faith | everdeepening

In the parable of the fields, Jesus says of his kingdom that:

The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

Then in the parable of the talents, Jesus addresses the Apostles and says of the servant that hid the money he had been given to invest:

‘You wicked, lazy slave…take away the talent from him’…For to everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away

The two parables illuminate the challenge of bringing divine power into the world. The unsuspecting finder of faith has no idea what to do with it. Looking at the history of the Hebrews, it is obvious how fragile faith is. From Aaron to the Pharisees, from Saul to Herod: the leaders of the nation of Israel corrupted faith for political and economic purposes. Aaron acted in good faith because the people were afraid when Moses disappeared on the mountain, but in the time of Jesus the Pharisees twisted the fear of divine retribution to line their pockets. Saul, having been anointed king by Samuel, was angered when others threatened his authority. In Herod’s time, that pattern had become so entrenched that oppression of dissent was not even remarkable. Given this, perhaps it would have been best to keep the treasure hidden.

But the Apostles were students of a master who prepared them to exercise faith in service to the oppressed. They had seen what faith could do. All that they required to see it multiply was simple courage. For those demonstrating courage, the master would not judge between those with greater or lesser skill in the exercise of power, but reward them all. For those lacking courage, the portion of power that was given them would be given to others.

The tension between the two parables should be heeded by us today as we ponder how to go about distributing the riches that Christ has provided us to do good in the world. As people of compassion, our natural tendency is to respond to fear and righteous anger with promises of aid. The obvious first step is to eliminate the cause of the fear and/or anger. When that cause is hunger, it would be hard to fault an offer of food. But when the cause is political tyranny, forceful intervention (as currently in Russia) can be propagandized to justify further oppression. The Russian people have offered adulation in response to Putin’s aggressive militarism.

So we have to ask, when offering aid, “What are you going to do with the power we offer you?” When the hungry man is fed, will he then seek employment? If an oppressed people is offered political assistance, how will they organize to overcome the tyrant? If these question can’t be answered, then their troubles are merely symptomatic of a large social disease that must be addressed before individual problems can be solved. They may need education, or political enfranchisement – or assistance in finding a leader that can articulate their needs.

I think that many of the world’s problems today require the last: for those offering Christian compassion to go beyond simple charity to supporting the development of leaders motivated by Christian ethics. In assessing candidates, I favor strongly the wisdom of Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts. In developing leaders, the program upholds this law:

A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.

These qualities are an interlocking web of virtue that ensure that power is not diverted for personal gain, but rather directed towards those that first inspired our compassion. They are not qualities that necessarily translate to the easy currency of popularity. That is gained all too often through promises of an end to fear and oppression that cannot be made good until the people themselves begin to manifest the qualities of true leadership. As it is said in the Chinese I Ching:

Of the great leader, when the work is done the people say ‘We did this ourselves.’

God took 2000 years to work his will on the people of Israel. For those continuing that work in the world today, patience (although perhaps on a more human scale) is essential. As in Jesus’s relationship with the Apostles: It is not upon us to do the work ourselves, but only to offer the oppressed the hope that it can be done at all. Hope is the seed of courage, Christian compassion is the seed of faith. When courage and faith combine, anything is possible.

In the ‘90s, following the fall of the Iron Curtain and the liberalization of China’s economy, Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History. From the reviews, I gathered that his proposition was that the competition between centrally planned societies and free-market societies had been decided decisively in favor of the free market. With that settled, Fukuyama argued, all that was left was the working out of the practical details in specific situations. The world would be mercifully free of the paroxysms born of ideological conflict.

The realists pointed out that, in fact, the Cold War era had been relatively free of conflict. With the loss of the dichotomy that pitted Russia and China against the rest of the world, history would in fact resume its messy march. The problem of foreign policy in new millennium would be to prevent generalized conflict on a global scale. We are seeing that borne out in current events.

At root, I believe that the prescience of the realists reflected the falseness of Fukuyama’s dichotomy. The true dichotomy is between societies that commit a significant part of their resources to the protection of human rights, versus those that allow the powerful to exploit human capital. In the extreme, exploitation is visible today in the slavery of child farm laborers in Mexico, and in sex trafficking on a global scale. But it is also seen in the rather more subtle exploitation of educated workers in the developed world, bound by lop-sided employment contracts and forced by income inequity to work and commute long hours that inhibit their investment in the maturation of their children.

With these miserable expectations, I was heartened in the ‘90s by the democratic transition in the Philippines. The methods deployed by the US were a fascinating contradiction. Over the decades, the Philippine armed forces had been reorganized around the use of advanced US weapons systems that require ongoing maintenance. At the strategic level, true mastery of these systems required training in US military academies. That training came with indoctrination in the democratic theory of military service. Thus, when the dictator called upon the military to prevent the installation of a freely elected government, General Ramos would only patrol the streets to maintain order. The Marcos regime had no option but to quit the country.

It has been with some trepidation that I have watched this and other methods deployed by first-world nations over the years to contain the spread of exploitative practices around the globe. The foremost tool has been the creation of plutocracies funded by the sale of natural resources. We see this at play in Russia. Secretary Kerry warned that the invasion of Ukraine would be an “expensive” adventure for Russia. President Putin scoffed that the US could not project power into his back yard, but now can only watch oil prices plummet as the US and other nations opened the taps at their oil fields. It may take some time, but the West must hope that eventually the zeal of the Russian people will wear down under growing poverty.

We see something similar happening in China, which has concentrated wealth in the hands of the very few not only by exploiting human capital, but by failing to contain wide-spread environmental degradation. The problem for China is that its lack of respect for human rights is not limited to the public at large. It extends into the oligarchy as well. Fearing that their wealth will be seized by political opportunists (including, by many accounts, the police), Chinese entrepreneurs are taking their money and talent overseas.

The counter-examples to this pressure are Iran and North Korea, both nations with rigidly controlled ideologies that beat down the will of the people. More disturbing to me is Tibet. The Dalai Lama has indicated that he would rather see the fall of his religious tradition than to have China choose his successor. The Tibetan natives are being overwhelmed by Han resettlement. It appears that the nation is going to succumb to rapacious greed.

The recent debacle over Sony’s The Interview has reinforced my gloom. The United Nations is now building a case against North Korea for widespread human rights violations against its citizens. The details include prison camps containing up to 120,000 people, summary executions and rape. Obviously this is not a situation that occurred overnight. Why has the world been silent? What precedents are we following in this case, and what lessons may be drawn by tyrannical leaders elsewhere?

In formal political theory, the only hope is in the tendency of dynasties to collapse. In the early stages, this is often a matter of cannibalism among the elite. As in China, they seize wealth from each other. When the unprofitability of that course is established, the next stage is in the realization that their ambitions are bounded by the incompetence of the people they depend upon. This results from a number of factors, perhaps foremost being the paranoia of thieves that leads them to surround themselves with people that they can control. When the cost of incompetence is grasped, a competition begins for access to creative talent, which over the long run leads to devolution of power to the middle class.

The lie to this hope is found in feudal Europe, where the middle class was allowed to accumulate wealth only until it created holdings that could threaten the ruling class. Then taxation and royal writs of monopoly were used to restore control to the nobility. Capitalism took hold in Europe only because the War of the Roses diverted the attentions of the nobility during the early stages of the industrial revolution in England.

In the face of these apparently implacable social and political pressures, I trust in faith. Not blind faith, but belief fused with scientific understanding. There are sources of power that beggar the military might of nations because they turn the will of warriors; there are methods of communication that no media barriers can block; there are mechanisms of justice that make the rapacious accumulation of wealth an exercise in self-destruction. Tyrants can frighten and exploit their people, but they can’t repeal the laws of physics.

The Unitarian Universalist minister Mark Morrison-Reed wrote, in Black Pioneers in a White Denomination, that the negro slaves of the American South, having lost all control of their physical existence, turned inwards and discovered an abiding presence of love. Grasping the power it offered, they developed strength to control the will of their masters.

Predators beat a single drum: they use fear and greed to seize wealth, rather than creating wealth through disciplined creativity. It is there, in the fundamental psychological weakness of the predator, that the faithful will find the chink in the armor, and subdue their oppressors.