Well-bearded John and Leo say: "Thou must first look at the system to understand thyself."
John said to the crowds coming out to be baptized by him, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our father.' For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire."
"What then should we do?" the crowd asked.
John answered, "Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same."
Even tax collectors came to be baptized. "Teacher," they asked, "What should we do?"
"Don't collect any more than you are required to," he told them.
Then some soldiers asked him, "And what should we do?"
He replied, "Don't extort money and don't accuse people falsely--be content with your pay."
- Luke 3:7-14
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means--except by getting off his back.
- Leo Tolstoy, What Then Must We Do? (1886)
(This blog is in a series discussing the responses made by presidential candidates on their plans to address poverty and hunger. For more on that background go here.)
Swapping Lenses
Every now and then, I open up my iPhone to try and take a picture of something amazing in front of me, and am terrified when instead my own ugly mug pops up staring back at me.
I think something similar has happened in our culture over the past several centuries. We've been trying to get a good picture of the world, to really understand how and why it works the way it does, by snapping increasingly detailed pictures of ourselves.
Rene Descartes is often trotted out as an original instigator of this curious mode of thought. Doubting the truth of anything in the external world, he crawled inside the sensory deprivation tank of his kitchen oven to block out everything but himself. In that moment, he arrived at the infamous maxim: "Cogito ergo sum" - I think therefore I am. Me. That is the first and ultimate truth. My "i"Phone agrees.
Perhaps it started much sooner. Perhaps it began in 1442 when Portugal had the first forced European encounter with Africans on European soil. Like a good Christian, the King made sure to tithe on his new property. He sent several of his black-bodied slaves to work for the Church, and congratulated himself for his faithfulness.
Surely they must not have been looked beyond themselves in such a moment. If they did, they would certainly have seen the tears and anguish flowing down human faces made in the image of God.
Galileo and Newton might be "blamed" for institutionalizing the individualistic, self-focused point of view with the holy seal of scientific methodology. The new physics said if you really want to understand something, you have to isolate it from everything else and quantify its characteristics. Only by being as individualistic and "objective" as possible can we truly comprehend the world. Unfortunately, individualism and so-called-objectivity were only able to lead us back into ourselves and construct a view of the world that agreed with who we saw ourselves to be.
These days, something incredible is happening behind the scenes, off-stage of our reality tv politics and consumer culture.
A new paradigm in thought is taking the place of this old worldview. People are calling it a "second Enlightenment," a new Copernican Revolution.
Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer summarized these as a series of shifts:
Simple --> ComplexAtomistic --> NetworkedEquilibrium --> DisequilibriumLinear --> Non-LinearMechanistic --> BehavioralEfficient --> EffectivePredictive --> AdaptiveIndependent --> InterdependentIndividual ability --> Group diversityRational calculator --> Irrational approximatorsSelfish --> Strongly reciprocalWin-lose --> Win-win and lose-loseCompetition --> Cooperation
Why am I talking about this, and what does it have to do with addressing poverty?
Because they way we think about the world massively influences the way we create the world. And the way we assess the world completely determines the analysis we provide.
The old worldview taught us to look at individuals, to see things piecemeal, to think "mechanistically" and "atomistically." The new worldview draws us to examine the system.
In the old worldview, we (and by we I mean white people--particularly white, male Christians like myself) looked at ourselves as the starting place for truth and morality. We looked at those who weren't like us as the problem.
The great systems theorist Donella Meadows explained that if a person can make the shift, when something goes awry, "You'll stop looking for who's to blame; instead you'll start asking, 'What's the system?'"
It's time to turn the camera around.
It's the System, Stupid
In the US, something has gone unequivocally wrong. Inequality is soaring to the highest levels it's every reached. Millions of children go to bed hungry in the richest nation the world has ever seen. Simply affording a place to live is increasingly out of reach for a fast growing portion of the population.
Why is all this?
Meadows gives the example of a slinky.
If you put the two ends of a slinky on your hands and move them up and down, it bounces around and sends ripples from one end to another.
Why does it do this? Because you moved your hands up and down?
If you placed a book on your hands and moved them you would find the book react quite different, so that can't be the whole answer.
Rather, Meadows explains, "The answer clearly lies within the slinky itself. The hands that manipulate it suppress or release some behavior that is latent within the structure of the spring. That is a central insight of systems theory. Once we see the relationship between structure and behavior, we can begin to understand how systems work, what makes them produce poor results, and how to shift them into better behavior patterns."
So, why do we have poverty and hunger in this nation?
The first answer I want to suggest in this little blog series, as a direct challenge to the answers provided by almost every candidate for presidency, is that the causes of poverty and hunger lay within the structure of our system. And this structure lies far deeper than the difference between free-market capitalism aimed toward unrestrained growth prized by conservatives since Reagan and more government managed capitalism aimed toward unrestrained growth of liberals. Both operate within the same basic paradigms, and neither delves deeply enough to see the root causes. The roots lies in our histories, in the stories that guide us, and in the structures that often stay hidden behind the surface even while they form the rules and boundaries of our lives.
Consciously or not, the system is designed to produce the results we've gotten.
As a student of equitability and sustainability, I believe these outcomes are severely damaging to the health of every aspect of our nation: the rich, the poor, the middle class, the environment, our farmlands, and our cities. As a Christian, I find these outcomes morally reprehensible. We stand at a pivotal moment in history, one that requires us to begin to imagine and work toward a different system.
When we stop looking in the mirror for answers--when we start to listen to the voices of the suffering and allow their cries to lead us--we may return asking that same old question: what then must we do? And we might find ourselves wrestling with answers quite similar to John's and to Tolstoy's.
Moving forward, this systems lens will be a primary starting point for me in examining the candidate responses.
More on that to come.
