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Insights from Behind the Iron Curtain
I made my second trip in the last two years behind what was once known as the Iron Curtain recently. There I saw the impact of communism that had been imposed by force of arms on these countries. I also saw what has happened since communism’s fall in the latter years of the 20th century. This salutary experience has thrown new light for me on the political struggles in the United States today. It has also forced me to come to some surprising conclusions.
Communism, as an economic system, has never had any real appeal to me. I never could get past Marx’s anthropology, and his failure to understand human nature. The slogan associated with Marxism “from each according to ability and to each according to need” is, in my opinion, a design that works only with angels. For humans it is prescription for failure. Let me explain.
The most powerful force in all living things is the drive to survive. Every plant, every insect, every animal and every human being shares in this innate survival drive. For most living things this drive is not conscious. Plants are not aware that they will inevitably seek both sustenance and water in the quest to survive. Insects are not aware that they will organize their lives in remarkably complex ways in the service of their survival. The higher animals all act with instinctual behaviors that aid their survival. None of these life forms, however, is conscious of these behaviors. Sub-human animals are also not aware that they were born, that they are alive or that they will die. These are the prerogatives only of that creature who has, in the process of evolution, passed from being merely a conscious life into being a self-conscious life. The self-conscious ones are the only living creatures who know how to say “I,” “me” and “myself,” or to contemplate their own mortality. Human beings alone prepare for death by buying life insurance, or making a will. So human beings, while sharing the drive to survive with all living things, are the only creature in which this drive becomes something of which one is aware. When we knowingly install our own survival as our highest value, we cannot escape being self-centered. Human beings are not by our nature altruistic creatures, we are self-centered, biologically driven, survival-oriented creatures. Communism never understood this. That was its fatal flaw.
The Christian Church, on the other hand, understood this human characteristic all too well. Our mistake, unlike that of communism, was not our naiveté, but our relating to our biologically-driven reality in a moralistic way. Self-centeredness, the church proclaimed, was the universal sign of our “original sin.” This was the indelible reality left on our humanity by our fall from our original perfection into our present state of inadequacy and brokenness, from which no effort on our own part could ever deliver us.
This ecclesiastical diagnosis assumed that there was a universal flaw in our humanity, to which the church offered the cure of salvation. Jesus, the church proclaimed, was sent to be the “savior of the sinful” and the “rescuer of the fallen.” The diagnosis was accurate about life’s self-centered reality, but wrong about the cause. The proposed cure, however, showed its invalidity when it did not result in human wholeness. It rather produced those strange divisions in human life between the “saved and the damned,” the “true believers and the heretics,” the “righteous and the faithless ones.” The competition for survival is ongoing. It was Charles Darwin who shattered this kind of religious thinking forever when he suggested that there was no original perfection, but rather a long evolutionary process from a single cell to self-conscious complexity. All of the theological dominoes thus began to fall. Since there was no original perfection, there could not have been a fall into “original sin.” One cannot be saved from a fall that never happened or be restored to a status one has never possessed. The story of the “fall” was never an accurate metaphor. Without the fall, there is no need to be saved, so the way Christians traditionally told the Jesus story made less and less sense to more and more people.
Communism, as a way of life, was devoid of any of this religious baggage. Its failure lay rather in its belief that human life could be perfected and that, if given the chance to escape exploitation, a willingness to share equally in both the wealth and the means of production would be born. Everyone would then give what each is capable of giving and in turn, everyone would take only that which they need. In this manner the classless society would be born.
Communism did not work because it could not work. If there is nothing in it “for me,” then my survival needs are not met. There is, therefore, no reason for me to work hard to get ahead. If I do not profit from my labor, why should I bother to get up at night to deliver the calf born to a cow in the collective herd? Why should I care for the machinery of our collective farms? Why should I put my neighbor’s needs above my comfort? Communism never understood that human beings see themselves and their survival as their highest value. Building a just society is never the highest motivator of human behavior.
On this recent trip to the Czech Republic and East Germany, I was in that part of the world where Communism had been forced on people by military power for almost 60 years. It was not popular. No one was sorry when it disappeared, yet I still found clothing styles that had a dull uniformity about them, and people who were gray and lifeless. I found expressions of human beauty and individuality still suppressed by what felt like a gigantic wet blanket that had been laid over all of that area for so many years. I found the poor would rather be poor, farming their one acre of land than to gain economic well-being by working in collective farms for the well-being of all. This system had collapsed because it had never understood human nature.
In one sense, however, I think the death of communism should be mourned, not because it was ever right, but because it represented a challenge, a threat and a counter weight to a capitalist system that serves no master other than the accumulation of wealth. Capitalism, per se, has no social conscience. Karl Marx was dead right in his analysis of what would happen to an unbridled capitalism. Gradually over time, he wrote, all of the wealth of a nation would be in the hands of fewer and fewer of the people. The gap between the rich and the poor would become larger and larger until 99% of a nation’s wealth would be concentrated in the hands of 1% of that nation’s population. When the masses are then reduced to hopeless poverty, Marx theorized, a revolution would occur and the masses would overthrow and even kill the ruling oligarchy. Then the wealth would be redistributed; that was the communist’s dream. So if a capitalist society wishes to endure, and this is something that Marx never contemplated, it will voluntarily and legally pass laws which require the wealthy to share their wealth to create a broad and growing middle class.
That is what happened in America with the passing of the graduated income tax in 1913. During the Great Depression in America, Franklin D. Roosevelt saved capitalism by spreading the wealth more equitably through government programs. He raised the percentages of taxes the wealthy had to pay, reaching to 94% on income over $200,000 a year in 1944. He raised the estate taxes that had been established in 1916. If the government enacts policies that will provide access for the poor into the wealth of the society, then communism will never come into power in that society. Among these government-sponsored services will be public schools and public libraries to offer the poor opportunities to be educated, to climb the ladder out of poverty and into success. The government must build parks, roads, highways, bridges and transportation systems so that a good life becomes possible for all. The government must see to it that people too old to work have money to live on and universal health care so that no one’s wellbeing can be devastated by a catastrophic sickness. All of this is to say that, in my opinion, the way to preserve capitalism is by law to make the capitalist invest his or her wealth back into the life of the society. Capitalism will be saved by forcing the wealthy to give up some of their wealth in order to give others the opportunity to gain wealth. Taxes are thus not confiscatory, but an investment in a more stable society. No one will be a conservative until they have something to conserve. Democracy will die unless the majority can force the minority to pay a fair share of their wealth in taxes. If the wealth of the nation becomes concentrated in the hands of the few, they will seek to preserve their power by manipulating the power of government so that it serves their special interests. They will spend billions of dollars to control the electoral process. They will try to make voting difficult for the masses. They will hire lobbyists to guarantee that those elected become beholden to them financially, voting always to protect their patron’s vested interest. They will oppose immigration for that usually means more of the world’s poor will be headed for our shores, making the wealthy an even smaller minority.
I see ominous signs in our nation today. More than 90% of the money recovered since the 2008 stock collapse has gone to the wealthiest 1% of our nation. Business leaders increasingly see government regulations as offensive meddling in free enterprise, instead of providing a proper business atmosphere for the well-being of all. Of course, there is a proper balance between these forces. That balance today, however, tilts in the wrong direction.
To say it bluntly, if capitalism is killed, it will be the greed of the conservatives that will kill it. If capitalism is saved, it will be the political liberals, who believe in education, health care for all, child care, worker retraining, Social Security and old age benefits, who will save it. That is not the common wisdom heard today in our current political discourse, but for those who have the eyes to see and the ears to hear, that is what they need to see and to hear.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Laura Geisel of Redondo Beach, California, writes:
Question:
I read your essays and have read some of your books and have enjoyed both. You certainly give us a lot to think about and a new way of viewing our faith, which I appreciate so much. However, I was wondering, given your analysis of our current liturgy, what would be your ideal look like for an Episcopal Eucharist? Would you start over and rewrite it completely or just replace some of the verbiage in some of the prayers/creeds?
Answer:
Dear Laura,
If you study the history of the Eucharist, you will see that it has gone through many transformations. It began as a fellowship meal in which the followers of Jesus could reenact liturgically the moment of the birth of their faith story. At that time, it was patterned after the Passover, which reenacted liturgically the birth of the Jewish nation and filled the Jewish people with a sense of their national purpose and their national destiny. Today the Eucharist has developed other elements designed to celebrate the identity of the worshippers as a community banded together in a common cause. It also catches up the human reality that sharing a meal with others builds relationships, enhances trust and creates interdependence. No relationship ever grows until food is shared and in that process the food becomes sacramental. The word “companion” means literally “one with whom bread is shared.”
Onto these primary meanings, lots of other things have been layered to the Eucharist time after time in Christian history. The Eucharist has come to be thought of as a meeting place with the Christian Lord, an experience that was later transformed into all sorts of magical claims like transubstantiation, consubstantiation and the doctrine of “The Real Presence.” It was later used as the bedrock of clerical power, when only the ordained priest could do the magic and so the people became dependent on priestly power for their salvation.
Today across the spectrum of Christian traditions one can see many of these themes sometimes intermingling. The Eucharist of the future needs to have at the least these features:
1. It is a fellowship meal where followers of Jesus can gather round a common table.
2. It must serve to identify and to perpetuate the meaning the community was created to fulfill.
3. It must define who we Christians are and why.
4. It must reflect the values of the moment. That is, it must not be used as a means to exclude anyone from the table of fellowship. I have always loved a sign I first saw in Redeemer Episcopal Church in Morristown, New Jersey, that announced boldly “the only pre-requisite for receiving Communion in this church is that you be hungry.”
The Eucharist will always mean different things to different people, but in my opinion, these things are essential.
John Shelby Spong
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