An extraordinary event occurred this past Friday, though its significance is likely to go unnoticed. In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, various medical experts and industry leaders gathered at the White House to announce to the nation various steps being taken collectively to address the virus’ looming threat.
This was an exceedingly rare instance of normally competing worlds agreeing to work together on a common problem for the common good. I was heartened by it.
Generally, in today’s economic climate, multinational corporations have little loyalty to the nations within which they operate. In an era of rampant financialization, the only loyalty is to the shareholder, not the country or its people.
When profits are made, often through arbitrage (favorable overseas trade arrangements, outsourcing of jobs – mostly to Asia – and mass immigration that keeps domestic wages low), companies pursue financial arrangements intended to create short-term benefit to shareholders rather than reinvesting those profits back into infrastructure, research and development, and provision for their workers.
The result is a country that is flush with cheap consumer goods but unable to create high value-added jobs or industries. The hollowed-out industrial areas of the upper Midwest speak to this in spades.
Within this scheme, the rich grow richer and the poor poorer (the shareholder vs the wage earner). Disparities of wealth grow ever more extreme. And increasingly the average person has very little say in the matter.
This Darwinian, dog-eat-dog world has been with us now for at least 40 years. And it’s only gotten worse, especially since the end of the Cold War – with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In his now-famous 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama voiced what many at the time had come to believe, that the West’s victory had effectively ushered in a whole new era, with a wholly new world order, one based on the West’s economic, cultural, and moral dominance and superiority.
From now on, a deregulated free market, orchestrated by a benign Western cultural hegemony, would create a future universally affluent, moral, and peaceful.
But with the subsequent and unprecedented rise of China (which, notably, has not fallen in line with anticipated democratic/liberal expectations) as well as the parallel growth of other Asian “tiger” states, the dream of this Western-led new world order has suffered a few sobering setbacks.
This is to say nothing of an increasingly distressed domestic front filled with low-wage service jobs, unemployment, and, in some instances, widespread opioid addiction. Even those in the upper income brackets face sizable student loan debt, rising healthcare costs, intense academic and vocational competition, and skyrocketing housing costs.
The failure of Fukuyama’s “end of history” scheme, however, betrays not so much a failure of Western culture as its distortion. It is instead the failure of the 40-year-old neoliberal consensus, whether of the neoconservative, progressive, Republican, or Democrat variety.
At root, the neoliberal consensus falsely assumed the mantle of traditional American democracy with its deregulated, laissez-faire characteristics, not just with regard to economics but social organization as well.
Which is to say that the society Tocqueville encountered in the 1830s was indeed pluralistic, comprised of interest groups that were “voluntary, competitive, and nonhierarchically ordered.” (Phillippe Schmutter)
Tocqueville embraced this innovative approach, seeing it as a system that enabled, as Gladden Pippen puts it, “different associations to vie for the attention of the common man through public arguments, meetings, literature distribution, and other classic techniques of American democracy.”
The situation today is radically different, however. While still outwardly advancing the tenets of pluralism, the combination of modern communications technology and targeted lobbying efforts has inordinately advantaged certain highly organized, moneyed interest groups over and against all others.
Additionally, the moral outlook Tocqueville so admired in early America, one that tempered competition between and among varying interest groups, can no longer be presupposed.
Not only did the Framers of the Constitution, like Tocqueville, assume a healthy civil society, they also assumed that representation in Washington, D.C. would accurately reflect the diverse geographical, social, and cultural differences within the broader body politic.
Today, however, according to a recent report in the New York Times, “more than 70 percent of House members [are] lawyers in private practice, businesspeople (including employees in insurance, banking, finance and real estate) or medical professionals.” Lawyers alone “constitute less than 1 percent of the voting-age population but more than a third of the House.”
In addition, these politicians are not just better at running for office but staying there. And rather than reflecting the broad interests of those they represent, studies suggest that politicians tend to vote with their own class and profession. So much for diverse representation.
So while the pluralistic-competitive system is being exploited by the savviest and wealthiest within the political and economic worlds, a similar phenomenon is occurring within the wider culture.
Identity politics and partisan interest groups vie for power and influence, working not as members of one body or community but as competing entities, even enemies. You’re either with us or against us. It’s a winner-take-all approach. The idea of working together in ways the early founders envisioned seems utterly quaint.
And since the mainline churches take their cues from the culture, the same can be said for church politics. Time and again I’ve witnessed social issues tear the church apart.
The reason is that these issues are approached not as matters to be debated among trusted community members, but as high stakes ideological battles where those you oppose must be defeated. You must win.
I recently came across an ordination paper written by a candidate within one of the major mainline denominations. No doubt parroting the latest thinking coming out of academia as well as, unfortunately, our seminaries, the pursuit of “power” was presented as a primary human motivation. I kid you not.
This, of course, makes perfect sense if the sole objective is to win. Wielding effective power ensures that your preferred interest or ideology “wins.” Then again, it also means those of differing views, by definition, must “lose.” Is this really the best way to run an airline?
The more obvious point is that love, not power, is the primary human motivation. Power is but a perversion of our deepest desire – to love and be loved. Power is nothing more than a tragically misguided substitute for love.
That the churches have bought into this deregulated, neoliberal, Darwinian free-for-all ought to horrify us.
Yet perhaps the COVID-19 will remind us once again of our common humanity – that we must stand together, respect one another, understand one another, and work together.
Otherwise, to state the obvious, we shall surely fall together.