The Spiritual Discipline of viewing from the margins -why do it?

It is actually pretty shocking to read the results of research into human prejudices based on looks. I can't now recall which USAmerican comedy series had an episode where one of the characters who has been blind to how his good looks have (exageratedly) tended to give him a free pass and a bye in all sorts of situations, gets a glimpse of how the other moiety lives. It should be required viewing!
Here's a synopsis of some results: If You Look Like This, Your Pay Check Will Be Higher Than Average - Business Insider And basically it's telling us that "Numerous studies have shown looks can impact career advancement. Some say physical appearance matters even more to employers than a cover letter.   Researchers have found that facial structure, hair color, and weight all can affect our paychecks.We can't help our genes, but some of them may be helping us more than others."

It probably starts really early in life. I seem to recall from primary school that those who had physical characteristics that were regarded as pleasant or desirable (and here I mostly mean in non-sexual terms since I think that 8 year-olds are not so tuned in to that dimension of attractiveness) tended to get preferential treatment from peers. And those of us with characteristics considered less desirable (red hair, very thin, plump, too fair, too brown, freckles ... to pick some that I recall) tended to be passed over.

The Biblical stories up to and around I Samuel 16 are reminders that physical appearances and prowess can be overrated and cause us to miss the real worth of what people who appear unprepossessing have to offer.

However, I find myself wondering beyond the almost truistic status of this observation to think about how we can and should do something about it. Clearly in some HR policies about recruitment, we get some sense of how this might be: eliminating things that give obvious clues about race, sexual, marital, religious status and the like. Ruling out certain kinds of questions in interview. And some of this can look and feel heavy-handed until you realise how deeply seated our prejudices often are and how easily and naturally we go into (self-) justification of them.

This brings me to the importance of what I've called in the title of a new "spiritual discipline". That is to say "new" to the classical lists of spiritual disciplines, though in fact it is probably a spiritual perspective that calls on several spiritual disciplines in the classical sense.

I would hope that I wouldn't need to rehearse the reasons why a Christian would take it reasonably for granted that we should have a care for those who are disadvantaged, down on their luck or otherwise disheartened. The main dispute between Christians is about the best means to address this. However, I would suggest that as we are not immune from self-justifying memes, tropes and distortions of thinking, we need to make sure that we have means to persistently address such distortions.

I think that the insight that we understand our social world best if we make sure that we view it from the underside; from the perspective of those who are not thriving in it. I think that this is an attitude that grows out of consideration for the disadvantaged and marginalised. It takes seriously loving our neighbour as ourselves by 'putting ourselves in their shoes' and so contributing to avoiding patronising and superficial responses which in effect do not respect them and therefore are not loving. And if there is any truth to the thought that we respond best when we understand well, then we should be making sure that our understanding is well-informed by the perspective of those who have to see our human social world from a perspective of hurt, exclusion and/or inaccessibility.

We tend to judge -as that research indicates- by the trappings of success. This means that we tend, unless checked, to perpetuate the conditions that continue to favour the already successful or those who have characteristics we associate with it or that we just 'like'.

So to offset this, to become more neighbour-loving and to change and be formed in the likeness of Christ, we will do well to find disciplines to embody and enact seeing from the underside.

I hope I'll be able to post soon about what such disciplines are and how they might play with other more commonly recognised spiritual disciplines.

'Big Society –just continuing God's work' Is cameron right?

Speaking last night at his Easter reception in Downing Street, the Prime Minister reportedly said he was simply doing God’s work when he launched the “Big Society” initiative of volunteering and civic responsibility.

“Jesus invented the Big Society 2,000 years ago,” Mr Cameron said. “I just want to see more of it.”David Cameron: 'Jesus invented the Big Society – I'm just continuing God's work' - UK Politics - UK - The Independent: 

When I read this I felt that Cameron was both right and wrong: I warmed to his sense that we should be involved in the Mission Dei as defined by Jesus -the idea that God is up to something and that our task is to learn to be a part of it.



What the quote reminds me, though, is how easy it is to get something of our understanding of what God might be up to wrong enough to bring it into disrepute. in this case we need to think a bit about it to see where the difficulty lies.


There are two areas to check out, I think. One is characterising Jesus' teaching -or some significant aspect of it- as equivalent to 'The Big Society'. So, we are asked to identify the Conservatives' slogan with Jesus teaching in some way. Now this is being done without specifics. So first we have a vaguely defined political slogan which seems to be about people helping each other and supporting one another and we are being invited to link that up with, presumably, Jesus' teaching about loving one another. So far so good and in some ways fair enough. However, I would want us to notice that the very vagueness of the two ideas being brought together should be treated with caution. The Big Society sounds fine in headline terms but what dose it mean in context and in practice. On the other hand, Jesus' teaching also contains encouragements to forgive enemies, do good to the 'unworthy' and leave families (I know that needs nuancing but it should be there if only to undomesticate Jesus' teaching in this context) -which I don't see represented very strongly in Conservative visions of society -quite the reverse.

The second thing is more concerning, though. and it relates to the way that 'Big Society' or Jesus' message is framed within a 'bigger' narrative. In this case, it is a return to framing that has worked for Conservatives for quite a while: to claim Christian credentials on the basis of agreeing with the idea that individuals should be nice to one another; a privatised morality where the state is not allowed to encroach or extrapolate. In this version of gospel, I may give a homeless person money, a bed, a meal -whatever, but I should not look at the social and economic forces that might have brought about a situation where someone might find themselves in such a position. And I should not expect to address those forces through law, tax or education (for these are the forces that create Wealth).

Let's just remember, by way of context, that iIn Jesus' time, there was no prospect of government responding to need  such as that: the Roman state was set up to mine  wealth from the provinces and to reduce populations to slave or serf-like conditions so as to provide labour for the the better off and the only hope for the destitute was private charity.

I would argue, in a relatively democratic society where we recognise that there can be such a thing as systematic generation of inequalities (Roman society didn't quite manage to make that recognition), that the proper way to take forward Jesus' concern for the marginalised is to address the systematic causes and effects of unjust inequalities by collective action and use of collective resources. Besides, the record of 'wealth-extraction' systems such as the Roman State and neoliberal capitalism is lousy in respect of addressing compassionate priorities which are meant to be to the fore in 'Big Society' visions.

Remember, we ended up with things like public sewage systems, public roads etc because private enterprise can't do them properly (and in the only models where it can, private companies are fulfilling governmental contracts and can't apparently make a profit without state safeguards and injections of subsidy).

Philanthropy was tried and found wanting -take a look at Victorian Britain. It was found that to address need at the level required took more than charity, it took collective action by government committed to common-good. The Big Society should not be an alibi for trying to leave the common good up to the diminishing capabilities of the good-hearted. The truly Big Society would be bigger than private-enterprise part-time philanthropy; it would be big enough to start to address the scale of need and the systemic nature of it (which is actually also going to be the 'cheapest' way to do it in the end).

So the problem with DC's Big Society is that it is actually a way to avoid Jesus' priorities: remembering the poor, reintegrating the marginal, healing the sick in mind or body. This is because it is actually giving an alibi to making the lives of many vulnerable people miserable because they fall outside the capacity private-enterprise charity to pick up what the collective was just about able to do. Hoping that somehow an army of volunteers can be found among the overworked and a flood of money from the overmortgaged seems a recipe for disaster. Literally -because the costs of leaving the needs unaddressed or being addressed patronisingly by non-professionals are likely to be revolutionary or worse. To model our response on the best that could be managed within in the limits of an oligarchistic (even kleptocratic) empire when we have democratic government and a fuller understanding of things, is frankly a sleight of hand to preserve privilege.

This is a moment to remember that trickle-down economics has never really worked.

And, we are talking about the Jesus who said 'Woe to you who are rich now ...' and 'Blessed are the poor ...' aren't we?

The truly big society should help us to do things together that we can't do (so well) isolatedly and to do so in a way that helps promote a fair contribution from those most able to give it. It should be able to allow us to recognise that all, by virtue of being God's image and loved by God, have an equal right to develop their capacities, talents and abilities and to use them to support themselves and contribute to the common good which nourished and continues to support them. It should recognise that sometimes we must act to redistribute opportunity to prevent its oligopolisation by the privileged and that very often the carrier of opportunity is wealth.

So, yes, the big society is carrying forward God's work, but so is seeking to address the systemic evils which keep the poor poor and degrade the environment. Using the former to evade the latter is undermining God's work, I think, by making a narrower good a substitute for a wider good.

Just how rich someone on £150k pa is ...

Well, I've seen the threats about a brain drain and driving away the financially very successful. And it may be true. But apparently polls show that most Brits seem to support a 50p tax rate for earnings over 150k. And the reason we've heard the downsides first may not be hard to find: "Highly paid editors and proprietors do not much like the idea of being hit in the wallet, and will seek to convince readers that the move is a dangerous one. But there is also a more general failure on the part of the elite to grasp just how exceptionally rich someone on £150,000 - the new rate's threshold - really is."
Quite, and if you need more convincing, just look at the rest of the article. Remember the typical in UK is £16k. The real difficulty is that at 1%, the numbers earning £150k-plus are not great and the revenue is likely to be small (and perhaps shrinking if the 'brain drain' predictions are right). But let's recall that there is a moral case for progressive taxation. Part of that case is that it builds infrastructure that all benefit from, including the wealthy. Another part of the case is the research that shows more equal societies are happier. Another dimension is that by helping the poorer members of society there is a degree of enlightened self-interest for the rich: it helps reduce crime and envy on the one hand and to help make sure that the guilt/yuck factor of having to drive through squalor and deal with smelly people is reduced ;)
Budget 2009: Alistair Darling's 50p tax for high earners 'welcomed' | UK news | The Guardian:

Green economic development in Britain

Definitely worth looking at, this publication from NEF. Tackling Climate Change, Reducing Poverty Here's an example of good news which illustrates the point and why our government should be considering this path as a major part of its somewhat Keynesian plan to spend us out of recession: "in a deprived community in Braunstone, Leicester, an alliance of local groups helped raise funds for photovoltaic solar energy systems to be placed on the roofs of 50 south-facing houses. Local small firms were given training to install the solar panels, which have now cut carbon emissions on the estate and lifted residents out of fuel poverty"
And I say, perhaps this is another area that local churches ought to be looking at encouraging as part of their community development mission; something which should also build local resiliance.
See also this article in WorldChanging.

Marriage still in fashion – finances are the problem

At one level this is no surprise, though it is good to see some evidence-basis beyond the anecdotal and admittedly not-so-random sampling of personal encounter and conversation. This is the articleMarriage still in fashion – finances are the problem - Times Online: and here's one of the most important findings. "Of those cohabiting, eight out of ten wanted to wed. The most frequently found reason for wanting to marry was to indicate commitment, another large proportion saying that the institution provided a stable environment to bring up children." Which all sounds good. Though I'd also want to ask questions about the 'tell me what you think I want to hear' factor. In other words how far are these statements of aspiration to which respondents are reasonably committed and how far, like losing weight or giving up smoking, are they aspirations which are 'some other time, when ...'?

We are also told that "The main reason for not having yet married was having not met the right person, but almost a quarter of those surveyed said it was financial: either they could not afford the wedding or were waiting for things to improve, for instance so that they could buy a home". Again, anecdotal evidence is supported. And maybe this is a big part of the aspiration 'if/when ...'. The difficulty is that in the meantime, we have, consensually but not consciously, as a society, created a new pattern of pair bonding where formal, legal, marriage is a staging post later on. What is the new meaning for a wedding and a marriage in this case? It cannot mean what it did: the start of a committed and intendedly stable relationship which is safeguarded socially and in which children may be brought up. The privatising of the relationship may mean that many couples are 'married' well before their nuptuals, though the public side of that may be somewhat inconclusive compared to previous 'marriage'; are they intending a lifelong partnership or is this a trial-run? Is cohabiting mainly a convenience or a statement of intent? Now let's note that in some cases, particularly where divorce is easy and frequent, these kinds of questions adhere to marriage too. So this is not so much an issue about legal marriage as about a society's ability to sustain and nurture stable partnerships -whatever the recognition structures may be. We should note an important and likely interpretation of the results, "Marriage signals, rather than generates, commitment," The report itself, identifies the main factor to promote marriage and stability as being freedom from deprivation. Yet another piece of social research (and the linked post links to still more research) that indicates that if we want to build a society of greater 'moral worth', we have to pay attention to reducing absolute and relative poverty: otherwise all we are doing is letting the rich feel morally superior because of their good fortune or because they can hide from the injustice of how they gained and maintain their prosperity while blaming the poor who can't buy distance from their wrong.

Development aid in ICT

It's good to see FLOSS being in the forefront of enabling the two-thirds world to develop where ICT is involved. The EU has invested some money to research this.

The FLOSSInclude project will carry out an in-depth analysis of the technical, business and socio-political needs for the growth of FLOSS use, deployment and development in the target regions. The project further aims to build on the network developed during the course of the study to promote international collaboration between the EU and developing countries.

FLOSSInclude will expand on earlier work by some of the consortium partners, such as the groundbreaking FLOSSWorld study , by providing a rich contextual analysis based on the specific expertise and country experiences of the participating organisations and countries.

In pilot efforts, the partners will implement FLOSS solutions, tools and services to ensure they are cost-effective and practical for each environment. The result will be a roadmap for future EU development research cooperation, with concrete and validated solutions for clearly identified needs. Together with a massive push in dissemination and networking, the FLOSSInclude aims to ensure a lasting impact beyond the project duration.

Outsourcing: just colonial chickens coming home to roos

This article, They've sold off their souls is a quick intro to the way that the big global funds players are fastening down the profit motive hard into the companies they buy into and buy up. The result being that considerations that humanised capitalism in the recent past, about how the company's ethos was, keeping stakeholders sweet, motivating workers through vision and so forth, are being shed along with expensive first world workforces.

One of the comments (the 6th) is very much to the point, imho: "To talk about out-sourcing is missing the point. The issue should not be about trying to privilege ourselves by refusing to give jobs to overseas workers: the issue should be why we allow ourselves to retain a system that produces such startling inequality of wealth. The system has always been hugely unequal, but in the past we, the workers of the West, were bought off on the proceeds of screwing over the Third World: but now, as profits get inevitably tighter and tighter, our chickens have come home to roost."

Of course, the irony would be that this process could kill the goose that lays the golden egg: while most disposable income is in the west that's where the markets are -but only as long as people are employed and paid relatively well. Outsource too quickly and recession hits. It is probably true that there needs to be a global redistribution of income; this may be one way it could happen. The issue is how it can be managed so that chronic decline doesn't cause even moGuardian Unlimited | Comment is free | re suffering and so that many can be lifted out of poverty largely by their own efforts?

I need to reflect on this more, but I'm not sure, in the grander scale of things, outsourcing is necessarily a bad thing.

NeoLiberalism, wealth and poverty

David Harvey proposes in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, wherever the neoliberal programme has been implemented, it has caused a massive shift of wealth not just to the top one percent, but to the top tenth of the top one per cent(4). In the United States, for example, the upper 0.1% has already regained the position it held at the beginning of the 1920s(5). The conditions that neoliberalism demands in order to free human beings from the slavery of state - minimal taxes, the dismantling of public services and social security, deregulation, the breaking of the unions – just happen to be the conditions required to make the elite even richer, while leaving everyone else to sink or swim.

Given that a Biblical take on the world requires that we consider how things look from the perspective of those who get the rough end of the stick in this life (Eg. "Oppressing the poor in order to enrich oneself, and giving to the rich, will lead only to loss." Proverbs 22:16-16,) this observation should not pass without notice. Especially as it could be that this is an ideology in the Marxist sense of the term:

Their purpose was to develop the ideas and the language which would mask the real intent of the programme – the restoration of the power of the elite - and package it as a proposal for the betterment of humankind.

We should, as ever, note that neoliberalism has its blind-spots. It expects certain things to be in place that do not have a market, it relies on non-market mechanisms in order for it to 'work'. It is the selectivity that is galling not to mention that it simply is not true that it betters everyone.
Monbiot.com � How Did We Get Into This Mess?: "

Make wealth history

A new-to-me blog with an in-your-face title which I think I'm going to sub to. Here's what they are about.

we’ve chosen the pretty brash Make Wealth History as our name, mainly because it’s bold and memorable. It gets an immediate reaction and catches people’s imagination, but it does slightly overstate our case. There’s nothing wrong with wealth per se. In the right hands wealth can be a real power for good. ‘Money is the root of all evil’ is, after all, a common misquote. It’s derived from something the Apostle Paul said in the Bible, but what he actually said was ‘the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil’. I agree with that. It’s that ‘love’ that makes the difference - greed, avarice, the compulsion to aqcuire - that’s where wealth becomes harmful.

We’re not really against wealth. We want to see equality and justice, and an end to poverty and the abuse of the environment. In order for that to happen, we’re going to have to fight greed, unsustainable consumer habits, and wealth that is generated by exploiting others. And we’re not all negative either. We need to learn and promote new ways of using wealth well, to redistribute it, give it away, invest it in sustainable development and job creation, find ways to make that money go further and do more good.

wealth is not the enemy « MAKE WEALTH HISTORY

Technorati Tags: bligs, wealth, poverty, Christian

Why it's bad for the rich to get richer

I'm seeing quite a lot of stuff lately that seems to suggest that the kinds of inequalities that unrestrained market forces tend to build up are bad for us. Part of that 'badness' is the way that those who have tend to affect the rest.

First have a look at this research on the effect of money on altruism. The net result being

In a series of nine experiments, researchers found that money enhanced people's motivation to achieve their own goals and degraded their behavior toward others.

Then, in this Guardian article, a number of considerations about how increasing affluence for a few actually does not deliver net benefits for the many, rather the reverse.

high pay rises among the top 1% are as inflationary as wage rises among the mass of the population. It's just that this inflation affects assets rather than goods and services. For years our rulers have insisted that one worker's wage rise is another's job loss. It is equally true that one person's fat-cat bonus is another's loss of home ownership prospects. It may be a job loss, too, since the Bank of England's concerns about an overheating housing market may cause it to raise interest rates. ... More important, they can hire the best accountants to minimise or wipe out their tax liabilities. If an increasing proportion of national income and wealth is taken by a tax-avoiding elite, the tax base ultimately shrinks. Increasingly, we must look to the philanthropic efforts of the rich to relieve poverty and to create social assets such as schools and arts centres. That sounds fine in principle, and Victorian philanthropy, free from the stultifying effects of public bureaucracy, is often held up as a model. But the result is a step backwards for democracy, with the super-rich deciding our social priorities. ... there is overwhelming evidence that as inequality grows a country becomes nastier. In The Impact of Inequality, Richard Wilkinson, professor of social epidemiology at Nottingham University, shows rates of violent crime and racism tend to be higher where the gap between rich and poor is greater. So firmly established is the link between homicide rates and inequality, according to Wilkinson, that many criminologists regard it as more important than any other environmental factor.

The comments are interesting too.
The real issue, as ever, becomes 'what do you do about it?'. But at least we have the research to rule out of court the stupidities of trickle-down and 'a rising tide lifts all boats' because the reality is that, retaining the metaphor,

a rising tide only lifts the boats that have already had money spent on them and that haven't been filled with boulders and concrete

or holed!

Oppressing the poor in order to enrich oneself, and giving to the rich, will lead only to loss.
- Proverbs 22:16-16

A return to the politics of envy could serve us well | Guardian daily comment | Guardian Unlimited:

Trickle down economics is a myth

Neo conservative economics are betrayed by the figures and shown up for the ideological smokescreen they are.

the notion that global economic growth is the only way of reducing poverty for the world's poorest people is the self-serving rhetoric of those who already enjoy the greatest share of world income. Based on the global distribution of income in 1993, even if the benefits of global growth were distributed evenly, it would benefit someone in the richest 1 per cent of the world's population 120 as much as someone in the poorest 10 per cent.

So let's not take any more guff about the benefits of growth filtering down to the poor and 'a rising tide lifts all boats' -comforting but merely feelgood talk; it's just not true. For it to be halfway true, different systems of trade and finance would have to be in place. And consider the minimal cost meaningful redistributive policies would have...

poverty could be reduced without growth by more effectively distributing what we already have: For example:
* redistributing just one per cent of the income of the richest 20 per cent of the world's population would have the same benefit as world growth of 20 per cent without redistribution. This is over ten times the average per capita growth rate of global GDP since 1981;
* the rate of poverty reduction achieved between 1981 and 2001 could have been achieved through the redistribution annually of just one tenth of one per cent of the income of the richest 10 per cent of the world's population.

What needs to happen?

...a shift in power relations, both globally and nationally, to move power from developed countries, elites and commercial interests to the majority of the world's population, the poor.

Global democracy instead of the current oligarchy, no -plutarchy, no -kleptarchy.
world economy giving less to poorest in spite of global poverty campaign says new research:
See also http://nouslife.blogspot.com/2006/12/why-its-bad-for-rich-to-get-richer.html