Reflections on War and Poverty

I had been thinking that perhaps the two highest-order material evils of our time, and all times, are war and poverty - conventional enough thinking - when I realized how deceptively framed these ideas have become in ordinary public discourse.

Take, for instance, the huge and perennial evil of poverty. It occurs to me that poverty itself is not the primary problem. Poverty has a primary cause, and that is – wealth. Wealth, the obsessive accumulation of it, and the misdistribution of it, are the root causes of endemic poverty in our world.

Throughout the history of human civilization, wherever great excesses of wealth have been amassed, great poverty has existed not far away. This is no mere coincidence. Excessive wealth and extreme poverty are directly correlated by causality, not by accident. Neither social condition can exist without the other. In fact, the existence of one is the definition of the other. Wealth cannot be seen to be excessive except by contrast with a co-existing extreme of poverty. Poverty, by conventional definition, is the deprivation of sufficient wealth for human well-being. Excessive wealth, by my definition , is not only the condition of more than sufficient wealth, but that condition which also entails the objective insufficiency we call poverty.

I have sometimes put it as follows, and as no economist without an ideological axe to grind will ever dispute: At any point in the process of an economy, there is a finite quantity of created wealth in existence. There is a certain distribution of this wealth among its owners. Some have more than others. However “enough” is defined, when some have much more than enough, others will necessarily not have that excess. If there are many who, in fact, do not have enough, then those who have more, have what is needed by others who have less. The “have-mores” have their excesses at the expense of those who have less than they need.

Republicans, libertarians, and apostles of the “prosperity gospel” will take umbrage at this. But their protestations notwithstanding, I am here to tell you that theirs is bad philosophy and bad religion. The Hebrew prophets of the ages, straight on down to Jesus of Nazareth, had it right, distorted though their prophecies have become in popular parlance. You cannot serve God and Mammon. You may worship one or the other, but not both, unless you are a fool or a hypocrite. To parallel Albert Einstein’s famous saying, “You cannot simultaneously work for peace and prepare for war,” I say, “You cannot dispel poverty while accumulating excessive wealth.”

Furthermore, excessive wealth and concomitant poverty are the root causes of war. Let me explain myself: Poverty consists of deprivation. Excessive wealth entails deprivation. What constitutes war? Violence carried out by people against other people. People act violently against others when they have been objectively or subjectively deprived of something which is of worth to them.

A simple instance: An insecure person responds violently to an insult, because in a state of personal insecurity, the insult deprives that person of his or her sense of self-worth. Another instance: A person needing or wanting something takes it from another person to whom it belongs and to whom the thing taken has value. The person deprived of something of worth responds violently against the other. Yet another instance: A person acting violently causes bodily harm or injury to another person, or threatens to do so. Thus the other is deprived of well-being, or the sense of security, and responds violently.

These instances of interpersonal violence can serve as analogues for international violence. Such violent personal acts, acts of deprivation, greatly compounded, are the constituents of war. Every act of war directly or indirectly deprives people of some or all of their lives, liberties, happiness, health, and homes. Thus, the function of war is to impoverish those against whom it is directed. And acts of war are also the ultimate resort of national or subnational groups of people who have been likewise impoverished, or deprived of what they value, by those whom they will regard as their enemies.

Most significantly however, in the modern world, it must be recognized that war engaged in by powerful nation states has another important function. War always enriches those who declare it and direct it, and those who profit by the provision of the economic factors involved in the production of war. Thus, once again, the interests of amassing excessive wealth, in this case for purposes of waging war, are the efficient causes of abject poverty.

While the foregoing are universal economic verities in the modern world, there is one unique special case which ought to be considered. In all of history until September 11, 2001, only the United States among powerful nation states was able indefinitely to wage war and to cause widespread foreign impoverishment (along with its corresponding domestic enrichment) beyond its borders with impunity, except for military casualties. Other than in the case of the U.S.A., acts of war and political and economic exploitation against other peoples have always before long resulted in retaliatory warfare against the enemy population. So war and poverty continued to be reciprocally engendered, and the interests of wealth – Mammon – have been their progenitor. The terrorist attacks of 2001 on the World Trade Center signaled that the specially privileged people of the United States are no longer invulnerable.

Whoever the instigators of the terrorist crimes of 9-11 were (and, despite conventional public wisdom, this has not been established with certainty) their evil was not done because “they hate our values,” as the Bush regime insists. To the extent that the perpetrators were Islamic militants, it is more probably because they hate the desolation and deprivation we have wrought against their values, i.e. the impoverishment of Muslim peoples in the “third world” by the people of the “first world,” preeminently in the United States and the United Kingdom.

In a sign of our times, a 1985 pastoral statement circulated in churches of Johannesburg, South Africa, is as timely as tomorrow for us here and now:

"We now pray that God will replace the present unjust structures of oppression with ones that are just, and remove from power those who persist in defying his laws, installing in their place leaders who will govern with justice and mercy . . . The present regime, with its structures of domination, stands in contradiction to the Christian gospel to which the churches of the land seek to remain faithful . . . We pray that God in his grace may remove from his people the tyrannical structures of oppression and the present rulers in our country who persistently refuse to hear the cry for justice . . . We pledge ourselves to work for that day."

Gustavo Gutiérrez writes that, for the fulfillment of the prophetic imperative, “the support of the community [of saints, the religious community] is essential . . . community life [as in the basic ecclesial communities of Latin America] cultivates receptivity for God’s reign and also proclaims . . . the special call to overcome . . . oppression, injustice . . . and to struggle for the values of the kingdom that Jesus proclaimed.”

The life work of Gustavo Gutiérrez (and liberation theologians following him) consisted in a synthesis of ethics and theology, politics and religion. Politics and religion meet, if they meet at all, in the personal. If the personal is political, then for the religious person, religion is political. I believe that all persons are both – we are inherently religious and political. A society of persons in which the religious and the political do not meet is in deep trouble, for it is either in error or it is in denial. Recognizing that a society is nothing but a complex of inter-relationships among persons, I think it must be true that in a just society the realms of religious ethics and political ethics would be coterminous.

Even in a religiously pluralistic society, the golden rule necessarily applies as the supreme ethic: I will not do unto others as I would not have done unto me. Don’t pee in my pool, and I won’t pee in yours. What, you may ask, does this rule of social reciprocity have to do with religion? For one thing, it is the first ethic of all religions in all cultures known to have ever existed – that is, the ones which were sustainable for more than a few generations. As Paul Tillich said, “Religion is the substance of culture, and culture is the form of religion.” Religion informs culture. The key to understanding Tillich’s bon mot is that, in his terms, religion is not simply identical with theology and ecclesiology; it includes within its meaning secular religions, the profane as well as the sacred. For, as we know, one person’s sacrament is another’s profanity.

This is not to say, as some young people do, “It’s all good.” Certainly not all that is done is good. Some is absolutely evil, unpalatable though that term may be to moral relativists. What is evil? It is the antithesis of good, and good has consistent objective meaning when considered inter-relationally, as all ethical considerations ought to be. What is considered good for one, or some, ought to be not other than what is good for all. As I suggested with reference to the golden rule, this should be no big news. Among other things, it was the core ethic of Plato’s philosophy concerning the just society. (By the way, there is good reason to suppose a direct connection in the history of social thought between the golden rule of the Hebrew Bible and the ethics of Plato and Aristotle.)

As usual, the devil is in the details. I think this is because of the recurrent ethos of what Rabbi Michael Lerner calls selfish individualism, which is what you might call sin. (Or you might not – I do.) Is sin original, inescapable, and inherent in humankind? I don’t think so. Endemic, perhaps, but not incurable. Did Jesus want to redeem us from sin? It certainly appears so, but not by getting crucified. I imagine that was John the Baptist’s objective, too. Unfortunately, he got murdered for his efforts as well.

How could a holy teacher’s words redeem us from sin? You have one big clue already. That’s right – the golden rule. An informed and conscientious application of it in praxis throughout our society would save us. Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics would be helpful, too. And Plato before him had a similar take on the subject. Speaking in Socrates’ voice (and identically with the ethic of Jesus) he wrote, “It is better to suffer injustice than to do injustice unto others.”