Living/Dying in the Capitalocene

The term Anthropocene is increasingly being recognized as a proper term to depict the current geological era, replacing the long-used term Holocene, the era that began some 11,650 years ago. This new term was helpfully explained in an article about two new movies that opened last week.*

Theologian Joerg Rieger, however, thinks there is a more accurate term to use for the present age, and he writes about that in his new book.

Joerg Rieger is a professor of theology at Vanderbilt University. He was born in Germany and will celebrate his 60^th birthday next week. An ordained Methodist minister, Rieger had already authored/edited 20 books when he joined the faculty at Vanderbilt in 2016. 

Theology in the Capitalocene: Ecology, Identity, Class, and Solidarity (2022) is the title of Rieger’s significant new book. Since I am also writing a review of it,** I asked GPT chat for help. Here is how they described the book:

Theology in the Capitalocene by Joerg Rieger is an important and thought-provoking book that offers a critical examination of the intersection of theology and capitalism in the context of the Anthropocene era.

Rieger’s book is not a quick read nor is it easy to digest all of his salient emphases. One criticism I have of his valuable book is the overabundance of references to other scholarly works.

This would be an excellent book for doctoral students writing their dissertations on related issues. But it may be overwhelming for the general public. And even I, who finished a doctoral dissertation over fifty-five years ago (though in a far different field), found his book challenging.

Here are some of Rieger’s main emphases that are worth serious consideration, and I am grateful to him for introducing each of these.

* Emphasis on the importance, and neglect of serious consideration of, “unpaid reproductive labor” that is directly linked to discrimination against women.

* Emphasis on the distinction between power and privilege. This has ramifications that are often overlooked.

* Emphasis on class as a societal structure rather than “classism,” which is largely based on stereotypes.

* Emphasis on “deep solidarity.” I have long thought that solidarity is something that we who are privileged, to whatever degree, can choose out of loving concern by becoming allies of those who are “underprivileged.”

While there may be reason to retain some of that emphasis, Rieger stresses that solidarity is a fact that needs to be acknowledged rather than something chosen in an over/under relationship.

All of these, as well as his prevalent emphasis on ecological concerns, are related to the pernicious power of capitalism in the present world.

My main criticism of Rieger’s book is his apparent belief that the serious ecological predicament facing the world today is a problem that can be solved. His position contrasts with what I have written over the past eighteen months about overshoot and the collapse of civilization.

Most scholars who are currently university professors and embrace deep ecological concerns hold the same position that Rieger does. The following words spoken in the 1930s are still quite relevant and true today: 

I can certainly understand why one in Rieger’s position would not want to publicly talk about the possible “end of the world as we know it” in a decade or two. If they believed that to be true, most high school students would likely decide that there would be no use going to college.

Rieger does show considerable compassion for the people who are suffering now because of capitalism as well as for the natural world that is being ravaged by the forces of capitalism, and I appreciate that concern.

Still, there needs to be more awareness that we who are now living in the Capitalocene era will soon be seeing massive numbers of people (and non-human life) dying in this present age because of the ever-expanding predicament produced by capitalism.

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* See “‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ tell the same terrifying story,” an intriguing July 19 opinion piece in The Washington Post.

** Last month I received a free Kindle copy of Rieger’s book by promising to write a blog article and/or review of it. The promise was made to Mike Morrell, who operates “Speakeasy,” a website that offers “quality books in exchange for candid reviews.” Here is the link to the rather long review I have written, subject to further revision. Among other things, that review amplifies the too-brief treatment of Rieger’s emphases given above. 

The Inevitability of “Progress”—and Collapse

This blog post is not a book review, but it is based upon a novel that I first learned about from Thinking Friend Anton Jacobs. The book in question is How Beautiful We Were (2020) by Imbolo Mbue. 

Author Imbolo Mbue was born in Cameroon (in 1981), educated in the U.S., and became an American citizen in 2014. She now lives in New York City with her husband and children.

Mbue’s debut novel is the award-winning Behold the Dreamers (2016) and was selected by Oprah for her book club. I am currently reading that intriguing book.

But soon after learning about How Beautiful We Were, I was able to check it out on Kindle from my local library and to read it in a few days. It is the poignant story of the people who live in Kosawa, a small village in a fictional African country.

On July 28 (see here), Anton cited what Yaya, the old grandmother, said about Christian missionaries who had come to that part of Africa when she was a little girl. She was troubled by what the missionaries said—and even though I was a missionary for 38 years, I found their talk troubling also.

But Mbue’s book is not anti-Christian. In fact, in “Acknowledgments” at the end of the book, she thanks her aunt “for making me go to Bethel Baptist Church, Kumba”—and says that “that led me to become the person of faith I am today” (p. 364).

The pivotal issue of How Beautiful We Were is corporate greed, which caused a severe environmental crisis in Kosawa and the surrounding area. Paxton, an American petroleum corporation, began working in that region, and their oil drilling operation led to massive pollution of the land and water.

An increasing number of children in Kosawa die from pollution-caused disease, and the once peaceful life of the Kosawa villagers is increasingly thrown into disarray.

The main struggle against Paxton is led by Thula, the most precocious child in Kosawa, who ends up spending years getting an education in the U.S. before returning to Kosawa to continue the fight against Paxton. There are often signs of apparent improvement, but the struggle ends tragically.

The novel begins in 1980 and concludes in 2020, the village of Kosawa gone, the descendants mostly working for Paxton in Africa or even in the United States. The older people still left in their native country woefully say,

Sometimes we ask our children about the cars they drive. The cars seem to be bigger than they’ve ever been, needing more oil. Do they think about it, about the children who will suffer as we once did just so they can have all the oil they want? (p. 358).

“Progress” seems inevitable when considering industrialism or capitalism. Rather than people maintaining their traditional way of life, the lure of money to buy those things that make life easier and, supposedly, more enjoyable is irresistible. And corporate greed is insatiable.

But as I have already written repeatedly this year, such “progress” leads to overshoot and the inevitability of the collapse of the world as we know it. As Thinking Friend David Nelson remarked earlier this week, “Uncontrolled capitalism is cancerous.” That is a primary reason collapse is inevitable.

When the collapse will come is not known, and action taken now can either hasten or delay the collapse. For example, the Inflation Reduction Act signed by Pres. Biden on Aug. 16 happily postpones the inevitable—but it does not remove the inevitability.

Someone anonymously posted (on Aug. 10) this comment on my blogsite: “We are always looking for an alternative to the only true solution—a radical change in how we consume everything—by consuming far, far less.”

I think that is certainly true—but highly unlikely to happen. The desire for upward mobility, which includes greater consumption, is boundless; the willingness to embrace downward mobility is rare—in spite of Henri Nouwen’s correct insistence that it is “the selfless way of Christ.”**

Sadly, as Jesus declared, “small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matt. 7:14, NIV)

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** See Nouwen’s The Selfless Way of Christ: Downward Mobility and the Spiritual Life (2007). I last read that book in Jan. 2021, noting that it is “a small but quite profound book that could/should be read often.”

“The Tragedy at Buffalo”: Reflections on McKinley’s Assassination

William McKinley was the third U.S. President to be assassinated—in just 36 years (plus a few months). He was shot 120 years ago on September 6 and died eight days later. What was behind that tragic event?  

Pres. McKinley shot on 9/6/1901

The Making of Pres. McKinley

William McKinley, Jr., was born in Ohio in January 1843. When he was still 18, he enlisted as a private in the Civil War—and 36 years later became the last President to have fought in that horrendous war.

Mustered out of the army in 1865, McKinley was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives just eleven years later. After six terms in the House, he served as the Governor of Ohio for two two-year terms.

In the presidential election of 1896, Republican McKinley defeated Democrat / Populist William Jennings Bryan and became the 25^th POTUS. Four years later, he was re-elected by defeating Bryan for the second time with 51.6% of the popular vote, up slightly from 1896.

McKinley’s election was due, in large part, to the financial support he received from the wealthy industrialists of the country. Bryan was the “commoner,” who had the support of the working class but with limited resources. The moneyed class won the elections for McKinley.

In his classic bestselling book, A People’s History of the United States (1980; rev. ed., 2003), Howard Zinn wrote that in 1896 “the corporations and the press mobilized” for McKinley “in the first massive use of money in an election campaign” (p. 295).

McKinley’s Presidency

McKinley’s support by the wealthy paid good returns for them. Early in the second year of his presidency, the U.S. went to war with Spain.

Three years before McKinley’s re-election in 1900 with Theodore Roosevelt as the Vice-President, the latter wrote to a friend, “I should welcome any war, for I think this country needs one.” And, indeed, that very next year (1898) the Spanish-American War began, and Roosevelt was a hero in it.

John Jay, McKinley’s Secretary of State, called it "a splendid little war," partly because it propelled the United States into a world power—with world markets. Indeed, under McKinley’s presidency in 1898, the American Empire emerged.*

Zinn quotes the (in)famous Emma Goldman writing a few years later that “the lives, blood, and money of the American people were used to protect the interests of the American capitalists” (p. 321).**

Indeed, the “military-industrial complex” was a reality far before Pres. Eisenhower used that term sixty years ago in January 1961.

Shortly after the brief war with Spain ended, the Philippine-American War started in February 1899 and was still in progress when McKinley was shot and killed.

McKinley’s Assassination

Leon Czolgosz was a Polish-American who, by the time he was 28 years old, believed, probably for good reason, that there was a great injustice in American society, an inequality that allowed the wealthy to enrich themselves by exploiting the poor.

Early in September 1901, Czolgosz traveled from Michigan to Buffalo, New York, where the President was attending the Pan-American Exposition (a World’s Fair). There he shot McKinley twice at point-blank range.

Czolgosz had clearly been influenced by the fiery, anarchist rhetoric of Goldman (1869~1940). But just as Nat Turner had misused the words of the Bible (see my 8/25 blog post), he misused the words of Goldman, who advocated dramatic social change, but not violence.

Even before McKinley died on Sept. 12, Goldman was arrested and charged with conspiracy. She denied any direct connection with the assassin and was released two weeks later. On Oct. 6 she wrote a powerful essay titled “The Tragedy at Buffalo.”

Goldman stated clearly, “I do not advocate violence,” but wrote in forceful opposition to “economic slavery, social superiority, inequality, exploitation, and war.” And she concluded that her heart went out to Czolgosz “in deep sympathy, and to all the victims of a system of inequality.”

At the end of October, Czolgosz was executed by electric chair—and Goldman continued advocating for the people Czolgosz cared about so deeply and sought to help in an extremely misguided manner.

_____

* “American Empire, 1898~2018,” my 1/15/18 blog post, elaborates this matter.

** Zinn wrote “Emma,” a play about Goldman that was first performed in 1977. I found Zinn’s play quite informative and of considerable interest. 

TTT #21 Too Little Is Almost Always Better than Too Much

For some reason, the 21st chapter of Thirty True Things . . . (TTT), which can be accessed here, seems a bit dated—but it shouldn’t. True, it refers quite a lot to ideas, books, and movements of the 1970s, but the problems being confronted then are still problems now, so I have no hesitation in linking this article to Chapter 21 of TTT.

What is the Problem?

My children probably didn’t appreciate me mentioning it so much, but from time to time I would say to them, “Too little is almost always better than too much.” That saying was not in harmony with the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, in which we were living then—or are living now.

In the United States, as in most of the “developed world,” the winds of capitalism have blown over the land so strongly that, fanned by the ubiquitous commercials on television, radio, and newspapers, the desire of most people is for more and more material things.

Generally, people don’t like to think about or use the word greed, especially in referring to themselves, but upon careful analysis it is hard not to think that that word is applicable to much of the consumerism rampant in capitalist societies.

Of course, greed means the excessive desire to acquire more and more, especially more material possessions, than what one needs. But the question is always about what is enough and what is, truly, excessive.

Compared to the vast majority of the people in the world, most of us middle-class people in North America, Europe, and Japan possess much more than we really need.

And considering the sizeable portion of the world’s population who live in poverty, the middle class, to say nothing of the upper class, definitely have excessive possessions. (Of course, many of those middle-class people, especially in this country, have excessive debts as well.)

So it was thinking about the problem of economic imbalance in the world, about matters of justice and equality, that led me to say to my children that too little is almost always better than too much.

What seems like too little is usually enough; too much is usually wasteful and/or extravagant.

Responding to the Problem

In the 1970s there was considerable talk among some people about “simple living.” John V. Taylor, a prominent British missionary and theologian, published in 1975 a thoughtful book called Enough Is Enough.

Back then, “Live simply so that others may simply live” was a popular slogan in some circles. The idea behind that statement, of course, is that those who voluntarily choose to live simply will have more resources to share with those who don’t have enough to live on. 

The simple living movement has been seen more recently: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Simple Living was published in 2000.

Caring for the poor has a long history in the Christian church. The current Catechism of the Catholic Church makes the RCC’s position clear: the Church’s love for the poor “is a part of her constant tradition.”

The same Catechism clearly declares, “Love for the poor is incompatible with immoderate love of riches or their selfish use.” It then cites the stinging words of Archbishop John Chrysostom (c.349~407): “Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life.”

Over-consumption is one of the ways in the contemporary world that the rich steal from the poor. That is the reason one of the things important for everyone to know now is that, especially when it comes to middle-class peoples’ stance toward material things, too little is almost always better than too much.

"Dung of the Devil"

Tomorrow (Feb. 10) is Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. For Christians around the world, this is the important 46-day period (40 days plus Sundays) of preparation for the celebration of Easter.

Although Ash Wednesday and Lent are now widely observed in Protestant churches, they started, of course, in the Catholic Church—and the main reason the Baptist church I grew up in, and most Baptist churches back then, didn’t observe Ash Wednesday or Lent is probably because they were thought to be Catholic practices.

While I have some reservations about the whole cyclical church calendar thing, I now acknowledge that there are good and important emphases in the observance of Ash Wednesday and Lent. I will be attending my church’s Ash Wednesday service tomorrow and observing some limited Lenten practices until Easter.

Pope Francis’ annual Lenten exhortation for this year was released on January 26. In a Religion News Service article posted the same day, journalist David Gibson wrote that in this year’s “message to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics,” the Pope uses “some of his most powerful language yet” in talking about “the corrupting influence of money and power.”

In his article Gibson also pointed out that the Pope has called the “unfettered pursuit of money” the “dung of the devil,” and he links to an address that the Pope gave in Bolivia in July 2015. Here is a bit from that powerful speech by Pope Francis:

Today, the scientific community realizes what the poor have long told us: harm, perhaps irreversible harm, is being done to the ecosystem. The earth, entire peoples and individual persons are being brutally punished. And behind all this pain, death and destruction there is the stench of what Basil of Caesarea – one of the first theologians of the Church – called “the dung of the devil”. An unfettered pursuit of money rules. This is the “dung of the devil”.

Some newspapers, such as The Guardian, the British national daily founded in 1821, reported on the Pope’s 7/15 speech under this headline: “Unbridled capitalism is the ‘dung of the devil’, says Pope Francis.”

Others pointed out, correctly, that that sensationalized headline wasn’t exactly true. The Pope went on to say (after the words cited above), Once capital becomes an idol and guides people's decisions, once greed for money presides over the entire socioeconomic system, it ruins society, it condemns and enslaves men and women . . .”

So even though it is often difficult to separate capitalism from greed, it is the latter that can be, and has been, called “the dung of the devil.”

Just recently I learned about a Catholic group whose name is Malteser International Americas (MIA). According to this article, this year is their second annual “Make Lent Count” campaign. They emphasize that Lent is a time for giving and not just giving up.

________________February 10, 2016________

Parenthetically, this same group has recently taken action in South America to protect women and their unborn babies from the Zika virus. (See this article.)

In January of last year I wrote about Super Bowl Idolatry, which seems to have gone unabated this year. But the Pope’s warning is about the idolatry of greed, which is not unrelated to activities surrounding the Super Bowl but is of much greater importance—because it is worldwide and year-round.

The practice of giving up something for Lent—or of extra giving during Lent as the MIA and other Christians emphasize—is important as an antidote to the ever-present tendency to step into the dung of the devil.

*****

500^th Post

      The first post I made in this blog was in July 2009, and it was very short and tentative. Counting that as the first, though, this is now my 500^th blog posting. At this point I don’t know how many more there will be—probably I won’t make it to 1,000—but I plan to keep on at the same pace in the foreseeable future.

I am grateful to all of you who have read many, of even some, of my articles. My special thanks goes to those of you who have taken time to respond with posted comments and by email.

Enslaved to the System

What was the primary cause of the Civil War? Most Northerners, among whom I self-identify, would say that the War Between the States was fought mainly because of slavery and the desire to abolish such a sinful system.

But from the time of the War until the present many Southerners have disagreed. They would be more likely to say that the South launched the Civil War, which started 150 years ago last month, in order to protect their way of life and to preserve the rights of the Southern states.

And the Southerners may be right. It seems that freeing the slaves was not uppermost even in Lincoln’s mind at the beginning of the War. Preserving the Union was. Two years before becoming President he uttered the well-known words, citing Matthew 12:25, “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free.”

Slavery was certainly a pivotal issue, but preserving the Union seems to have been Lincoln’s major concern. During the second year of the War, though, Lincoln did decide that freeing the slaves was the right thing to do, and long before the War ended, on January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

But what about the argument of the Southerners; why do I say they may be right? I think it is clear that their major concern was, in fact, preserving their way of life. But the problem is, their way of life depended on slavery. The affluent lifestyle of the landowners was made possible only by their slaves.

Yet in another sense the Southerners were wrong: the war was about slavery. They, as well as most Northerners, were enslaved to the system, the system of capitalism. And in the South capitalism depended on the continuation of slavery.

Capitalism is a great system for those who have capital. It is not so great for those who have nothing to sell but their labor. And it was an extremely bad system for those who were slaves of the capitalists, which is what all slave-owners were.

So it can be argued that the central issue of the Civil War was largely an economic one. The Southerners did not particularly hold animosity toward their slaves. True, some slave-owners did mistreat their slaves just as some farmers mistreated their horses. But most didn’t.

The Southerners didn’t favor slavery because of their dislike of those dark-skinned people who worked for them in the cotton fields and elsewhere. They supported slavery almost entirely for economic interests, although there were other personal benefits that accompanied having slaves in the household.

Those who had the biggest financial stake in preserving slavery tended to be the biggest supporters of the Civil War, and most of those who fought against slavery were largely those who had few, if any, direct economic ties to the system of slavery.

And now in the 21st century, perhaps most of us in this country, and especially the politicians in charge of the legislative and executives branches of the government, seem to be largely enslaved to the corporations, the bastion of capitalism, just as the Southerners were enslaved to the system of slavery in the middle of the 19th century. 

When and how will emancipation come this time?

Who Loves Capitalism?

My previous posting was about income tax, and I am continuing to think about economic matters in this article. Just the evening before Tax Day, June and I watched Michael Moore’s 2009 movie “Capitalism: A Love Story.” We thought it was a good movie. But there are those who not only don’t like it, they hate it.

I was a bit surprised that the movie included brief comments by a retired Catholic bishop from Detroit and two other Catholic priests, who were all quite negative in their comments about capitalism. But through the years there has been a rather long line of prominent Christians, Protestants as well as Catholics, who have been critical of capitalism.

As you know, those who are conservative politically are strong opponents of President Obama, and there has been a steady stream of criticism calling him a socialist and decrying his leading the country into socialism (or even Communism). His pushing for the healthcare reform bill, of course, has been one of the main reasons for that attack. And, in fact, the President is probably just one of many prominent politicians who are somewhat critical of capitalism.

In the previous posting, I mentioned Ronald Dellums, the current mayor of Oakland (CA). He served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1971 to 1998, and he was the first openly socialist congressperson since World War II. Although I have known of him since the early 1970s because of his opposition to the Vietnam War, I did not know until recently that he is a democratic socialist. But I was not surprised when I learned that.

Are you aware that Bernard “Bernie” Sanders (1941), the junior U.S. Senator from Vermont serving in his third year, also describes himself as a democratic socialist? He is said to be the first open socialist to serve in the Senate. There are, of course, many others, mostly liberal Democrats, who are regularly charged with being socialists. And maybe a number of them are democratic socialist sympathizers. But is should that be considered a bad thing?

If even half of the things Michael Moore says about capitalism are true—and probably more than half are, in fact, true—then it seems to me that followers of Jesus Christ ought to be among the leaders of those seeking an alternative economic system, or at least modification of the present capitalistic system.

Thankfully, there have been some modifications through the years. Michael Harrington (1928-89) was one of the outstanding socialist scholars in the twentieth century. Perhaps his most influential book was The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962), a work that had an impact on the Kennedy administration and on Johnson’s subsequent “war on poverty.”

So, who loves capitalism? Primarily, those who have capital. And it probably can be said that, in general, the more capital one has, the more that person loves capitalism. But there is little love for capitalism by most of those who live in “the other America,” and also by those who are most concerned for people living in poverty.