We need to also look at the other side of the coin
This month, David Tutty writes…
Over the years much has been written about poverty, its causes and the best ways to respond. We Christians have been part of these debates and have brought to them our long history of care for those who are poor. We seek to end poverty but we have often struggled to know how. For most of us, we have placed our hope in a mixture of individual alms-giving, institutionalised social service delivery and a range of local and overseas development projects. But in spite of our best efforts, poverty and the gap between the haves and have-nots have continued to increase.
While there is some relative poverty here in Aotearoa New Zealand, the reality is that 854 million people – in mainly much poorer countries – go to bed hungry each night and 16,000 children die of hunger-related causes each day. We see something of this tragedy in our newspapers and on television, and yet for most of us, the people involved are distant and unknown and we feel there is very little we can do.
One recent ray of hope has been the Make Poverty History campaign. This campaign has brought together thousands of organisations and many more individuals around the world to work for an end to poverty. Internationally MakePovertyHistory seeks to persuade governments and international organisations to change their policies so that more and better aid reaches those most in need, that international trading arrangements are more just and that poorer countries unsustainable debt is cancelled. Many of the national campaign groupings have also taken an additional local issue. Here in this country, child poverty is an extra focus.
While the MakePovertyHistory campaign is an important step, I suspect that like the United Nations’ Millennium Goals, MakePovertyHistory will not end poverty because the campaign only addresses part of the problem. Both campaigns only focus on one side of the causative coin. They seek to alleviate poverty but are unwilling to address the interconnection between poverty and affluence. To be serious about ending poverty, a sustained focus on affluence is also required.
To do this, we need a deeper understanding of the nature and history of affluence. A study of this uncovers some difficult truths. Writers like Vandana Shiva, a leading Indian scientist and environmentalist, name as false the history most of us learnt of how the richer countries became rich. The affluence that accumulated in Europe did not arise because these countries developed and industrialised first. The wealth and affluence accumulated because other peoples were systematically impoverished and their wealth creating capacity destroyed.
Vandana Shiva believes that “[w]ithout the destruction of India’s rich textile industry, without the takeover of the spice trade, without the genocide of the native American tribes, without the Africa’s slavery, the industrial revolution would not have led to new riches for Europe or the U.S. It was the violent take over of the Third World resources and Third World markets that created wealth in the North – but it also simultaneously created poverty in the South.†(www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-05/11shiva.cfm)
And the affluence that we in Aotearoa New Zealand enjoy is shaped by this history. It was British-accumulated wealth that enabled expeditions like those of James Cook and colonising activities like those of The New Zealand Company to occur. And then with the takeover of Maori resources and markets, the wealth of this land moved into British and settler hands. Even a cursory read of a number of Waitangi Tribunal reports reinforces Vandana Shiva’s demythologising of history.
So to truly MakePovertyHistory, we also need to do something about affluence. We need to go beyond thinking that we can seek an end to dire life-threatening poverty without addressing our own level of affluence. Poverty and affluence are inseparable realities.
I’ve been sitting with the Lucan Beatitudes (6: 20-26) of late and have a strong sense that Luke appreciated this interconnection. Unlike Matthew’s focus on how to become blessed and therefore experience true happiness, Luke focuses on who will be happy because God’s reign is breaking in, bringing blessing and fulness of life. And for Luke, it is those who were poor who are happy with Jesus’ announcement and those who are affluent are not.
Out of a place of deep grief and sadness, Luke has Jesus saying woe to the rich and the satisfied. They turn their backs and reject who God is and what God’s reign seeks to make real. For Luke, God is the one who is good news to the poor (4:18), who challenges the rich man’s accumulation of wealth (12:16-21), who calls disciples to sell all they have (14:33), who sends the rich man who ignored Lazarus to Hades (16: 19-31), who was sad that the rich young ruler wasn’t willing to give what he had away (18:18-30), and who rejoiced in the actions of Zaccheus (19: 1-10).
And for us who live in the more affluent countries, we have great difficulty with Luke’s Beatitudes and his stories of Jesus with affluent people. We find it easier to see them applying only to the most affluent, the super rich, and not to ourselves. We are unwilling to recognise our own affluence and we justify that by arguing that we are not as bad as those who have more than us.
To come to a point where we have a greater sense of how affluent we truly are, I suggest that we need to change our point of reference. Instead of seeing ourselves in comparison with those who have much more than us, we need to see as our yardstick those who struggle each day with hunger and grinding poverty. In comparison with them, we are very much part of the affluent. In being so, we are therefore very much part of the ongoing injustice that impoverishes people.
In recent decades Catholic and Protestant leaderships have produced statements that talk about taking a preferential option for the poor. While they may have interpreted the implications of the phrase less strongly than some liberation theologians, our churches are increasingly realising the need to see and judge their own priorities and actions from the reference point of those who are most poor.
We need to move beyond seeing our material good fortune as a blessing – or as ours by right – and it is the beginning of Matthew’s beatitudes that offers us a way forward. It is important to stress that happy are the poor in spirit; theirs is the reign of God does not actually mean a withdrawal into an interior privatised confidence in God. But what it does call for is a radical change of life. Both Matthew and Luke have Jesus challenging the pharisaical sense of spirituality that would allow us to be humble in spirit while continuing to see our level of affluence as acceptable.
So Matthew’s poverty of spirit is to be expressed externally as well. Throughout Christian history there has been a tradition of evangelical poverty, of living simply for the sake of the gospel. With a greater awareness of the interconnection between poverty and affluence, a choice to be less affluent, and to use our resources so that others are less poor, would be an important step to complement the MakePovertyHistory campaign.
It would be the start of a necessary MakeAffluenceHistory
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