The film focused specifically on three instances of modern day slavery: cocoa plantations on the Ivory Coast, rug-making looms in northern India, and (to my great surprise) there are even instances of slavery in the U. S. The Department of State estimates that between 15 and 20 thousand individuals are trafficked into the U. S. each year to become slaves.
A "slave" was defined as one who is "Forced to work--through mental or physical threat, owned or controlled by an 'employer', usually through mental or physical abuse or threatened abuse; dehumanized, treated as a commodity or bought and sold as 'property'; physically constrained or has restrictions placed on his/her freedom of movement."
In other words, slavery today is what it always has been--and perhaps worse. Increased population and the pressure of the global market mean that slaves now are easier to come by and simultaneously less valuable. The days of eeking out a marginally decent existence on the plantation of a southern diplomat in the 18th and 19th century are decisively over.
Of particular interest was the role the global economy plays in the issue of slavery. Competition fuels injustice, especially (for instance) in the cocoa industry. With the price of cocoa falling steadily over the past twenty years, plantation owners on the Ivory Coast work strenuously to stay competitive on the market by keeping the total cost of each bag of cocoa produced extremely low. What better way to get an edge than by restraining dozens of unpaid laborers under the threat of violence? Productivity goes up; total costs go down; and farmers stay competitive.
What is most problematic is the prevailing assumption that the market will self-regulate so as to mitigate potential oppression and injustice: Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand." Where that principle may have been true for local economies, it fails to hold for the modern global economy. The baby tiger has grown up, and it's starting to knock stuff over in the living room. Passivity will not do any longer. A self-regulating global economy is a contradiction in terms.
Which means then that the onus clearly is on the consumer to a) support organizations and initiatives that advocate for and implement structures that generate economic justice and b) demand accountability in the marketplace.
So that got me thinking: What does it mean to be a consumer in the way of Jesus? Clearly we cannot avoid being consumers. But is there a way to be a consumer in a way that promotes shalom rather than mitigating it?
And to that end, is it under-defining "simplicity" when we think of it solely in terms of frugality?
Do I (can I) accurately and faithfully embody the message of Jesus with my spending habits? And how?
What do you think?
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4 comments:
Good stuff. I think that you have approached the problem in the correct way. Our generation needs to understand why the generation before us failed to correct the moral ills of a culture shaped by advertising and consumerism. During the 80's and early 90's, the church went boycott-crazy against any institution that did not align itself with overly fundamentalist moral sensibilities. This failed for several reasons, but one reason in particular sticks out as being worthy of discussion in a forum such as this.
It seems that the church of a generation ago was trying to remove the "splinter" of moral failure from its neighbor's eye while not paying attention to the "plank" jetting out its own eye. The plank, of course, being the same problem spoken of in the Bible time and again (i.e. the church neglecting the marginalized in order to favor a self-serving system, whether commercial or political). James writes about this very thing in scripture, as does Amos, as does every other prophet in their own way for that matter. The church during the late 80's was of the opinion that it made more sense to scold the "rich young ruler" by threatening not to "buy" from them, and, instead, it chose to turn it's wealth over to some other unjust company like Walmart simply because it didn't have a gay employee--or some such pedantic foolishness... futhermore, this technique took into account that actually letting the "rich young ruler" walk away could possibly cost them a new church building or whatever other toy they had convinced themselves would glorify God (Matt. 25).
Our generation, on the other hand, is really starting to understand that it is impossible to speak to corporate America about moral failure if one thinks its alright to show up to the meeting driving an SUV whose gas depletes the ozone and is one of the central reason we can't stop beating up the middle-east, wearing Prada that was sown by children in Bangladesh, and passing the begger because we don't have change smaller than a twenty.
We realize that the only way to be salt and light is to call the people out into the wilderness where the laws of consumerism don't apply... even if that means that we look like John the baptist and are forced to wear camel hair and eat locusts for the sake of our poor brothers and sisters around the world.
--dan
Great thoughts Dan ... Your last comment confuses me a bit, though, when you talk about being called "out into the wilderness where the laws of consumerism don't apply." Where is that? Is that even a real place? And if it is (say, in a monastic community--and I'm not even sure that you can find one of those in the US where the laws of consumerism don't apply), then it's existence may in fact be part of the problem ...
The conundrum here is that a radical prophetic gesture such as the one it sounds like you might be propounding--an "exodus" of sorts from the marketplace--actually hurts the cause of fighting global slavery. If Christians everywhere stop buying chocolate, then the price of cocoa plummets, and plantation owners are forced to buy more slaves that they mistreat just to stay competitive in a sagging industry.
So the question that I'm wrestling with is how can we (as it seems we must) act redemptively WITHIN the system in order to breathe God's justice into the world?
by the "wilderness" I was referring to a monastic move of sorts... similar to that of Ignatius of Loyola who suggests radical "indifference" to the world that one might become more present to the needs of the world. It is not necessarily a literal leaving of the market place, because that would be impossible. Rather it is a symbolic withdrawal from a given system in order to see it more clearly and to help others to reflect upon their participation in that system... monastic orders understand that there is never a point in which "all" christians will do anything (live in the desert, sell all they have, move into the slums, ect), but that some specific communities are called upon to make grand gestures in order draw attention to a problem.
so, my allusion to John the Baptist was to suggest that perhaps some groups of Christian must appear a little odd and even be part of something that is not universally possible in order to call attention to itself in such a way as to disorient others, which may allow new ways of seeing a problem in a new way--or at least that is how "indifference" is supposed to work int the discernment process. For the sake of brevity, I won't here explore what that might look like in the cocoa market. In short, i'm not so sure that operating "within" the system is always the best answer when it comes to a small religious community, such as yourselves, changing a larger political system... though it sometimes is.
--dan
I completely agree ... thanks for the clarification
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