{"id":33598,"date":"2023-10-23T12:52:57","date_gmt":"2023-10-23T19:52:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=33598"},"modified":"2023-10-24T22:41:13","modified_gmt":"2023-10-25T05:41:13","slug":"an-alternative-to-a-self-regulating-market-inconceivable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/an-alternative-to-a-self-regulating-market-inconceivable\/","title":{"rendered":"An alternative to a self-regulating market? Inconceivable!"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the 1987 film, The Princess Bride<\/em>, the character Vizzini, repeatedly uses the word \u201cinconceivable\u201d when things don\u2019t go as planned. Finally, Inigo Montoya responds: \u201cYou keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means\u201d.<\/p>\n

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog I titled \u201cWords Matter\u201d, admitting that I didn\u2019t fully understand the context of the word evangelical. For a person who has identified as an evangelical all his life, that was a hard pill to swallow. And now I want to admit that the last few weeks of reading and blogging have seriously challenged my perspective about the definition, and history, of the word capitalism<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Because just like I thought that evangelicalism had been a part of the religious landscape for centuries longer than it had, I believed capitalism (more specifically a version of it with a lazes-fair, self-regulating market) had been a part of the fabric of economic history reaching far beyond its actual emergence.<\/p>\n

In both cases, I failed to heed the warning of the Spanish Philosopher George Santayna who said, \u201cThose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.\u201d[1]<\/a> I think Polanyi and Weber were on a mission to help us not fall into that trap. Dr. Clark suggests that they \u201cwere acutely aware of the need for accounts of the history of things in order to understand concrete realities. They believed such accounts, if made, could help explain their own contexts, and serve as predictors of future situations.\u201d[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

That\u2019s been true for me. As I wade more deeply into the secular history of capitalism with Karl Polanyi\u2019s The Great Transformation[3]<\/strong><\/a><\/em>, I have come to better understand the economic context in which I live, and I have a slightly less opaque view of where the world might be heading. And perhaps even more basic and important, I\u2019ve come to realize that \u201cI\u2019m not sure that word (capitalism) means what I think it means.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a boy I was taught that capitalism was a broken system, but it was the lesser of two evils. And I use that word evil intentionally, as one of my earliest political memories was Ronald Regan decrying the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, and my young brain connected the dots from Russia\u2019s political enmity to the economic enemy of communism.<\/p>\n

In my mind, there were two choices: Communism and capitalism (when I learned about socialism, I thought that was just a \u201ckinder, gentler\u201d communism). Because it seemed we\u2014the USA\u2014were \u201cclearly\u201d on the right side of freedom, it followed that Regan\u2019s trickle-down economics and government philosophy of a hands-off approach to the market, must also have been right.<\/p>\n

Or at least a bit less wrong.<\/p>\n

Because even at a young age I struggled with the implications of capitalism. Though we had a strong protestant work ethic, my family was living off food stamps, and government cheese and peanut butter. I was living by a government safety net provided for individuals, and there probably needed to be some kind of government checks and balances for amoral corporations and greedy corporate leaders, too.<\/p>\n

But even though I was personally benefiting from regulation, the self-regulating-market narrative had a strong pull. Though I knew neither name, I was educated more by Adam Smith than Karl Polanyi. Though I was an evangelical who didn\u2019t accept Darwin when it came to his explanation of nature, I unknowingly embraced the survival of the fittest in our economic order.<\/p>\n

But the problem with the survival of the fittest is that whoever is strongest, fastest, and most cunning is the one who comes out on top; everyone else dies. For evolutionary progress that might work, but it doesn\u2019t reflect the way of Christ in our society or economics.<\/p>\n

I turn to Christ here because while there is so much more<\/u><\/em> to I\u2019d like to wrestle with from Polanyi about things like the utopian myth of self-regulating-markets, and the false narratives of labor, land, and money, and the concerns of risk, deflation, and social degradation, (and more) my chief concern in this blog post is not to regurgitate Polanyi, but to ask how the church might respond to these market realities?<\/p>\n

Last week in our cohort chat, Dr. Clark suggested that economists and theologians are often at odds because the theologians propose utopian economic systems that can never actually work. That helps me see as I navigate new learning about economic history and theory that my job isn\u2019t so much to dream up a new system that might work (that could never be implemented), but to understand the system that is and work to help the church recapture a biblical imagination and implement a Christian counter-cultural response to it.<\/p>\n

Quoting Clark again, \u201cIt is in recognising that the market is a society, and one that is religious in its nature and makeup, that we might discover the nature of a true and ongoing Christian countermovement.\u201d[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

In other words, if a self-regulating Darwinistic capitalism is just the unrecognized water we swim in, the church will never be able to live out an alternative to it. But the more we understand it as a different religious system, the better we can forge a different path.<\/p>\n

Like the early Christians lived within the context of Roman law and culture and religion but instead of trying to change it offered an alternative to it, could it be that when our economic foundations have begun to self-implode, and the world recognizes that a SRM is not the secular salvation they thought it was, that the church might be standing by with a better way?<\/p>\n

Inconceivable?<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> George Santayna, The Life of Reason<\/em>, 2nd<\/sup> Ed. (New York: Scribner and Sons, 1925).<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Jason Paul Clark, \u201cEvangelicalism and Capitalism: A Reparative Account and Diagnosis of Pathogenesis in the relationship,\u201d 122.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time <\/em>(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1944).<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Clark, 139<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the 1987 film, The Princess Bride, the character Vizzini, repeatedly uses the word \u201cinconceivable\u201d when things don\u2019t go as planned. Finally, Inigo Montoya responds: \u201cYou keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means\u201d. A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog I titled \u201cWords Matter\u201d, admitting that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":169,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2489,467,4],"class_list":["post-33598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dlgp02","tag-clark","tag-polanyi","cohort-dlgp02"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/169"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33598"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33612,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33598\/revisions\/33612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}