Tetzel on Craigslist: Commodification and the Demise of the Commons

In his incisive and thought-provoking new book, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, renowned political philosopher Michael Sandel invites us to step back and take stock of the results of the rapid expansion of market logic into every area of life that the last generation has witnessed.  Economics has transformed itself from a discipline concerned with the production, exchange, and allocation of material goods and services to a master-science claiming to describe the logic of all human social relations in terms of cost-benefit analyses.  In tandem with this theoretical shift has come the increasing subjection of areas of life once governed by non-market norms to the logic of free exchange driven by supply and demand.  Many today, including (perhaps especially?) many Christians may have difficulty in seeing what is wrong with this trajectory—after all, doesn't this represent the triumph of free, voluntary social relations over against coercive, top-down ones (for a critique of this gross oversimplification, see here)? 

 Inasmuch as the logic of the market, though, is amoral and nonjudgmental—it doesn't matter what you want and why as long as you're willing to pay for it—Christians should be deeply concerned, and should heed Sandel's call to bring morality back into the picture, asking about the moral consequences of subjecting more and more of our lives to the logic of exchange (especially as Sandel himself does not provide a theological basis for this moral concern).  Accordingly, I want to reflect here on the first set of phenomena he examines, "Jumping the Queue," from a more explicitly theological standpoint.

Click to read more ...

Property—Real and Imaginary

For the undergraduate Christian Ethics: Sources class last week, I had the opportunity to lead a class debate on the resolution, “This house believes that the downloading of music and media without copyright permission should not be considered an issue of conscience”—a fun topic for me, given my ongoing interest in the issue of property, and the many discussions/debates I have had with friends about this issue.  

I was curious to see what students would make of it—given how many students nowadays violate media copyright with no compunction whatsoever, I expected a vigorous case to be made in favor of this resolution, but was surprised to find, on the contrary, a very vigorous and thoughtful opposition, and a very half-hearted defense of illegal downloading, ready to concede before the debate was even quite over.  Students seemed to find little merit in the Pro arguments, and to find the Contra arguments unanswerable.  While this might demonstrate a laudatory law-abiding spirit, it also confirmed what I had long suspected was the case—few people nowadays have any grasp of the contingency of property relations.  Consider the following arguments that I supplied to the students:

Click to read more ...

Justice Against the Oppressor--What to do with Imprecatory Psalms

Another gem of a passage from Bauckham's The Bible in Politics, offering perhaps the most satisfactory discussion of the issue of imprecatory psalms and forgiving enemies that I have yet read:

"The oppressed Christian who discovers Jesus' solidarity with him must take account of one respect in which Jesus in his suffering prayed differently from the way the psalmists prayed.  Jesus prayed for his enemies' forgiveness (Luke 23:34), thus practising his own teaching (Matt. 5:44).  The psalmists never did this: their attitude to their enemies is consistently unforgiving.  They pray for God's judgement on their enemies (Ps. 10:2b, 15), sometimes in the form of solemn and extensive curses (Ps. 69:22-8; 109:6-20).  But such prayers are not unknown in the New Testament (Rev. 6:10).  They need to be accorded a kind of provisional validity, which does not excuse any Christian from the duty of forgiving enemies, but does help us to understand what is really involved in forgiveness.  Jesus' demand for forgiveness of enemies does not, we might say, simply revoke these prayers, but takes a step further beyond them.  We have to appreciate what is valid about them before we can rightly take, as followers of Jesus must take, that further step.  

Click to read more ...

Two Faces, Two Kingdoms

Each time I read through C.S. Lewis's masterpiece, Till We Have Faces, I'm struck by some new layer of meaning, some new profound insight, and this latest (fifth, I think) time was no exception.  One of the most emotionally wrenching and mentally jarring moments in the book comes on the very last page, the only bit not written from the perspective of Orual.  "I, Arnom, priest of Aphrodite, saved this roll and put it in the temple.  From the markings after the word might, we think the Queen's head must have fallen forward on them as she died and we cannot read them.  This book was written by Queen Orual of Glome, who was the most wise, just, valiant, fortunate, and merciful of all the princes known in our parts of the world…."

On their own, there is nothing particularly arresting about these words.  However, to any reader who has traversed the pages of this book, following Orual on her psychological journey of love, hate, envy, insecurity, and pettiness, these words come like a splash of cold water on the face.  This is the same Orual who has been consumed, up till the final days of her life, with jealousy and self-love, who is Ungit, the embodiment of sin and ugliness, devouring everyone around her: "It was I who was Ungit.  That ruinous face was mine.  I was that Batta-thing, that all-devouring womblike, yet barren, thing.  Glome was a web--I the swollen spider, squat at its centre, gorged with men's stolen lives." 

How can she be simultaneously the embodiment of wickedness and yet praised by her subjects as "the most wise, just, valiant, fortunate, and merciful"?  

Click to read more ...

How Much is Too Much? (Good of Affluence #8)

Before turning to consider the attitude that Amos is critiquing, and what this might mean for our attitude toward wealth, Schneider takes some time to critique what he considers to be irresponsible and unjustified uses of Amos-type rhetoric.  He complains that people like Ron Sider suggest that people's eternal salvation is on the line if they enjoy too much of their wealth, instead of giving it to the poor.  Not only do they make such harsh accusations, but they do so on a hopelessly ambiguous basis.  For how much is "too much"?  Schneider suggests at first that Sider and others (he includes John Wesley here) appear to operate on a utilitarian basis, whereby we are to seek to maximize happiness for the greatest number, and so, presumably, to keep giving away any resources we don't need as long as there are some people that are poorer than us.  But then he points to what seems like an inconsistency or hypocrisy in Sider's approach, by which he equivocates on the meaning of the word "need."  "'Necessities,' he writes, 'is not to be understood a the minimum necessary to keep from starving.'  It rather means, he explains, what is 'necessary' for a standard of living that 'would have been considered [in ancient Hebrew society] reasonable and acceptable, not embarrassingly minimal." 

Click to read more ...