From: Restore Hope in America <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Free Market Capitalism and Race I'm posting the following column because it represents something I've been saying on this list for some time now, most often with disagreement for a view which many think is anti-black, even racist. David R. Quammen Restore Hope In America The Sticky Wicket: Poverty's Home Page http://www2.ari.net/home/poverty/ Market Idolatry William Raspberry, Washington Post, April 10, 1998 It was an extraordinary day, beginning with a chat with my futurist friend, Robert Theobald, and ending with an evening with Robert Bellah. Or maybe it just seemed extraordinary because the two men, unknown to one another, gave voice to a fear that has been gnawing at the edges of my mind: that we Americans may be living in a fool's paradise in which our pre- occupations with money and race are blinding us to serious crisis, perhaps even catastrophe. I had phoned Theobald on the West Coast to talk about the ravaging effects of Proposition 209 on black enrollment in California's elite universities. But Theobald (who has been told that his esophageal cancer is terminal) didn't want to talk about race. "I think we need to back off and understand that the real issue is class, not race," he said. "We have a huge and growing dispossessed class which we have to save and serve, not because they are victims of slavery and discrimi- nation but because they are part of us." Viewing the problem in racial terms, he said, almost inevitably leads to accusation and defense, pits group against group and divides us along racial lines. Viewing it as an American problem reminds us that the solution is in our mutual interest. Such a reorientation might not tell us precisely what to do about declining black enrollments at U.C. Berkeley, he acknowledged, but it might give us a more helpful way of talking about our problems. One of the most serious of those problems, Theobald believes, is our blind expectation that "the market" will solve the rest of them. "It won't, because it can't." Bellah, whose lecture at Duke University was on multiculturalism and the common American culture, took a side excursion to compare our deference to the market with the Communist totalitarian's deference to the state. Though one proceeds from individualism and the other from collectivism, both elevate - very nearly worship - an idea that cannot possibly withstand detached analysis. Bellah, whose influential books include "Habits of the Heart" and "The Good Society," accepts "the sacredness and the conscience of every individual" and, further, believes that this is the force that made America great. But: "Just when we are moving to an ever greater validation of the sacredness of the individual person, our capacity to imagine a social fabric that would hold individuals together is vanishing. This is in part because [our] religious individualism is linked to an economic individualism which, ironically, knows nothing of the sacredness of the individual. Its only standard is money, and the only thing more sacred than money is - more money." Both Bellah and Theobald fear that our fealty to market forces - as though they represent unquestionable good - is destroying our sense of community. "We look at the boom on Wall Street and feel justified in hailing the superiority of the system," said Theobald, who was trained as an economist. "But the boom is hiding a whole series of moral and civic crises that need our urgent attention." Among these, he said, is the ascendancy of the super rich, the increase in poverty and the tighter and tighter squeeze on the middle class. "Out of that squeeze comes a moral crisis, because it feeds the notion that the only way out of our difficulties is endless and accelerating economic growth - no matter the effect on emissions and natural resources." And all of it together, Bellah and Theobald agree, feeds a spiritual crisis, in which growing numbers of people - even in the midst of undreamed-of affluence - are feeling inexplicably stressed, wondering if their lives really are worth living. Hardly anyone in our public life - certainly not our politicians - is speaking to this widespread sense of angst. We hardly talk about it among ourselves, preferring to think that everything will work itself out because the Dow just hit 9000. So what must we do? Theobald believes there is a bottom-up movement waiting to be born from the ranks of those who worry that their successful, market- driven lives don't make sense. Bellah, who is more religiously oriented, hopes - though faintly - that organized religion, however secularized and individualized, might again assert the transcendent truths - including the homely one that we need each other, that "our precious and unique selves aren't going to make it alone."
