Tom Power - July 11, 2005
Ideological and Spiritual Confusion
July 11, 2005
KUFM / KGPR
T. M. Power
Ideological and Spiritual Confusion
One of the most widely discussed aspects of the last national elections was the apparent willingness of voters to vote against what might have been seen as their narrow economic self-interest and vote instead on what came to be described as “value” issues.
This should not have been all that surprising. Most philosophic and religious traditions do not suggest that wealth and consumption are a reliable foundation for “the good life.”
The Christian New Testament is full of condemnations of a narrow focus on wealth:
• “Man shall not live by bread alone…”
• “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God…”
• “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth…”
• “…those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and hurtful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all evils…”
Just how Christianity made peace with capitalism, consumerism, and the affluent society is an interesting philosophic odyssey.
Both the left and the right have been distracted and confused on these “values” issues for some time.
The left for a century or more has focused on the economic insecurity that plagues working families in an unstable market economy. The Great Depression three quarters of a century ago brought liberals to power where they focused on trying to stabilize the national economy, promoting economic growth, and a wider sharing of benefits of that growth.
The right, freaked out by the oppression of officially atheistic communist regimes, uncritically embraced modern corporate capitalism, warts, waste, inequality and all. The left, equally freaked out by the totalitarian ideologies of both Stalin and Hitler that brought soul numbing destruction in their wake, fled from ideology all together, preferring to be pragmatic problem solvers. Ultimately liberals fractured into unconnected groups working on racial, gender, environmental, or labor problems.
The right never really abandoned its ideological focus. It reconstituted itself around an ideological agenda that included maximum individual independence, unregulated corporate activity, limited government, and privately supplied personal security through faith and the family. In doing so, the right easily linked its ideology to traditional American cultural icons.
Both left and right embraced a narrow economic definition of “the good society.” The result is the dominance of competitive consumption, increasing inequality, rising insecurity, and a growing time crunch that threatens out families and our mental health.
One dramatic symbol of to where our collective understanding of our society had descended came immediately after the 9-11 attacks when George Bush told us that the best thing we could do for our country was to go shopping. We were not citizens to be mobilized to help each other and help rebuild. Rather we were mere consumers who should not be asked to make any sacrifices, except for the young soldiers and their families who were called to war. The rest of us were to enjoy tax cuts, the temporary benefits of a ballooning federal deficit our children would have to pay, and the short term pleasures funded by endlessly rising credit card debts.
It is not surprising that many of us had doubts that this was the path to the good life.
The ongoing search for something more, largely unrelated to individual consumption, is found in a broad range of grassroots activities: efforts to improve the quality of life in our communities, efforts to shift priorities from commerce and profit to people and families, struggles to preserve threatened and disappearing natural systems, a growing emphasis on the need to create time in our lives for our families, especially our kids, and, overall, a skepticism about whether we can grow and consume our way to happiness, peace, and transcendence.
But as a nation we remain trapped in ideological and cultural confusion, denying the legitimacy of acting together to pursue any of these, insisting that we must let the corporate commercial machine role on unimpeded. The dominant ideology tells us that we must seek peace and security in a private religious world where the only legitimate use of government is to dictate how we are to live the most intimate aspects of our lives.
On both left and right, we know we need more that consumption and growth, but our past ideological traumas will not let us either talk about it or organize ourselves to get it.
The left needs to recover a broad popular vision also rooted in American traditions that lays out the elements of what more this country can be than one giant shopping mall. The right needs to see a corrosion of fundamental ethical and spiritual values in corporate excesses, the economic time crunch that is destroying families and lives, the accumulating environmental destruction, and our wasteful and distracting consumption.
Then, maybe, our political choices might mean something productive.
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