Minister's
Inter-faith Blog Page 14
Jesus
and Multinational Agronomics
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The
recent sermon notes on reading
the Bible for the very first time offer an interesting possible
interpretation of a scripture passage that some people have found
difficult to understand. However, I wonder if, in drawing a
parallel with multinational agronomics, we may not be falling into the
very trap that you underline- transferring the problems of our 21st
century society onto the Biblical canvas? The Romans may have
engaged in some consolidation of lands, but certainly not on the scale
of modern agronomics. And while Jesus is reported as telling at
least one parable about day labourers, most of his stories are in fact
about poor peasant land-owners.
It may be helpful to take a holistic approach to Biblical interpretation, and this would indicate two features of Jesus' teaching: 1. He often taught by hyperbole, and 2. When recruiting followers, he asked for a total commitment, something which would not be diverted by a wedding, a funeral or a football game. So, in suggesting the rupture with family, contrary to the teachings of Moses, Jesus may well be engaging in hyperbole to emphasize the need for total commitment. Incidentally, the rupture with family would be at least as hard for the young man with a prospect of inheriting some land as for the son of a family that had been driven into casual labour. One final comment. There are quite a number of ethical issues with multinational agronomics. However, I am old enough to remember the days when the cultivation of crops was left to the peasants. In that era, there were years when literally millions who died of starvation in India and China. So there are some important pluses to more efficient agricultural production. Roy
Shephard.
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| I
have been interested in the practice of agriculture and its impact on
both the environment and on the local human community since studying
with
agronomist and Christian Ethicist Dean Freudenberger and reading
Wendell
Berry (The Unsettling of America)
and Wes Jackson (co-founder of the
agricultural research organization called The Land Institute) .
From my reading and study of these issues and the impact of factory
farming both here and abroad, I have begun to see the devastating
impact
of the current agri-business practice on both local communities and on
the environment. One of the troubling realities is that factory
farming, with its high use of fossil fuels, pesticides and herbicides,
is
actually less productive (yield per acre per amount of energy used)
than
smaller family farms run with the care of the soil and place in
mind. The point of factory farming, as with Roman
commercialization
of the land in Galilee at the time of Jesus, is the production of
"cheap food," so as to maximize gain for the
"landowners." The well-being of land and the well-being
of those who work on the land are important only as means and resources
to be exploited. It is an interesting study to compare the loss
of
fertility under the regime of imperial exploitation in Ancient
Palestine
with the current destruction of top soil in North America, and the loss
of
local subsistence cultures through-out the world. A rather tragic
example is Sri Lankan fishing villages. After the Tsunami, large
corporations took advantage of the human crisis to purchase- and in
some
cases expropriate through government manipulation- fishing villages
along
the coast for wealthy European and North American tourists. I
suppose you could argue that the few who may be employed are lucky to
have work, but the reality is that not only did the Tsunami destroy the
village, but the Tsunami of unbridled corporate greed destroyed any
hope
of rebuilding the homes and culture of those fishing villages. The hope
was that these villages could be rebuilt in such a way as to make them
safer from natural catastrophe, but what occurred was that the
catastrophe
of human greed destroyed any hope for a dignified community life.
Incidentally, Naomi Klein's new book "The Shock Doctrine"
investigates this, New Orleans and other cases, where natural disasters
and other crises become exploited by greed, creating human-made
disasters
that dwarf the natural disaster in their lasting impact on human
communities and the environment. As to the reading of that piece of Luke, Richard Horsley's archaelogical works and history of the Galilee during the time of Jesus have provided very real insight into the passages. I would say that indeed the Jesus movement was one that did command a radical letting go of all patterns of exploitation, inner and outer, and a RADICAL faith in the way of the baseleia tou theou, the way of Divine justice, compassion, healing and new life beyond both the shame-honour based structure of the villages and family groupings and the imperial power of Rome. The radical break Jesus encouraged was non-violent, and based on a new kind of community. The arrival of this new possibility for human community, and of the Sacred presence within this new community as "the Kingdom of God Come" was "new and old." It reaffirmed the Prophetic vision and liberating paradigm of the Exodus, but extended it to include "all the nations". The itinerant peasants who mostly made up Jesus' followers would hear his words as a call to this new/old kind of community that was in harmony with the deepest values of the God of Exodus and Israel and the "creative Breath" that calls forth all things into being. I do not contest the radical nature of call in the passage- I just want us to see it as particularly addressed to an itinerant class of peasant/artisans who- in the Galilee- would have had an experience of no longer being able to depend on family and village structures as they were eroded as a subsistence "economy" by the imperial economy of Rome. If, and I think the lines about hating mother and father do in fact go back to the historical Jesus and are not additions to the tradition by the early church, words like these were spoken by Jesus in his native Aramaic, they would have had a very particular meaning to his itinerant followers who gathered about him, and it would have had a disturbing impact on those who still had "households" to defend. He really was calling for both a spiritual and social radicalness that leads away from all the structures of Empire and Custom that entrapped the creative work of the Spirit, towards a new community "of the heavens and earth." I emphasized the external transition last week, but there is equally a call for spiritual transformation. My own understanding of this is a recognition of our inner most being as a place where grace can be found as a place of reconciliation, harmony and beauty in-tune with the Creative Spirit of all life and the God of Exodus/liberation. To use the words of Jesus in another source that looks like it contains sayings that go back to the historical Jesus, "God's rule is [already] spread out upon the earth." Nouwen talks of this same thing when he suggest that "changing the human heart and changing human society are as connected as the two beams of the cross." The inner life and the outer life are indivisible. So the deep social critique Jesus brought to his times was equally a call to transform the human heart and mind, letting go of all the "evil spirits" that may "possess" them, and all that they might possess, in a new freedom of the Spirit. Jesus acts of healing and exorcism were both social and personal. Jesus words always addressed the inner and outer realities together. Dr. Dan.
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| Oh, for the good old days! Wendell
Berry has been an out-spoken advocate of frugality and
self-sufficiency, based on
studies of primitive agricultural techniques used by the Amish and
the traditional settlers of the Peruvian uplands and the deserts of
Southern Arizona. But as we yearn for the good old days, are we
looking nostalgically, through rose-coloured spectacles, at a past that
never was? Were the old days all that good? I have already
mentioned the disastrous famines that killed millions in India and
China in the first half of the 20th century; during just one of several Chinese
famines in the 1940s, FIVE MILLION
people died of starvation; unfortunately, the Chinese economy was
not sufficiently "developed" to transport rice from one part of the
country to another when there was a regional crop failure! And
most observers believe that the famine associated with Mao, and the
movies that I have seen about life in rural Saskatchewan in the dust
bowl of the pre-war period further cool my enthusiasm for the "good old
days." The village teacher or preacher was lucky to be paid by an
occasional scrawny chicken or a few cracked eggs! Think of the
mother in a traditional Inuit community who has lost her newborn child;
can we honestly tell that she is better off with an infant
mortality of 200 per 1000, as compared with a mortality of perhaps 5
per 1000 which would have been her lot if she had lived in
Vancouver? Rather than for ever looking backward to a rosy
past, I would argue that our task is to recognize that we live in an
internet dominated "Global Village." Our responsibility is to
determine how we can redeem a society that is irrevocably based on the
electronic media, agri-business and multinational corporations. What of Berry's own background? He could look back on a family who, for five generations, had been well-established Kentucky tobacco farmers. Presumably, they were living on fertile valley land "bought" or captured from the Indians; originally, they would have used slave labourers, and more recently would have exploited impoverished share-croppers. Moreover, when Berry set up his own farm, in 1965, he was not an ill-educated peasant holding a quarter acre of dusty soil- he had completed advanced degrees, and grew tobacco (!), corn and various grains on a quite extensive homestead of 125 acres. I am not sure if there is enough land in the U.S. for each of 300 million people to own a fertile 125 acre farm, and when we think of adding to this land quest the population of India and China... Given a good year, some amateurs can achieve a greater productivity than agri-business. In the 1960s, I grew many of the vegetables that were needed by a young family of four for ten months of the year, using only about a tenth of an acre of land. But I also lived in a fertile valley. I had ready access to both sewage sludge and straw from a slaughterhouse, and I know that I could not have achieved this output if I lived 2 km away on a chalky hillside; moreover, even in the fertile valley, I was very glad to use the local supermarket in January amd February. Your former Claremont colleague Dean Freudenburger had a rosy vision of small-scale agronomy. In 1976, he wrote (with Paul Minus) "Christian responsibility in a Hungry World," although I am not sure how far he addressed the the issue of repeated episodes of mass starvation that were seen during the era of primitive agriculture. Freudenburger also authored (in 1990) Global Dust Bowl: Can WE stop the destruction of the land before it’s too late? (1990). He spoke of the possible creation of an enormous dust bowl due to modern agricultural techniques. I do not have any particular brief for the actions of the present Israeli government, but one positive aspect of their policies is that modern methods of agriculture have restored large tracts of land once made desert by excessive nomadic grazing to fertile fields. To some extent, the same thing has happened in Saskatchewan. The final star of your blog is Naomi Klein, who (perhaps because of her self-confessed teen-age addiction to shopping malls and designer labels) has been prominent in attacks on corporate logos, global trading and multinational corporations. Most of my clothes still date from before the era of designer labels, so I am not the best critic of her thought. Much of what she says seems just, but the problem lies not so much in the multinational corporation per se as in the fact that its operations are unredeemed. Places like Walmart may pay low wages, but so do many of the small independent shops in Squamish. Likewise, profits in themselves are not necessarily evil. Indeed, they are essential to the functioning of a market economy, and to the budget of our church! A three week sojourn in various parts of Russia during 1978 amply demonsrated to me the superiority of the market place over its soviet alternative. No, profits are to be criticized only if they become excessive. Many multinational corporations are learning to be more generous. I was reading this week that quite a long list of poorer countries can now read the very expensive technical journals produced by multinational publishers on-line at no charge. Progress is being made on the distribution of pharmaceuticals to poorer nations... And multinationals have brought change to India; when I visited New Delhi in 1974, a substantial number of beggars did not have a single item of clothing; now, there is a very substantial Indian middle class working within multinational companies. Klein is particularly critical of the Sri Lankan government in allowing the creation of coastal resorts, at the potential expense of fisher folk. Without being "on the ground," it is difficult for me to know if compensation was fair, but for Sri Lanka, as for a large proportion of the world, tourism is presently the main source of the foreign currency it needs to provide adequate health care and housing. Finally, a few more comments on the gospel passage. Any attempt to place Jesus and his family in the social hierarchy becomes almost unadulterated speculation. As a carpenter, Joseph could have been an itinerant worker, but this seems unlikely. The family were well-known in the local synagogue, and the parables are often about people living in houses rather than wandering from place to place. The reference to "the man who built his house on the rock" suggests Joseph may have been in the home construction business. Some of the carpenters in Biblical times were skilled craftspeople rather than day labourers, converting the cedars of Lebanon into impressive palaces and temples. As we look at the immediate circle of disciples, we see that some of them, also, were business people. James and John were commercial fishermen with a hired crew, and others were bureaucrats such as tax collectors. There is certainly support for Horsley's thesis that the Romans built upon the Sumerian tradition of commercial agriculture, and laid the foundations for the mediaeval tradition of serfs, but it is less clear whether the process of clearing peasants from the land had progressed to the stage of becoming a "hot button" issue in the Israel of Jesus. Pliny, for example, speaks of a liberated slave who was taken to court for sorcery because he had acquired a small-holding, and was producing better crops than some of his patrician neighbours. The former slave was able to produce in evidence well clad workers, iron tools of excellent make, heavy mattocks, ponderous ploughshares, and well-fed oxen (Natural History 18.8). So, I would maintain that we should view the Lucan passage as a call to total commitment, whatever the type of world in which we live; I would not attempt to interpret this segment of scripture through the lenses of our 21st century controversies. Roy
Shephard.
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We differ, and isn't that delightful. I think of you as part of that great Aristotilean Thomism, the Great Middle path of theology and ethics. I am part of that unwashed idealistic strand of the radical Socinian/William Morris/Prophetic path. What I most fear is that when the agro-imperialism, political imperialism and spiritual imperialism of the present order collapse we will move into such chaos that we will simply repeat the patterns of destructive imperial religion, politics and culture in an even more destructive form. My faith is founded upon what I see witnessed in the Peasant Galilean Rabbi Jesus, who said that a new World was possible through the gracious actions of a community faith that could incarnate the Way (kingdom) of God. As I suggested, I too think Jesus demands were of a radical faith that on one hand was in harmony with the good old days of Exodus and Wilderness, and on the other was radically new. Neither Berry and certainly not Dean Freudenberger my old teacher call for merely a return to all the old practice of agriculture, but rather point to the virtues and values of the best practices of the past married to improvements--for example Wes Jackson's development of new seed varieties that both allow for farmers to bank seeds in the time honoured pattern and yet these seeds give both more durable and sustainable yields,hardy, more resistant to disease and yet working wit the natural rhythms of soil and place. In short, the way ahead is a radical transformation of the present patterns, but learning from the virtues and patterns of the past. I no longer hold that we have nothing to learn from the past. The new is not necessarily better. Again the model that Jesus holds up is instructive here, for he both is in continuity with the deepest faith of the past--the prophetic and Exodus tradition--and yet calls for a radical transformation of even family structures. Finally I won't cross swords with you on Naomi Klein, only to say I have deep regard for her moral courage and critical analysis. I am working slowly through her new book after Loretta encourage me to listen to her recent lecture. She is an important voice and a prophetic voice. She also knows her Torah One other topic, what is important I think in preaching is not that one convinces his hearers of his own opinions, but he encourages the hearers to explore their faith. What is important is not so much the answers as the questions raised for the community of faith to explore. All faith is seekers faith if it is faith on mere belief--or as the Buddhist's put it we must not lose the beginner's mind in order to know enlightenment. My point, even though I have a passion for agriculture and a totally unrealistic desire to farm with horses--I know how unrealistic--in all this is that to hear the voice of Jesus we must be prepared to hear a radical voice that comes from a world both unlike and like our own. The text is a rich layering, an archaelogical dig that needs to be seen in all its layers and complexity to appreciate its rich and revealing power. Again the journey is never over, there is always more to found in that rich text and more question raised. Dr.Dan.
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