I recognize there is an inherent logic challenge with my blog title. By definition, one cannot see one\u2019s blind spots. If it were possible, they would not be blind spots. And yet, this week\u2019s readings pushed me to see the blind spots in the economic system that has been like what air\u2014polluted air\u2014is to my lungs. It sustains me but kills me at the same time.<\/p>\n
Western-educated, Pakistani professor, economist, and social scientist Dr. Asad Zaman captured my learning journey with Karl Polanyi\u2019s The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time[1]<\/strong><\/a><\/em> well when he said, \u201cA major obstacle to understanding Polanyi is the fact that living in a market society shapes our mindsets and behaviors, making it difficult to imagine radical alternatives. Understanding Polanyi requires standing outside the streams of history which have shaped modern societies, to see how our economic, political and social theories about the world have been shaped by external forces, and have evolved in time.\u201d[2]<\/a><\/p>\n But paradoxically, Polanyi, a preeminent economic historian, moved me to a deeper understanding of the pollutants in the economic air I breath through his thorough examination of the interacting economic and political histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He provides a historical map of the development of market societies, and in doing so gave me another way of navigating the questions I have been asking in my NPO about the relationship between social cohesion and economic justice. He wrote the first edition of this book between the first and second world wars and so wrote from the vantage point of living through the calamitous impact of market forces intersecting with fear and anger. This dance between the utopian belief in unfettered free markets and the human needs of individuals and societies that defy commodification is the center of Polanyi\u2019s argument. In a market society, human need is subordinated to the market. In fact, poverty is seen as a requirement by a market society. It drives people into the labor force. But societies can only endure so much pain before they react with regulations (or revolution) to restrain the dehumanizing aspects of the self-regulating market. This back-and-forth between the impersonal free market system and its focus on profits at the expense of everything else (whether human dignity or the environment), and the correctives and\/or restraints imposed on the market by governments and societies is what Polanyi calls his \u201cdouble movement\u201d thesis.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n In sharing my NPO\u2014especially the research I have discovered linking social cohesion with economic justice\u2014I hear from some in my circles of relationships, \u201cBut Jesus told us the poor would always be with us (Matthew 26:11).\u201d This is always said in a way that closes conversation and leaves me feeling both sad and disturbed. Now I have to wonder how much of that statement is blindly informed by the assumptions of our free market economy that depends on there being haves and have nots. Bryant Myers, long an evangelical activist among and with the poor, rebuts this attempt to shut down conversation. Jesus\u2019 comment references Deuteronomy 15:4-8, a powerful set of commands given to the ancient Hebrew people. Myers comments: \u00a0\u201cThere will be poor in Israel, not because God\u2019s Promised Land failed to provide, but because human beings were not faithful to God nor to each other. There has to be provision for the poor in the Promised Land, not because God failed or intended it, but because Israel failed.\u201d[4]<\/a><\/p>\n Jason Clark\u2019s work, Evangelicalism and Capitalism: A Reparative Account and Diagnosis of Pathogeneses in the Relationship<\/em>,[5]<\/a> engages biblical\/theological reflection with Polanyi\u2019s historical analysis, using Polanyi\u2019s argument to further his investigation into the role evangelicals can play in repairing the societal harm caused by the self-regulating market system. He lives with the abiding hope that evangelicals will not ultimately fail in their call to place economic structures at the service of society, rather than society being enslaved by an economic structure. That is my hope as well for my developing NPO. But I will need to further steep myself in Polanyi\u2019s work so that I have a more developed map to navigate successfully around (or through) my blind spots.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Polanyi, Karl. 2001. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time<\/em>. 2nd Beacon Paperback ed. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Zaman, Asad. 2018. \u201cSummary of the Great Transformation by Polanyi.\u201d Medium<\/em> (blog). August 25, 2018. https:\/\/asaduzaman.medium.com\/summary-of-the-great-transformation-by-polanyi-c329541e8532<\/a>. Accessed 03-03-22.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Polanyi, 79-80.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> \u201cWill the Poor Always Be With Us?\u201d n.d. Christians for Social Action. Accessed March 3, 2022. https:\/\/christiansforsocialaction.org\/resource\/poor-always-with-us\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n