Specifically, I want to reflect on the presentations made by Eve Poole and Mark Sampson. Both Eve and Mark made a variety of criticisms about capitalism, Eve drawing from her recently published book Capitalism's Toxic Assumptions and Mark from both his doctoral work and the life he shares with his intentional missional community.
One of the points I took away from both Eve's and Mark's presentations was an appreciation of the various ways capitalism forms and malforms us.
Specifically, beyond any economic criticisms we might make about capitalism what is undoubtedly the case is that capitalism shapes us into a certain kind of human being, a human being with particular desires and imagination.
For example, according to Eve one of the toxic assumptions at the heart of capitalism is that competition always produces the greatest good. Economically speaking, competition can struggle to find cooperative, nonzero sum outcomes--the "win/win" scenario. But for the purposes of this post I simply want to ask about the spiritual cost of competition upon our lives.
How does a life spent competing in a capitalistic economy affect us--emotionally, spiritually, cognitively, relationally and behaviorally?
Of course, you might deny that you are competing. But you are. You compete to get a job against other applicants. You compete to keep your job, get promoted at your job or get a raise. And your place of work is competing against rivals in the marketplace. If those rivals win you lose your job. So you compete against them. And your nation's economy--of which you play a part--competes against the economies of the world.
If you're working you're competing.
So it's reasonable to ask: How is this lifetime of competition affecting you? Affecting us and our communities? What is the spiritual fruit being produced by this steady diet of competition?
And yet, someone might retort, while these criticisms are important is there any other option? What other choices do we have? Communism? Surely that's a dead end, right?
Such questions go to a point Mark made at Host: Capitalism has destroyed our imaginations.
The fact that "Capitalism vs. Communism" is the only choice we can see before us is, more than anything, a vast failure of imagination. Free markets vs. central planning exhausts our economic imaginations. Beyond those two options, we can't even imagine another world. Which is shocking given the economic diversity we witness across human history.
Mark suggested that one of the reasons we need to cultivate and protect alternative economies is that, like protecting endangered plants, you never know when you might need them. Some endangered plant might wind up being the cure for Ebola. But if that plant goes extinct we'll never find the cure. It's in our self-interest to keep that plant around. You never know.
Similarly, alternative economies preserve systems that pre-date and thrived before the rise of capitalism. We might need these systems at some future date. We might, in fact, need them now.
Regardless, these alternative economies--new worlds in the shell of the old--cultivate the imaginative capacities necessary for social critique and social change.
You can't change the world if you can't imagine it.
And that ability to imagine has been slowly and steadily eroding.
