Turning the Wheel of Liberation

Originally published in The Realities of Poverty in Delaware 2003-2004

In the Old Covenant forming the Hebrew Scriptures, the signatories are Yahweh and the run-away slaves who rose against oppression. Can you cite for me a single instance in the Bible wherein Yahweh is recorded to have signed a Memorandum Of Understanding with the Dominant class? The Covenant, which is the principle point of our faith, is God’s defense pact with the Powerless. The powerless are the non-persons who acquire a dignified peoplehood. ~ Aloysius Pieris ¹

Development should be bottom up. This means human development, cultural development, and social development before economic and technological development. I don’t deny economic and technological development, but human, spiritual, and cultural development should come first. People at the bottom must feel free and unopposed. This is the first step in Dhammic Socialism. ~ Sulak Sivaraksa ²

We would be remiss to close a publication on poverty and inequality without a discussion of these issues from the point of view of the religious traditions of humankind. What follows is an effort to do so, relating the insights of an Abrahamic (Christianity) and a non-Abrahamic (Buddhism) tradition to the contemporary understanding of the role, mission, and duties of charitable organizations.

While Christianity might be characterized, along with its Judaic mother and its Islamic brother, as a path of submission (to Divine Will); Buddhism could be described as a path of admission (gaining insight through and being transformed by an investigation of reality). Beneath these apparent differences, however, lies a great common ground, as demonstrated by the two remarks cited above, one by a Sri Lankan Jesuit and the other by a Thai lay Buddhist. A very relevant example of that common ground, in the context of this discussion, is the certainty that, returned to us today, both Jesus and the Buddha would be arrested as vagrants and aggressive panhandlers in most of our major American cities and would likely be confronted with one or more forms of institutional correction of their aberrant lifestyles.

Whether following Jesus (Lord and Savior) or going for refuge to the Triple Gem (Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha), the religious impulse is fundamentally our opening ourselves to liberation. The act of faith is a movement of transcending the self and affirming what binds us to others and to the world, our inherent solidarity with all things. We emerge from the delusion of self and merge with the world.

This movement places us on a radical path, especially in regards to an issue such as poverty and wealth. The path of faith leads us, in the words of Pieris, “to join hands with other religions in working for inter-human justice,” ³ and to make a preferential option for the poor and against the forces of power and privilege. The history of almost every religion is a history of its forgetting and having to return to these roots (radix). We stray from the path of liberation, are forced to acknowledge our having been intimidated (or seduced) onto a side-track, and rediscover the path that leads us back into the neighborhoods of the marginal and excluded. In this sense, religion is not a sectarian institution nor an optional human undertaking, but a fundamental drive for social and self- transformation.

If we look at any aspect of poverty – Choose any article in this publication. – we find, in tracing back its genesis, that it is not amenable to solution solely within the framework of nonprofit activity. In every case, the solution requires changes of a scale and complexity that demand that nonprofit actors become advocates and organizers within the subject group in order to even begin to address the issue. Homelessness in the U.S., for example, is not the result of sudden changes in the lifestyle choices of the poor and unknown, but of massive economic and policy changes beneath the social landscape.

Building the capacity of charitable sector will never suffice. There is a systemic incapacity of such organizations to meet the need. What is needed is for organizations to become more engaged in and informed by those who suffer most from the lack of a solution, adopting as their base the subject group and as their agenda, the agenda of the base. This is necessary, because, in the absence of this agenda-transfer from the base, charitable organizations run self-defeating risks: 1) They cannot help solve the problem, because they do not yet understand it fully; 2) they lack the authority to mobilize those who suffer most to embrace wholeheartedly the organization’s agenda; 3) they face forces in the wider society which tend toward privatization, competition, and depleted models of nonprofit governance and management, 4) they risk drift of mission to align the nonprofit with the current trends of accepted opinion and the latest funding themes; and, most ruinous of all, 5) the nonprofit agenda becomes so thoroughly informed by the privileged, elite consensus, that it literally becomes a “business of the rich. For the poor become the means by which the dispensers of aid acquire power.”³ Groups which hope to eliminate poverty must build into their mission a duty to exist in closer solidarity with the poor and a willingness and even a zeal to contest the present order. Organizations which are truly “missionary,” in the sense of allowing themselves to be fully open to liberation as an essential element of their collective life, must respect the capacity of the poor and resist forces which tend to the diminishing or disregarding of that capacity. What is more, they must be as ready to refuse cooperation with oppressive structures, helping to dismantle them, as they are to comfort and care for those who are victims of these structures. We must be prepared to rend, as well as to mend.

The accompanying chart diagrams four different root assumptions about poverty and the consequences entailed by each of those assumptions for a group or organization. Each of the four assumptions (center) leads to a certain set of responses to poverty and, thus, to a role (outside corner) which the charitable organization (“CO”) plays within the larger society. The ability of the organization to have an impact on the problem is illustrated by the continuum along the bottom of the chart. Its ability to nurture a new social order is illustrated by the continuum along the right side.

Beginning in the bottom left hand corner of the chart and proceeding clockwise:

■ To view poverty as a problem created by the wealthy is the most disempowering scenario, leaving a charitable organization with no effective role to play except that of helping to usher in changes, after which it would presumably participate in the new society. Without a tremendous change in power relationships, the organization can do little good.

□ Regarding poverty as a problem created by the poor themselves lends itself to treatment of the poor as, in Freire’s words, “failures and rejects of life,” a damaged subgroup to be policed by society, most benevolently by its voluntary sector, which serve the poor in ways consistent with this fundamental assumption.

◊ To treat poverty as a problem of lack of wealth entails responses which build the capacity of individuals, households, and communities to compete successfully in the society as it is. While organizations have many hopeful roles to play in this scenario, educating and providing technical expertise, their ability to resist the present order is limited.

◆ Approaching poverty and wealth as mutually reinforcing problems treats them as co-arising, giving the “wealth problem” ⁴ equal attention with the problem of poverty, and leading to responses which enlist the poor as partners and equals, whose agenda is solicited, adopted, and advanced by the nonprofit.

Assuming the co-arising of wealth and poverty as human problems leads to a requirement that this mutual problem be viewed from both sides – not uniquely from the point of view of the rich and powerful – in order to fashion a response to it. It leads to this because it recognizes no expertise on the part of those who possess, since wealth is just one contributing element of the problem which has to be solved, not a privileged vantage point “above” the problem from which to reach down and solve the problems of the poor.

In “The Asian Sense in Theology,” Pieris speaks of Jesus and the Buddha as mediators of liberation. He goes on to say: “Authority makes no external claims. Authority is competence to communicate freedom. He who lacks competence uses power.” ⁵ In the Buddhist worldview, the root of our problems lies in our susceptibility to the three poisons: greed (lust), hatred (aversion), and ignorance (delusion). These poisons are products of the human mind, from which they flow, and where they must be stopped. Our modern society, with its myriad means of communication, has turned the dissemination of these poisons into a deluge, one of the most prominent forms of appeal being to our role as consumer, the dominant Western mode of defining selfhood, humanity, and even citizenship. As the poisons become institutionalized in our forms of discourse, entertainment, politics, economics, and diplomacy, they become “structures of selfishness,”⁶accumulated forms of ignorance and of wrong and harmful views, which set us on a false path, even while it is being portrayed as the road to freedom and self-realization.

When wrong views prevail, the out come is wrong intention giving rise to unwholesome actions. Thus one who denies the moral efficacy of action and measures achievement in terms of gain and status will aspire to nothing but gain and status, using whatever means he can to acquire them. When such pursuits become widespread, the result is suffering, the tremendous suffering of individuals, social groups, and nations out to gain wealth, position, and power without regard for consequences. The cause for the endless “competition, conflict, injustice, and oppression does not lie outside the mind. These are all just manifestations of intentions, outcroppings of thoughts driven by greed, by hatred, by delusion. ⁶

The point which Pieris and others are making is that an anti-poverty strategy must also address the infinite capacity of human appetites, especially as they are built into our collective life. An anti-poverty strategy, for example, without an “anti-Mammon” program cannot succeed. “Mammon is a cosmic power that organizes itself into principalities and powers,creating inequalities and injustices among human beings. The battle has to be fought also at the macro-ethical level of systems and ideologies in politics and economics. We are dealing here with a human compulsion to institutionalize human greed at the cost of human fellowship.” ⁷

In an article entitled “The Death of Horatio Alger,” Paul Krugman, discussing the Congressional Budget Office report on historic U.S. tax rates, writes: “…between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 percent. Meanwhile, the income of the top 1 percent rose by 148 percent, the income of the top 0.1 percent rose by 343 percent and the income of the top 0.01 percent rose 599 percent.” ⁸

Discussing the United Nations Development Report for 1998, David Loy comments: “…twenty percent of the global population now accounts for 86 percent of consumption; the three richest people on the plant have assets that exceed the combined GNP of the 48 poorest countries. The result is that three-fifths of the 4.4 billion people in developing countries lack basic sanitation, one-third have no safe drinking water, one-quarter are inadequately housed, one-fifth undernourished and one-fifth lack access to modern health services. This continuing catastrophe is partially due to the fact that in ‘undeveloped’ countries it is the powerful and wealthy classes that continue to benefit most from the efforts of development agencies such as the World Bank; and when projects fail, as many do, it is the poor that suffer the most from their failure.” ⁹

Later in the same article, he quotes from the report: “It is estimated that the additional cost of achieving and maintaining universal access to basic education for all, basic health care for all, reproductive health care for all, adequate food care for all and safe water and sanitation for all is roughly $40 billion a year….This is less than 4 percent of the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world.” ¹⁰

When U.S. hyper-power no longer exists to enforce such global inequity, truly the consequences of our failure to address the wealth-poverty problem will come home with a vengeance. For the poor, there is no solution to their problem without a cure for the appetites and delusions of the rich.

In a chapter entitled “Work and Wealth,” Giovanni Baldelli, points out: “Without the notion of a general order, of a whole fabric in which no constituent part can be damaged or offended without damage or offense to the whole, the notion of right falls to the ground and there is nothing beyond monadic interests and power to satisfy them, there is no authority to which to appeal…” ¹¹

This same understanding of the interdependence of existence suffuses many of the world’s wisdom traditions, including a number of texts written over 2500 years ago, that touch on the nature of a just and stable society. The sutra on the“Wheel Turning Ruler” described a monarch who had forgotten the injunction to make provision for the poor. This had led to crime and to attempts to quell it, including capital punishment:

Hearing about this, people thought: “Now let us get sharp swords made for us, and then we can take from anybody what is not given, we will make an end of them, finish them off once and for all and cut off their heads.” So, having procured some sharp swords, they launched murderous assaults on villages, towns and cities, and went in for highway-robbery, killing their victims by cutting off their heads.

Thus, from the not giving of property to the needy, poverty became rife, from the growth of poverty, the taking of what was not given increased, from the increase of theft, the use of weapons increased, from the increased use of weapons, the taking of life increased… ¹²

In a sutra from the same era, also regarding the right conduct of government, the monarch is advised of the rightness of maintaining the social contract:

To those in the kingdom who are engaged in cultivating crops and raising cattle, let Your Majesty distribute grain and fodder; to those in trade, give capital; to those in government service assign proper living wages. Then those people, being intent on their own occupations, will not harm the kingdom. Your Majesty’s revenues will be great, the land will be tranquil and not beset by thieves, and the people, with joy in their hearts, will play with their children, and will dwell in open houses. ¹³

Egalitarian in its shape, the wheel is a model of the right form of community improvement. Its structure is such that its strength comes from the mutually reinforcing and interdependent nature of its parts, all of which converge at the center. It has no top or bottom. Human beings – self-organizing creatures, capable of great mutual aid and mutual uplift, even in circumstances of deprivation – work from the ground up to encourage “organic leaders” and foster sound and just human communities. It is as permanent a form of change as is possible in a world of impermanence. As besides, it is the right thing to do.

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Footnotes

1
“In Jesus, God has become my poor neighbour,” Sunday Times of Sri Lanka, http://www.sundaytimes.lk/021222/plus/8.html
2
in Watts, Jonathan, Senauke, Alan, and Bhikkhu, Santikaro (ed.), Entering the Realm of Reality: Towards Dhammic Societies(Bangkok: INEB, 1997), p. 85.
3
“In Jesus, God has become my poor neighbour,” Sunday Times of Sri Lanka, http://www.sundaytimes.lk/021222/plus/8.html
4
Loy, David R., “Buddhism and Poverty,” , http://www.wfdd.org.uk/articles_talks/loy.pdf .
5
Pieris, Aloysius, “The Asian Sense in Theology,” in An Asian Theology of Liberation (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1988), p.86.
6
Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Noble Eightfold Path: Way to the End of Suffering (Seattle: BPS Pariyatti, 2000, p. 31.
7
Pieris, Aloysius, “The Buddhist Political Vision,” in Love Meets Wisdom: A Christian Experience of Buddhism (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1990), p. 91
8
Krugman, Paul, “The Death of Horatio Alger,” The Nation online, http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040105&s=krugman
9
Loy, David R., “Buddhism and Poverty,” , http://www.wfdd.org.uk/articles_talks/loy.pdf
10
Loy, David R., “Buddhism and Poverty,” , http://www.wfdd.org.uk/articles_talks/loy.pdf .
11
Baldelli, Giovanni, Social Anarchism, Chapter 6, “Work and Wealth,” (Chi/NY, Aldine-Atherton, 1971), pp. 110.
12
Cakkavatti Sihanada Sutta, Digha-Nikaya iii 66-68; in Maurice Walshe (tr.), The Long Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Digha Nikaya (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995)
13
Kutadanta Sutta, Digha Nikaya, I 135 – 136 (136); ibid.. See also the Aggañña Sutta, pp. 407 – 415 of the same volume.

Footnotes

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