What price community? (2)

This follows from my last post on this subject…

From Beck’s second post on this theme:

Many theologians consider bourgeois existence to be a kind of spiritual failure. Its focus on personal  discipline (e.g., piety, prudence, thrift, sobriety) and its role as the engine of market economies makes bourgeois existence a pale vision of what Christianity should be or aspire to. Thus, there are frequent theological calls to reclaim or rediscover an identity, ethic, or mode of living that pulls us out of bourgeois existence. Christian living is to be more than personal piety and self-control. The Kingdom of God should not be squeezed into the bourgeois work week. A Higher Time, a Liturgical Time, should rule our lives rather than punching the bourgeois timeclock.

But for over 200 years, from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution to this very day, these theological appeals … have had little effect…

Why is bourgeois existence so resistant to change?…

The bourgeoisie have been then most effective psychological and sociological innovation the world has ever seen in creating both social peace and freedom from debilitating poverty. Consequently, any alternative mode of existence or identity will have to be equally if not more effective in creating peace and prosperity…

And then Beck develops an argument based around Malthusian thinking. In Malthusian terms, circumstances which drove the death rate up before 1800 were socially useful, in that they reduced the number of people clamouring for the ‘pot’ of communal wealth. Conversely, anything, post-1800, that preserved life (better sanitation, peace, etc) was (again, in Malthusian terms) unhelpful: the more people lived, the less material benefit there was to go round for each…

In the Malthusian era a Christian "peaceable kingdom" ends up creating poverty and war. And this isn't the result of intrinsic human sinfulness. It's a birth rate issue. Peaceable kingdoms grow populations. And it doesn't matter how much you share in your church and have "all things in common." If the population keeps growing eventually you have nothing to share with…

Beck says:

Unless wealth is created we remain stuck in the Malthusian situation where good is bad and bad is good. The only way to get out of the Trap is to create wealth commensurate with population growth. If that can happen, if wealth can be created, then we can escape the Trap. Once out of the Trap the world looks more sane. Peace and charity come into their own as the virtues we know them to be: Good things for us and the world, short-term and long-term. But we have to get out of the Trap before that can happen. And guess who got us out of the Trap?

The bourgeoisie.

In his third post, Beck develops this further.

…in 1800, something remarkable happened. Average personal income began to rise and it has yet to stop rising. Our world looks nothing like world of the late 1700s….

One of the things that has happened is a profound shift in the modern Western identity…There] was a new emphasis upon the "ordinary life" of work and family. Further, ordinary life was governed by self-discipline…

[T[he rise of this "disciplined society" was the result of changes brought about by the Protestant Reformation….

[T]he rise of the disciplined "ordinary life" helped to fuel the rise of market economies…

And so Beck concludes…

As I have noted, the bourgeoisie tend to get a bum rap from a lot of contemporary religious thinkers. To be bourgeoisie is to be a kind of spiritual sell-out. The bourgeoisie are the engine of commerce and capitalism. This stains them. Plus, morally speaking, the bourgeoisie tend to focus on personal self-discipline and family stability. That seems narrow when we look at calls for social justice. Plus, the bourgeoisie identity is autonomous and individualistic when we want Kingdom living to be communal, relational, and Trinitarian.

So many people struggle with the bourgeoisie, trying to squeeze more out of them. The trouble is, being bourgeoisie, they don't have a lot more to give. They work too much. Spend too much time with family. Water the lawn. Stuff like that.

But I'd like to argue, at least for this post, that the bourgeoisie changed the world and we should pause in every theological conversation and give them credit for that. More, theological conversation should be a bit awed by the bourgeoisie. What the church had struggled with for 1800 years the bourgeoisie remade in 200. So when we criticize the bourgeoisie we have to keep in mind that their revolution, as nerdy as it was, because that guy watering his lawn in black knee-high socks doesn't look like Stanley Hauerwas or Che Guevara to me, has been remarkably successful in reducing poverty and violence. More so than any other class or Christian motivated revolution. Might the bourgeoisie, as the Protestant Reformers hinted, be closer to the Kingdom of God than their Christian critics?

In comments later in the third post, Beck points out that his goal is about complicating the too-easy conversations we tend to have about capitalism. He has certainly achieved that for me!

It’s so easy to point at capitalism as fomenting greed and self. And I still would say that, in principle, this tends to be the characteristic capitalist effect. But Beck’s point is that capitalism has done plenty of good too, and that it forms, in present circumstances at least, an irresistible buffer to a Christian rebuilding of community built upon focus on the Other.

But there is a huge problem here, for me at least. I fully believe that the Gospel stands for more, much more, than personal satisfaction or individualistic destiny, or Malthusian demographics. Unless it is to be eviscerated of its very core - the teachings and actions of Jesus - the Gospel has to be about more, or the whole God project is done for. Just possibly it is done for, and finished, wrecked on the rocks of late Modernist capitalism. But, somehow, I doubt that. I guess I will (I want to) believe that there has to be more. And that more may be, just may be, God.

Where this debate will go, I have no idea. What I do know: where principled, valid, theology meets nitty-gritty human reality, the answers have to be delved for, and no facile assumptions made.