John's Blog: Distributive Justice (Part 2 of 2)
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Distributive Justice (Part 2 of 2)
The following is the second part of a guest article from my friend Mark Tesny in Cleveland. He wrote it (paraphrasing The God We Never Knew, by Marcus Borg) as an email message to a bunch of us, and I am posting it here with his permission.
Consider the messages that we get from our culture, you know, contemporary American proverbs, slogans, advertising lines, etc.
Be all you can be, Whoever dies with the most toys wins, Work hard and you'll succeed, Plan for retirement, Government is bad, Life is about having and consuming, Be slender, Enjoy yourself.
None of these is a community value. Once in a while someone will suggest as a slogan the Golden Rule or love your neighbor as yourself, but that's about it. There are no messages about working for a just society, or having an obligation to future generations, or building the kingdom of God on earth. Everything is concerning the individual.
For many of us, significant religious issues concern the individual as well, whether those issues are of salvation in an afterlife, or individual righteousness, or peace of mind, or personal spiritual development in the present. Individualism leads to individualistic interpretations of the Bible. Passages such as "the poor you will always have with you" or "whoever does not work shall not eat" are much better known than prophetic passages about justice. "Render to Caesar that which is Caesar's, and to God that which is God's" is frequently understood as establishing two separate realms--a public one of politics and economics and a private one of religion and God.
When contemporary American Christians become political, they tend to remain individualistic in their thinking. Among the "religious right," the most visible form of Christian politics today, the central political issues concern individual behavior. Many issues involve sexuality: abortion, pornography, homosexuality. The issue of "welfare mothers" often becomes an issue of sexual morality, and the welfare debate becomes a debate about family values. The political vision of the religious right is for the most part an individualistic politics of righteousness, not a communal politics of compassion.
Beyond Christian circles, our ethos of individualism pervasively affects our political life. When we think about politics, we think individualistically, The reason the poor are poor is because of individual failings, not because of social and economic policy. The solution is individualistic as well: the poor need to develop a work ethic and embrace family values. Antigovernment sentiment and the tax revolt also reflect the triumph of individual values over community values: we think we shouldn't have to pay taxes for the well-being of the community as a whole.
Our ethos and politics of individualism affect our economic life, generating a society with increasingly sharp social boundaries based on wealth. There are other important social boundaries as well, including race, gender, sexual orientation, age, physical ability. But we have made progress in all of these areas in the second half of this century. Though all require continued attention and vigilance, I do not know anybody who would say we are worse off now in these areas than we were at mid-century.
But social boundaries based on wealth have become sharper. The U.S. over the last thirty years has seen a growing gap-indeed, a deepening gulf-between the rich and the poor. The gap is significantly greater than in any other developed nation. During the 1980's 90 percent of the total increase in income went to the wealthiest 20 percent of the population. The bottom 80 percent made do with the remaining 10 percent increase. In 1963, the ratio of CEO salaries to average worker salaries in a company was 41:1. Now, the ratio is 225:1. Moreover, the gap between the rich and the poor is the result of social and economic policy, not because some people have worked harder and others have slacked off over the last thirty years (all of us, according to most studies, are working harder). The difference among countries generate the same conclusion: social policy, not simply individual effort, is responsible for the distribution of wealth. Our recent social policy may not have intended to produce this result but it has. The consequence is increased suffering and desperation among the poor and potentially grave consequences for the society as a whole.
Moreover, many people in the middle, who are most often struggling financially, support the individualistic ideology underlying our social policy-namely, the notion that we each have worked hard for what we have and ought to be able to keep all of it, that government is bad (or at least inefficient and wasteful-and hungry for our tax dollars), and that things will be better for all of us if we let the wealthiest people in our country make and keep as much money as possible. Many of us seem not to realize that the people who benefit the most from our politics and economics of individualism are the wealthiest 10 percent, especially the top 1 percent. People will support a tax cut that saves them $300 a year, without considering that the same tax cut will save the very wealthy tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands a year, with significant damage to the social fabric, including not only decreased help for the poor and disadvantaged but also cuts in services such as public schools, road repairs, parks, libraries, and so forth.
Thus our culture's ethos of individualism generates a political ideology of benefiting elites in particular. It legitimates their place in society: if you have prospered, it's because you have worked hard and made good use of your opportunities; you deserve what you got. It legitimates social and economic policies that increase private wealth and generate public poverty. It legitimates blaming the poor.
The conclusion is that we have an elite-driven social and economic policy.
I noted that Borg points out that the indictment of an elite-driven social policy is not an indictment of the American middle class. The point is not that there is something morally wrong with a middle-class standard of living. Rather, the issue is the political values and attitudes that are widespread in our culture (including among the middle class) and the need to change our politics of individualism to a politics that recognizes the indispensability of community. The appropriate response is not "feeling guilty about what I have" but a different political vision.
The solution:
I don't know. Can any political theorists or economists come up with a different political vision that is more communal? Or change the existing political structures?
As far as voting goes, I do know that I will not be supporting President Bush who caters to the elites of this country at the expense of everyone else. I will be voting democratic.
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