Capitalism

WE LIVE IN AN AGE of “market morality”: In our market system, we believe that money grants value and meaning to the moral and social questions of life. It doesn’t. Nevertheless, we’re under its spell.

Market morality interprets life in economic terms. For instance, many corporations do not believe they have a moral duty to vulnerable communities affected by their business practices. Instead, they assert that their primary duty is their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders and other stakeholders in the company. In this case, the moral domain of corporate practice is about securing profit returns to the exclusion of broader social and communal practices of care.

We have witnessed, repeatedly, poor communities and their environments polluted by toxins associated with corporate practices. This is readily seen in the Flint, Mich. water crisis, which persists. These companies offer no apologies, because their moral obligations are defined in economic terms, shaped by the bottom line of profit.

I WAS FILLING my coffee mug at a church lunch when I was greeted by a woman with a smile I couldn’t miss nor soon forget. Her short blond hair was pulled back under a red hat. She wore an oversized black T-shirt as a dress. A few lonely teeth protruded from her lower gums when she grinned.

Speaking fast, as though we might get cut off at any moment, she reminded me that we’d met when I’d first arrived in Berkeley, several years before. She asked if I would pray for her.

“Sorry if that’s presumptuous,” she apologized.

“Not at all,” I said. “I’m sorry, but would you remind me of your name?”

“Kim. And yours?”

“Ryan.”

“What’s your last name, Ryan?”

“Pemberton.”

“Oh, a very WASP name!”

“That’s not me,” I told her abruptly. “I’m no WASP.”

What began as a prayer request soon devolved into a debate about Jesus’ divinity. In the back and forth, Kim referred to me as a WASP several more times.

“That’s not me,” I corrected her each time. “We’re not all as we look, you know.”

Driving home, my mind was stuck on my frustration with Kim and, specifically, my rejection of the label “WASP.” I am white and of Anglo-Saxon descent—mostly English. I am Protestant, even. But WASP still carries connotations of wealth—especially inherited wealth—that do not fit me.

Yet for much of my life, I would have been reassured if someone thought I was a person of means and status. Why was it urgent to me now to reveal the very thing I had spent the past three decades hiding?

Living in shame

As the oldest child in a single-parent family in the far Pacific Northwest, in a small town where dairy cows outnumber people 10-to-1 and the lone, blinking stoplight is more of a luxury than a necessity, I did my best to hide our family’s poverty.

Just off the driveway was a shed where we stored our garbage. Trash collection was another expense. Maggots tumbled out from black plastic bags when I opened the door just wide enough to heave another trash bag atop the pile. We never spoke of it.

In elementary school, I waited anxiously in line for the woman who took money for “hot lunch”—Mrs. Price, aptly named. I faked surprise when she told me, in a voice loud enough for my classmates to hear, that I had already charged too many lunches.

“How long are we going to have to use food stamps?” I asked on a drive home from the grocery store one afternoon. The look I received assured me I would not ask this question again.

College for me, as it is for most people, was a revelation of my identity. I was preparing for a developmental psychology lecture when I read that Head Start is a school-readiness program for children from low-income families. I had always assumed everyone went to Head Start.

My face turned red. I turned the page quickly, hoping not to be found out.

In Redeeming Capitalism, Kenneth J. Barnes argues that the moral failures of our economy are evidence of moral decay in our social institutions. The greed and excess of Wall Street and the vast income inequality between the very wealthy and everyone else demonstrate that the moral fabric of our society is in tatters. What we need, Barnes believes, is a lesson in virtue. Barnes, I think, would like to replace Falwell Jr.’s ethic with a truly Christian one. If we want a virtuous capitalism, he argues, we need virtuous people.

FINANCE-DOMINATED capitalism uses a variety of institutional means to single out individuals and render them accountable for their own fortunes, the bearers of either praise or blame. Economic success or failure becomes one’s individual responsibility, revelatory of who one is as a person. Moralized evaluation of individual success or failure figured prominently in the old Protestant work ethic and now reappears in exaggerated form within a finance-dominated work ethic.

Economic success or failure in that old religious ethic was deemed indicative of one’s fundamental individual character—reflective, that is, of the particular standing before God that defined one in religious terms, success being a mark of election to salvation, failure a sign of exclusion. Hoping to confirm one’s salvation by the character of one’s economic activity, one worked hard as capitalism demanded—to gain economic success and in that way distinguish oneself from others, not just economically but religiously.

Crazy Rich Asians begets notions of Christianity in hyper-capitalist countries, satirizing Christianity by showing it as a tool for the wealthy to cozy up with those even more wealthy, accruing large doses of social capital with sprinkles of gospel. The movie, coming from author Kevin Kwan’s personal experience, thus provides a damning window into looking at how Christianity functions today in the world’s richest countries.

2. The Online Gig Economy’s ‘Race to the Bottom’

“ … while freelance websites may have raised wages and broadened the number of potential employers for some people, they’ve forced every new worker who signs up into entering a global marketplace with endless competition, low wages, and little stability.”

3. How Some Women of Color Were Left Out of the Minimum Wage Hike

“I see my job as the work of God, but God is angry because he sees that my job is making me sick needlessly and is mistreating me. We have been treated like slaves.”

Although New York state has passed $15 minimum wage legislation, there are thousands of home health care workers, mostly immigrant women of color, who are paid only half of the hours they work.

Epifania Hinchez, who immigrated to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic in her 40s, worked as a home health care worker for 17 years in NYC. The heavy-lifting – her last patient weighed 290 pounds and could not walk – required in her job led to shoulder and wrist injuries, as well as nerve damage which has required surgery. For her entire career as a home health attendant, she has only been paid for 13 hours of her 24-hour shifts.

Pope Francis has blasted employers who do not provide health care as bloodsucking leeches and he also took aim at the popular “theology of prosperity” in a pointed sermon on the dangers of wealth.