then, the exchange value would often not have been reified in money, as the exchange would have taken the form of barter. However, as the arch-commodity, radically fungible and abstracted from use value, money has come to represent value itself. We increasingly live in pursuit of money, labouring for pure exchange value. And, as money is value, what we earn comes to represent our value and our social standing. Yet as money becomes the overwhelmingly dominant way that we perceive and pursue value, our world will be reordered around it. It will impose a logic of abstraction and alienation upon everything. Money makes it possible for us to convert the specificity of particular forms and acts of labour into pure exchange value. While my labour might once have primarily been a matter of exercising my own agency, living out my specific vocation, and developing my dominion in the world, my labour is now more likely to be alien to me, something from which I and my employers seek to extract value in the form of money. Money frees me to exercise a more general power and influence, detached from the specificity of personal relationships and local bonds, with their attendant responsibilities. Our society is often described as a ‘materialistic’ society. However, we must recognize just how hostile our society is to matter in its notion of value, which both alienates value from matter and seeks to render all matter homogeneous and conformable to abstract value, power, and knowledge. Our society is built upon alienation, abstraction, and extraction from matter. We extract power, knowledge, and value from matter and abstract ourselves from its binding particularity. Matter is to be broken down and departicularized for the sake of our autonomous power. This is what defines reality for us today. This hostility to the concreteness and particularity of matter isn’t just true in the case of money. It can also be seen in the way that we regard power as a homogeneous reality to be extracted and abstracted from the particularity of the material world. It can be seen in our modes of mass production and digital replication. It can be seen in our scientific posture towards reality that reduces reality to universal laws acting upon indistinguishable particles, purged of the particular or local meanings or qualities that render them salient to us. It can be seen in the way people are trained to be self-effaced, fungible, and optimized raw human material for labour. It can be seen in the way that the market steadily dissolves particularities of culture and persons to create homogenized markets. It can be seen in the way that the particularity of personal skill is replaced by universal abstract processes. It can be seen in the replacement of the deep wisdom that arises from lengthy enculturation with the study of detached technique. David Bentley Hart writes: "The abstraction of the market, its lightness, is a fire that attempts to burn away the weight of glory as so much dross, as exchangeable tokens of wealth; unlike the fire of God, it does not transfigure but consumes. The market, then, is a particular optics, a particular order of vision. Its aesthetic of immateriality suspends all difference in the univocal formalism of the aleatory; all more refractory values—beauty, need, awe—are transformed into the universal value of price (the transvaluation of all values, endless evaluation). Within the world descried by such an optics, there is no theme to vary in the fabric of things, no distinct orders of beauty and grace, but only random series of simulacra whose unitive logic is uniform: exchange value." (8) Once we recognize just how powerfully determinative our reigning vision of value is for society, how deeply embedded in our consciousness it is, and how thoughtlessly we accommodate ourselves to it (indeed, accommodating ourselves to it is necessary for survival for most of us in modern society), some of the more specific threats that it poses may begin to dawn upon us. This discussion of value may itself seem to be fairly abstract and theoretical. Let’s bring it a little more down to earth. Here it may be illuminating to consider the contrasting ways in which the accounts of Ruskin and Mill might lead us to regard the labour of the homemaker with regard to the production of value and the wealth of a people. For Mill, the labour of the homemaker would have little value in this regard, as it doesn’t produce much that is fungible or exchangeable: you can’t sell your home or your children on the free market. For Ruskin, by contrast, the work of the homemaker would carry value beyond almost all other labour: she brings new life into the world and is the living heart of a world that she creates around herself and extends out into her surrounding community. The homemaker’s labour is highly specific to the particular home and family that she is creating and resists abstraction or alienation. Her labour isn’t alienable and abstractable, but is material in its most stubborn form (note the etymology of the word ‘mater-ial’). Her labour can’t be regarded as ‘production’ as such in pursuit of ‘value’ as such, but is labour ordered to very specific goods and ends, whose ‘value’ is the commonweal of her own home and family. Men have always been much more conformable to the logic of abstraction and alienation. In his most characteristic forms of labour man stands over against the world and acts upon it. However, the same isn’t the case for the woman. The connection of the woman’s labour with the fertility of her own body is important to notice here, for instance. In Genesis, the body of the woman and the body of Mother Earth are bound together symbolically; throughout Scripture, the earth and the womb are paralleled. As Robert Farrar Capon has observed: "To be a Mother is to be the sacrament—the effective symbol—of place. Mothers do not make homes, they are our home: in the simple sense that we begin our days by a long sojourn within the body of a woman; in the extended sense that she remains our center of gravity through the years. She is the very diagram of belonging, the where in whose vicinity we are fed and watered, and have our wounds bound up and our noses wiped. She is geography incarnate, with her breasts and her womb, her relative immobility, and her hands reaching up to us the fruitfulness of the earth." (9) In a culture that idolizes Mammon in the abstraction of pure exchange value and which pursues autonomous power, both the woman and the earth will suffer as the nature of both will suffer serious indignities. While the alienation such a society encourages is destructive and oppressive for men, it is even more so for women. It is important to notice the way that alienated labour increasingly sets the terms in which we regard and establishes the conditions within which we practice non-alienated labour. While the homemaker can establish deep and particular value as she pursues the well-being of her household, she is pitied and may even not be regarded as producing at all, as she has no money to show for it. Far better, it is suggested, that she outsource her domestic labour to other paid labourers and pursue a high wage through alienated labour for employers. While earlier feminist writers like Betty Friedan may have endeavoured to expand women’s horizons of meaningful labour beyond the limited realm of mid-century American suburban domesticity, without abandoning the non-alienated formation of their own homes and families, contemporary feminists have been more prone to idealize the pursuit of autonomy through alienated labour and look down upon homemakers or decry the injustice of their ‘unpaid labour’. In a society ordered around abstraction and alienation and the pursuit of pure exchange value, such a stance is not unreasonable. In such a society, the conditions under which one could form a stable and enduring family, home, and community are increasingly precarious as marriages, localities, and ways of life become ever more fluid and unstable in order to conform them to the logic of the market. Homemaking is a very dangerous gamble in such a context. In the tensions that women experience between their work and their lives, they are not mistaken in feeling that in many respects the game is rigged against them. Their particular natural attachment to, embeddedness in, and symbolization of the realm of the home mean that they return home from work to a ‘second shift’, whose weight falls far less heavily upon the shoulders of their husbands. Robbed of its proper dignity, and reduced to a realm of the preparation and consumption of commodities, the work of the home is broken down to largely thankless chores, within which the woman is the chief labourer. She bears the greatest burden of what Ivan Illich calls the ‘shadow work’ required to keep every member of the household prepared for their labour in the economy.(10) And, as she will struggle to earn the equivalent of the men around her, she will often find herself deemed lesser in value. While the challenges faced by women in our society are more acute and more widely discussed, they will never properly be addressed apart from a more general transformation in the way that we approach value—for both men and women. For the alienation of men’s labour is, in many respects an original driving mechanism of the problem. This alienation detached the labour of men from the dominion and vocation concretely manifested in the building up of their own households, a form of labour whose value was inextricably intertwined with the value of their wives’ labour. In sacrificing the more concrete forms of vocation and dominion grounded in their own house for the wage earned in the ‘house’ of another, men could enjoy a more autonomous form of power relative to their wives and also steadily diminish the power and significance of the home and women’s labour in it to one of the consumption of commodities and the refreshment of the ‘breadwinner’, the chief of the capitalist labourer’s pit crew. The role of the state in all of this shouldn’t be ignored. The state has always had an especial interest in the expansion of the money economy and the drawing of areas of life that exist outside of it into its orbit. In the past, kings could establish economies by paying their soldiers in coins and requiring the general population to pay taxes in coins.(11) This rendered society more scrutable to the state, increased the control of the government, encouraged greater production and consumption, produced more taxes more efficiently, and put populations under various pressures and gave them various incentives to move in the direction of wage labour. The imperative of growing ‘the economy’ and strengthening the state means that governments have always had strong motives for pushing people out of the subsistence economies of households into the pursuit of pure exchange value in the money economy. Opening our eyes to the distortion of our entire perception through an inverted vision of value is profoundly difficult. It initially requires something akin to an epiphanic moment in which we appreciate the disorienting strangeness and perverseness of the ways of experiencing the world that prevail in our society. However, beyond that it requires a continual effort of correcting our vision, over which the obfuscating distortions of mistaken perceptions of value retain considerable influence. Such discipline is not without its rewards. Our eyes do not merely open to the prevailing distortions, but to possibilities for goodness and beauty. Seeing value as life itself, as Ruskin teaches us, is inherently much more fulfilling than seeing value as money. As this way of seeing things starts to be internalized, it can release us from things we hadn’t realized were holding us in bondage. As I illustrated in the case of the homemaker, it can change the way that we view and appreciate people too. Alastair Roberts' podcast and other writings can be found at his website, Alastair's Adversia. (1) Cited in John Ruskin, Unto This Last and Other Writings (London: Penguin Classics, 1997), 206. (2) Ibid (3) Ibid 207 (4) Ibid 209 (5) Ibid 211 (6) Ibid 222 (7) John Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive and the Ethics of the Dust (London: Cassell and Company, 1909), 18-19. (8) David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 437. (9) Robert Farrar Capon, Bed and Board: Plain Talk About Marriage (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), 62. (10) Ivan Illich, Gender (London: Marion Boyars, 1983), 45ff. (11) David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011), 50. by Kyle Herrington One of the most important concepts I have encountered is that of human-created systems of discrimination and unequal treatment. G.K. Chesterton showed how both capitalism and socialism distort our understanding of the human person. Recent events such as the Charlottesville neo-Nazi rally have brought attitudes and polices that disenfranchise and persecute minorities to the forefront of the nation’s consciousness. Progressive voices have been instrumental in pulling back the curtain on these discriminatory systems. Yet, progressive voices are silent on the systematic prejudice perpetuated by abortion.
Frank Stephens, a man with Down syndrome, recently testified before a congressional committee about research on Down syndrome. In his opening statement, Stephens argued for the necessity of research on Down syndrome. He refused to be silent about the epidemic of abortions which take place after a Down diagnosis. “I completely understand that the people pushing that particular ‘final solution’ are saying that people like me should not exist. They are saying that we have too little value to exist. That view is deeply prejudiced by an outdated idea of life with Down syndrome.” (1) Unfortunately, this “outdated view” is not innocuous. As Stephens mentioned, places like Iceland, Denmark, and South Korea are grotesquely stating they will eliminate Down syndrome in the coming decades. By “eliminate Down syndrome” they mean eliminating people with Down syndrome via prenatal diagnosis and abortion. Nearly 100% of children diagnosed with Down syndrome in Iceland are aborted and about 67% of US children diagnosed in utero with Down syndrome are aborted (2). The right to abort fetuses diagnosed with “fetal anomalies” has been a key talking point in the debates around the potential repeal of the 8th Amendment in Ireland. Stephens believed the most important thing he could say to the Congressmen and Congresswomen was that his life is important: “If you take nothing else away from today’s hearing, please remember this, I AM A MAN WITH DOWN SYNDROME AND MY LIFE IS WORTH LIVING” (emphasis in the record). The promotion and acceptance of abortion as “taking care” of people with Down syndrome and other fetal diagnoses perpetuates ableism. Mothers and fathers who receive the news that their child has a condition like Down syndrome or a medical condition that will result in the child losing their life during or shortly after pregnancy deserve robust support from their families, doctors, and communities. (If you or someone you know has received a potentially fatal pre-natal diagnosis for their child, I encourage you to reach out to Alexandra’s House. If you are able, please also think about supporting this charity’s amazing work.) Everybody’s life is worth living, but legal abortion perpetuates a system that says otherwise. Legal abortion says that every life is only contingently worth living: If you are conceived in a violent act, your life may not be valuable. If you are conceived at the wrong time, your life is only potentially worth caring about. You're less than equal; you may even be an inconvenience. The system of abortion legalized by Roe v. Wade and solidified in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (3) makes the value of a child’s life contingent on the “liberty…to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” In other words, a system has been created to disenfranchise those who cannot speak for themselves and the disenfranchisement is death. How much more ableist can it get? Both major American political parties and many powerful interests tacitly support this system. Cecile Richards, CEO of Planned Parenthood, recently tweeted that birth control is good for business and is encouraging “brands” and businesses to protect birth control. Birth control is good for business because less children mean less time employees are off work. I am sure Richards believes abortion is good for businesses (it surely is for her business). The attitude behind legalized abortion is utilitarian and built off the elimination of the defenseless in society, especially children with a medical diagnosis in utero. This isn’t surprising given that Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a eugenicist and considered “[t]he most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.” (4) Legalized abortion is founded upon a system of eugenics that dealt with poverty and disease by killing people. No other institution would get such cover by progressives and powerful interests. Why is the logic of dehumanizing people allowed to be perpetuated? How many people have to be murdered and traumatized before the US wakes up to the system of oppression sold as a system of freedom? According to the logic of abortion, the bodies of those who are deemed expendable or not suitable for life are violently extinguished. It is necessary to create a culture that is honest with itself about the unacceptable system it has enshrined in law. But that is not good enough. Only a culture that replaces a discriminatory system is one that respects all people’s lives as worth living. Every level of society should promote and support this principle. The goal is a lofty one, but we should not waver in our commitment to solidarity with the least amongst us because this is a goal worth supporting, working towards, and voting for, because as Frank Stephens reminds us, “Every life is worth living.” (1) Watch the whole statement here: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4687834/frank-stephens-opening-statement-syndrome or read the transcript here: http://docs.house.gov/meetings/AP/AP07/20171025/106526/HHRG-115-AP07-Wstate-StephensF-20171025.pdf (2) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/down-syndrome-iceland/ (3) Majority opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/505/833#writing-USSC_CR_0505_0833_ZO (4) Margaret Sanger, “Chapter 5: The Wickedness of Creating Large Families” in her book Woman and the New Race. http://www.bartleby.com/1013/5.html The following address was delivered to the American Solidarity Party's second annual Midwestern Conference on Saturday, October 21 by Tara Ann Thieke, Chairwoman of the Dorothy Day Caucus and Vice-Chair of the ASP-PA Chapter. Good afternoon everyone! My name is Tara Thieke, and I've just been elected the new Vice-Chair of Pennsylvania, and am currently the Chairwoman of the Dorothy Day Caucus, which is an independent group of ASP members. I'm thankful to be here with you all today, and want to extend my especial gratitude to Dr. John Das who so kindly invited me here to talk a little bit about Christian Democracy, the state of our society, and why I believe the American Solidarity Party is our best hope for transforming our politics.
I don't know how familiar any of you may be with contemporary Japanese fiction, but there's a particular author I'm very fond of named Haruki Murakami who I'd like to discuss. He isn't Christian, and he isn't overtly political. About seven years ago he was invited to accept an award in Jerusalem, an award he was pressured to turn down for political reasons. Mr. Murakami did not turn down the award. Instead, he went to Jerusalem, where he spoke some words which have stayed in my heart since I read the transcript of his speech a few days later. I'd like to share them with you, and then talk about how these words are relevant for believers in Christian Democracy, third parties, and the sacredness of all human life: "Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg. Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be? What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them. This is one meaning of the metaphor. This is not all, though. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: It is The System. The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others - coldly, efficiently, systematically. I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today. We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called The System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong - and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others' souls and from the warmth we gain by joining souls together. Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow The System to exploit us. We must not allow The System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made The System. That is all I have to say to you." Mr. Murakami has chosen the side of the egg. The human face, the human soul, that is the egg. And it is the face, the soul, that our current political and cultural conversation ignores. Our thought leaders, our think tanks, our cable news networks are full of utilitarian thinking, of fulfilling Daft Punk's dream of "Bigger Better Faster Stronger." But mere accelerationism tells us nothing about the present, about the souls around us and their needs. Perhaps this is why Christian Democracy is treated with such wariness: because it is so desperately needed, and because it recognizes goods which cannot be sold on the market. A politics built around Christian Democracy places the person at its very center, because the person is made in the image of God. It establishes both a rule and a limit at its core, and that is what accelerated state capitalism seeks to destroy. We have heard such beautiful promises, of the End of History in one breath and ever-increasing prosperity in the next. Perhaps we should ask what is happening to the people without megaphones, to see what it is like for our neighbors: In America: Suicide rates are increasing every year. Teenagers and children face a particularly gruesome escalation in suicide rates. Teen depression, anxiety, and stress are all rising. Adults face a similar, though less stark, rise. Over 3,000 abortions are committed each day, destroying a human life and leaving a woman with a scar that will last a lifetime. We are in the grips of the most powerful opioid crisis we have ever seen. The number of homebound, elderly Americans who are all alone has never been higher. We have the highest incarceration rates in the world. Working-class men without college degrees are disappearing from the work force. The elderly and disabled are increasingly at risk of being pressured to end their lives prematurely. Heavy binge drinking has dramatically increased in the past ten years. The use of antidepressants has increased almost 400% since the 1990s. Children, especially boys, are increasingly drugged. Foster care children are the most drugged of all. Alienation, however it manifests, is killing millions of Americans. How can everything be wonderful and getting better every moment when more children and teenagers kill themselves with each passing year? When children and teenagers and young adults are enduring a mental health crisis, how can we neglect what our politics has failed to do? As liquid capital has been allowed to dictate the norms of our world, reality itself is liquidized and replaced by virtual substitutes. Youth, with no defined roots or common good to attach themselves to, are burdened with the task of self-creation, a self-creation that is actually promoted and defined by a market which calls for every bond to be dissolved and replaced by a profitable dissatisfaction. So it is that even their own bodies are weaponized against them. The evidence is before our eyes but we lack the will to see it or the strength to admit the prevailing orthodoxy is ill-equipped to understand the depths of the crisis. It's time we admit that, whatever great gifts our economic and technological progress have bestowed upon us, we have done nothing to off-set the negative consequences of that progress. The balance sheet is not drawn in favor of human good, but for the good of a System which counts success in numbers. Our failure to recognize human beings have needs other than to watch large numbers get larger, or gadgets get smaller, has created a culture of despair, of addiction, of waste, of inhumanity. We must restore a vocabulary which has a fuller understanding of the human condition, which does not run to programs or markets to solve problems, but understands the depth of our need for meaningful relationships and lasting bonds. Christian Democracy is what is missing from our vision. Not to be confused with the Religious Right, Christian Democracy recognizes values other than utilitarianism, growth, or mere respect from the powerful. It restores a voice to those left voiceless by The System. We need a politics which does more than try to win elections. Christian Democracy enables us to encounter and hear our neighbors. We need a politics that worries about more than electable candidates. Christian Democracy meets this need by knowing a strategy is only as good as its motivating values. We need a politics where people outside gated communities are heard, not merely managed. This requires subsidiarity, a principle too quickly discarded for its difficulties, but that Christian Democracy recognizes as necessary to some degree for common flourishing. We need a politics willing to do more than encourage polarization or self-righteous tribalism. Christian Democracy is rooted in the humility of Christ, and reminds us we, too, are sinners, and that we are called to love people even while disagreeing with them. We need a politics unafraid to ask what a good life looks like beyond "college degree, resume-building, travel, and access to cutting-edge technology and fine dining." Christian Democracy understands a human life is not a mere balance sheet tabulating up the pleasant and unpleasant experiences, but a gift bestowed by God. Peace, love, wonder, and Theosis are our highest callings. They cannot be purchased, they cannot be sold. We need a politics that asks what makes a community, what makes a home. Christian Democracy, recognizing how the family stabilizes and provides a context for finding our place in the world, is able to identify the catastrophic effects of what Zygmunt Bauman called "liquid modernity." We have long endured a process of liquidization which devours mediating institutions and uproots families in order to make them more manageable workers or consumers (depending upon where you live in the world). Christian Democracy seeks to protect the family and local communities, knowing that it is relationships which best heal, and it is restored relationships we crave. We need a politics willing to ask if machines serve people, or if people serve machines. Christian Democracy can be open to the positive changes of technology, but is willing to step in when the progress of machines interferes with the good of people. We need a politics that asks how many people have to die to acknowledge mass despair is a political issue, we need a politics that asks what progress could ever mean in a world where any child commits suicide, let alone one where more and more do so. Christian Democracy maintains an unshakeable commitment to the truth that our good cannot be found by liquidizing those things which make for human flourishing simply in order to be richer, more autonomous, or better entertained. It instead proclaims every human being is of irreplaceable worth from conception to natural death, and we are bound to one another as neighbors and children of God. Too often political choices are framed as though if we act in our self-interest we are acting amorally, while if we act guided by morality we are acting altruistically. We must reject any such distinctions. If we are to succeed as a political party, it will be by articulating and demonstrating how moral politics (a politics rooted not in the performance of markets or the aggregation of statistics, but in the fundamental dignity of every human being), is in the self-interest of every single human being. Our politics have too long ignored the eggs smashed against The System. The coltan miner in the Congo who works as a virtual slave is the egg. The Chinese worker in the iPhone factory with suicide nets outside the windows is the egg. The dispossessed farmer in India is the egg. Our youth facing unemployment or prison are the egg.The laid-off factory worker in Ohio is the egg. The teenagers addicted to social media and unable to identify the cause of their increasing anxiety are the egg. But the wealthy professionals of Silicon Valley, DC, and New York are also the eggs, however convinced they may be that they (and the rest of us) are better off with smart phones and tablets and infinite options for streaming entertainment and meal delivery services than we would be with thriving local communities and strong neighborly and familial bonds. Their shells may strengthen the wall after they crash against it, but they are still fundamentally smashed eggs. Telling people the things and systems they believe are making them happier and the world better are actually making them more miserable and the world worse will not be well-received. This was a truth faced by Christ, faced by all the prophets. It will indeed be mocked by many. But we will never succeed as political party by chasing people where they are. There are two political parties in this country with incredible resources and with brands, however damaged, that are known by all. We cannot hope to beat them at the game they themselves crafted. Even if we were to devise the most popular combination of policy positions and the cleverest of messaging, as long as we were not threatening the current power structure in any great way, that platform and messaging would just be coopted by one (or both) of the two existing parties. We face, even among ourselves, even within ourselves, a failure to imagine alternatives, a desire to fall back upon the same answers which have inadvertently wrought the destruction and stalemates we currently struggle against. The temptation is overwhelming: trust that this time the self-proclaimed experts will get it right. They may not have changed the goal, they may not have even understood the criticism leveled against them, but if we would just put aside our pesky devotion to ideals of localism, our recognition that healthy families and communities are the best guarantees of health and happiness, then our flying cars will be just around the corner. Or self-driving ones, at least. In spite of the temptations which beset us to abandon our commitment to our principles, the American Solidarity Party possesses a virtue which is the key all other third parties in our country have lacked: central to our identity is our belief in the irreplaceable sacredness of every human life. If you believe all people contain within them the Imago Dei, the image of God, then no person can be a means to an end. No person is only a vote. No person is just a path to power. No strategy is more important than a human being. We are not means to an end: we are ends in ourselves, and the end is greater than mere power. It is greater than mere speed. It is greater than mere credentials. Thus our party has written into itself a principle which is also a gift: the gift of being able to put down our megaphone and meet our neighbor not just with words on our lips, but with ears to listen. We can encounter human beings as opposed to simply yelling at them. With the most firm and loving of all first principles as its foundation, the American Solidarity Party is better equipped than any party in US history to love our members rather than use them. We have built our party upon something greater than ourselves. We have built our party upon our common humanity, rather than narrow self-interest. It is easy to say the time we live in is dark. It is harder to say what we in this room, or the American Solidarity Party as a whole, can do about it. It is hard to know in any moment where in the ebbs and flows of history we stand, or how far things can go in any one direction before a critical mass will decide they have gone too far. We should do all we can to build a raging fire, but accept that for this moment in history, our role might be to merely light a spark, or gather kindling, or simply to keep the wood dry. What we absolutely cannot do is to accept the darkness and hope our eyes adjust to it. We will leave here today and return to the difficult, perhaps impossible task of pushing back against a culture of death and despair. All around us will be eggs undergoing the slow, horrible process of being smashed. We will hear the familiar and exhorting commands that we acquiesce to the solutions offered by the powerful, to the promises of false compromises and shallow dreams. People and pundits alike will chide us for our idealism, pushing always for the lesser of two evils, and never daring to articulate a true good. We will constantly be steered towards the lowest common denominator, while told we should rejoice at what is clearly only a quickening degradation. The weight will be heavy. We will be surrounded by temptations to throw in the towel, to acknowledge the egg is too fragile, and we are too weak, the world too strong. But let us remember this: the American Solidarity Party holds up the pelican, an ancient but persistent presence in Christian iconography. Legend testifies the mother will pierce its own breast in order to feed its young. Rather than squawking like seagulls or hovering like a vulture, it silently observes the pain of hunger and asks itself what is lacking. Then she looks to herself for the change its young depend upon. The pelican exemplifies the "revolution of the heart," the seeking of the common good before its own. The pelican's sacrifice brings strength and health; the beauty of the sacrifice inspires our devotion to something higher than our appetites, to things which have no price, and inspires us to value love over power. We look at the pelican in awe and joy, and are thus transformed. Perhaps it takes a pelican to protect an egg. by Charlie Jenkins Why Labor Day is Truer to Labor Tradition than May Day
There was an autoworker, Ben Hamper, who used to publish a column in the Flint (later Michigan) Voice, an alt-weekly where Michael Moore made his name by founding. A lot of Hamper's columns were later collected and repackaged in an excellent book, "Rivethead." Hamper was born in 1956, a fairly clever kid growing up in Flint, Michigan, the chronological and geographic apex of American industrial unionism. Every kid's father worked for GM. Hamper could have gone to college, but he impregnated a young woman, and so went to work on the assembly line. His reasoning does not show a sense of obligation, or that infamous Catholic guilt as a source of motivation for leaving the college path, but because the factory path seems as good a life course as any other. It’s what every man he knew had done, and under the mighty UAW the pay is on par with the kind of “educated” jobs you could get anyway. Why not? So Hamper went to work on the line and eventually ended up writing a column about it. In his columns he talks about the color of the factory culture, playing soccer with rivets for balls and cardboard boxes for goals, drinking mickeys of malt liquor in your car on lunch break, the absurd fur-suited mascot “Howie Makem, The Quality Cat” GM would feature at rallies and shop-floor tours, being laid off in economic downturns and put into the “job bank” where you get paid waiting to be rehired in the next upswing, and developing a perfect rhythm with your partner, developing into a harmony so perfect you can each trade off doing the two-person job yourself for 4 hours while the other one goes out to a bar on the clock. It was the dignity and solidarity of the American worker. Time passed and eventually his marriage fell apart but he took it in stride, and his column was recognized and he takes pride in its fame. Then eventually he had an epiphany, and a complete breakdown, which are basically the same thing. The inciting incident is when an older line worker, some guy he’d looked up to as a model of quiet, philosophical stolidity, just literally shits himself and is barely coherent enough to even notice what has happened. At that moment Hamper realized this man he respected hadn’t been some sort of Zen master, he’d just been a checked-out mindless drunk on the line every day. And he realized the rivethead life is destroying him, that the only thing holding it together was a budding alcoholism, and it’s working the same slow poison on all his co-workers. He looked back even further and found it had done the same to every grown-up man he knew as a child: his father and uncles, men he had looked up to as models of masculine strength and fortitude, actually had just had their spark snuffed out and the life beaten out of them years earlier. Whatever pride they took in the cars out on the road was a defensive attempt to locate in an external form the sense of self-value that had been exterminated within them. When Marx talked about “alienation”, well, this was it. And so Hamper went mad, and couldn’t bear to work on the line anymore, and there’s no redemption, and that’s where the book ends. And that is what I want to stress. There were two great working class traditions that echoed through the ages, and they were: 1) avoiding work and 2) drinking Back in the pre-mechanized age of small-group workshop manufacturing, workers would celebrate “Saint Monday," which was simply not showing up for work, as they were hung over after the weekend. This was a riff off of Catholic feast days, or holy days, from which we take the word “holiday." As time went on they counted an increasing share of the days of the year. There was a reason poor workers were aligned with the Church, and nobility, in “Altar and Throne” coalitions resisting the development of industrial capitalist liberal democracy. We see in our own era, particularly the 1980s which were a miserable time in the American auto industry, that one trick which was passed around (pre-internet, so by word of mouth largely) was to look at the codes stamped on car bodies, which would tell you what day of the week they were manufactured, and thus workers knew to avoid Mondays and Fridays. Those days had the highest defect rates, because the workers tended to be drunk, or hungover, or absent. And back in the workshop days, you’d drink at work. Apprentices would be sent out for growlers or buckets of beer, and there were elaborate rules of who in the hierarchy of workers was expected to buy rounds for which person and when. There was hellacious resistance to attempts to get men to knock this off as the industrial era kicked into swing. Those great satanic mills, where women and children worked in shifts at great water-or-steam-driven sewing and spinning machines, which produced wrenching stories of small children having their hands mangled by the machinery? (Ironically, one of the great moral victories of the 19th century was supposed to be getting women out of the workplace, and one of the great moral victories of the 20th century was supposed to be getting them back in.) One of the major reasons women and children were preferred was because they would actually show up on time every day, and stay sober around all those hand-mangler while the men were drunk. Some of this may sound like an argument for socialism and worker-owned factories. But as capitalist propaganda will also be glad to tell you, Soviet work culture, at least when the morale thrills of the Revolution and Great Patriotic War faded from personal to institutional memory, was all about shirking and vodka. So when we hear those complaints about how America celebrates Labor Day instead of May Day, ignoring the true meaning of labor - solidarity - in favor of mindless distraction? Psssh. Labor Day is a celebration of the truest, most ancient, most fundamental traditions of labor: not working (especially on Mondays), and getting drunk. by Kyle Herrington
“X group of people won't change. X are evil. X must be stopped at all cost. #PoliticalTwitter” Contra the hope and optimism trumpeted after the election of President Obama, the current mood of American politics (most visible on social media) is a disbelief in change. We believe that even with dialogue, debate, and pertinent evidence, people won't change their minds about community issues or policies. Instead, we assume if a person is wrong about an issue (abortion, tax policy, climate change, social justice, etc.), they are completely wrong and probably evil. Such a mindset exonerates us from having to make our case, therefore we can reduce people to their stances and promptly call them names, all while we feel good because we “did something” about an issue (which usually amounts to merely announcing where we stand and denouncing anyone who disagrees). If we push this logic further, we get a justification for the use of force to inflict the decisions of a government body or political committee into people without input from those affected or open debate. The explosion of data and the mechanical way in which we increasingly approach policy has exasperated this problem. “These people are wrong and/or evil. They are irredeemably wrong because they are ignorant (probably willfully) and hateful. For the good of the citizen (and my own conscience), such and such policy must be implemented, regardless of what others think. Those who disagree with us must be silenced, ignored, or physically assaulted. #Solidarity (except for those idiots I disagree with).” This mindset is antithetical to a belief in the common good and solidarity with our neighbors. We must respect our neighbors enough to listen to their (crazy or stupid) opinions and respond with the best argument for our position while addressing our neighbor's concerns. Common good and common ground solutions aren't going to fall from the sky or magically show up in the divided halls of the national congress. Such policies are going to have to be developed, honed, and articulated by those willing to put in the work for the common good, which is a long and mostly thankless job. We have to articulate these goals with respect and charity. Paving a way for the common good in our politics is going to take time and heartache in trying to convert people to our views, but that is the true change we must believe in. |
AuthorsTara Ann Thieke Archives
April 2018
Categories
All
|