Chapter 30 in Everything Must Change is titled "Organized Religions or Religion Organizing the Common Good?" He identifies seven categories of development economics. Summarizing:
Trade
First, we have to live within environmental limits. Second, integrate free trade with fair trade. Third, we need to make it easier for people to grow small businesses. This will mean deregulation, which allows small businesses and entrepreneurs to flourish, and regulation that restrains powerful large multinational corporations.
Aid
More public and private aid is needed for developing nations.
Debt
Judicious and discerning debt relief for developing nations.
Limits
We must recognize that we are finite creatures in a finite creation that must live within biological and material limits. McLaren wants us to invest in four initiatives:
“…improving health and education of children, improving the health and education of women, expanding the availability of contraceptives, and developing social security systems for the elderly. These four actions, taken together, give poor parents good reasons (and means) to have fewer children.” (260)
Also…
…we should speak less of an environmental crisis and speak more of an overconsumption crisis. (260)
Wages
We need an international minimum wage that is contextually specific to local cost of living conditions. Instead of centralized planning, we need to think about ratio-based salary arrangements where the highest salary is limited to some multiple of the lowest-paid worker.
Within a framing story that provides no moral context, this kind of ceiling may sound ridiculous, but within a framing story, that takes bonds of community seriously, the lack of a ceiling sounds even worse. (261)
Brief aside here. Last month I wrote a post called Some CEO Compensation Perspective. Fortune 500 CEO earnings have increased sixfold over the past thirty years. However, as economist Xavier Gabix has noted: "The sixfold increase of CEO pay between 1980 and 2003 can be fully attributed to the six-fold increase in market capitalization of large US companies during that period."
There are about 300,000 CEOs in the US. If you take away these top 500 CEOs, find a ratio of CEO salaries to the salary of the average production worker, the ratio is 4.1 to 1.
Justice
We need a framing story leading to integrity where meaning, prosperity, and equity are integrated. Justice can't be limited to abstractions like "democracy" or "freedom." Oversight of even democratic free societies is needed. Quoting Jim Garrison, "In an integrating world, governance, not government, is the key to effective management of the global system because networks, not nations, are the emergent powers of the future. "(262) We need more peer-to-peer networks like the United Nations, World Trade Organization, International Atomic Energy Commission. He envisions a World Labor Organization, a Global Environmental Organization, and an International Reconstruction Fund (to help failing states rebuild.) (263)
Community
We need to strengthen communities and publics. "Communities are families of families linked together in a local environment of land, water, air, and climate. Publics are larger networks of people whose influence spreads over many communities, such as governments, political parties, multinational corporations, institutions, cartels and media." (263) He views communities as the key, with systemic injustice usually resulting from dysfunction with the publics. He goes on to observe:
Local churches, local schools, local other civil organizations associations have a pivotal role in this regard – strengthening families and communities through celebrating virtue and training people to practice it.” (263)
If the first six recommendations don't lead to strengthening of these communities, then all will be for naught.
I've commented on most of these issues in previous posts in one way or another, so I'll leave it with this summary.
Michael:
Very gracious for you to let Brian have the last word.
As the series went on, I wondered if it was a good idea for me to keep reading. One wants to guard one's heart and not be reactive against people who are well meaning. It was getting hard to do that.
But, I must say, the book became an effective foil for you to present the contrasting view. Well done.
Most discouraging is McLaren’s seeming shift regarding the supernatural. In The Secret Message of Jesus, McLaren affirmed signs and wonders as real and supernatural signs of the kingdom. He has also distinguished himself from theological liberals in that they deny the supernatural aspects of scripture. Seemingly he no longer affirms supernatural aspects of Jesus' ministry, as per his thoughts on the feeding of the five-thousand event and his recent comments on the existence of demons. So what’s the distinguishing feature now?
Posted by: Rob | Apr 18, 2008 at 08:02 PM
Thanks Rob. I'm didn't mean to indicate I was done with the series. (Two posts, possibly three, to go.)
I know what you mean about guarding your heart when people have good intentions. This book truly angers me but I don't know the author and can't presume to know his heart. I’m struggling mightily with how to frame my final remarks. I want to avoid being snarky but communicate my level of concern about this book.
McLaren is exceedingly vague about the role of the church or the role of God in the shaping of events. At the end of the book he presents a vision that could be interpreted to mean that we evolve into the New Creation as opposed to the New Creation coming at a distinct transformative moment. It’s just like with the loaves and fishes. He doesn't say it wasn't supernatural. He just talks in generalities but articulates the key point that those who don't believe in a supernatural interpretation would take. It is similar here.
One of things I find very distasteful about liberal theologians my Mainline tradition is the practice of using the same language as more traditional Christians while teaching contrary to what they know is believed. Challenge that they are speaking against supernatural occurrence and they “Protest I didn’t deny a supernatural occurrence. You’re overreacting.” But neither do they affirm it. Then, once enough of these teachings are transformed into platitudes devoid of historical reality, you just help folks connect they dots that none of those supernatural realities were there.
Personally, I think it is plausible with the loaves and fishes that there wasn’t a miracle of physics but when I’m writing about it I’m going to tell you that our least tell you I’m not sure which way it is. Several places in McLaren’s book give me this uneasy sense that less than full disclosure is being used manipulatively, all with plausible deniability.
Posted by: Michael W. Kruse | Apr 18, 2008 at 08:40 PM