Picked up the 'sh*tty pulp edition' of Ruined by Design recently. This was one of my favourite books I read a few years ago and so it's a good excuse for a reread. A lot has happened since I first read it—both in my personal life and in the world—so I'm interested to see what resonates now.

In the intro, Monteiro describes the goal of the book as wanting to "help you do the right thing in environments designed to make it easier to do the wrong thing." I think this is a perfect description of the tension of trying to work for a better world under capitalism. It's something that time and time again I have grown frustrated by how much the system, those environments he speaks of, are resistant to change. The question of whether or not capitalism is capable of producing a common good, one I have reflected on previously, seems to keep coming up as a no.

Capitalism relies on the myth that profit and the common good can coexist. It's what has fuelled Silicon Valley's techno-futuristic promises up to this point. Sure, you have to ignore all the missteps along the way. Selling people's data, massive efficiency layoffs, union-busting, those are all necessary evils on the road to a better tomorrow. But the truth is these aren't in the pursuit of good, these are done in the pursuit of profit. As Monteiro puts it,

“When the people at the top tell you they want to change the world, it’s generally because they’ve figured out how to profit even more from those below them.”

In Horsley's book, he notes a passage in the Gospel of Mark where Jesus rebukes the religious leaders for telling people to donate their money to the church rather than care for their family members with financial need.

“You skillfully sidestep God’s law in order to hold on to your own tradition… But you say it is all right for people to say to their parents, ‘Sorry, I can’t help you. For I have vowed to give to God what I would have given to you.’ In this way, you let them disregard their needy parents. And so you cancel the word of God in order to hand down your own tradition.” (Mark 7, NLT. Emphasis added)

It strikes me that I never heard this preached in all my time in the church. Instead, we were taught to give to the church before all other needs. I'm not going to flat out suggest that this passage was actively ignored, but it isn't lost on me that for all the sermons on tithing I sat through, this never once came up.

Recently started a book I've been sitting on for a while, Richard Horsley's You Shall Not Bow Down and Serve Them: The Political Economic Projects of Jesus and Paul. I think about the relationship between faith and wealth quite a bit and I'm always interested in deepening my understanding of that topic.

Something I like that Horsley makes explicit right from the outset is that the various texts of scripture are primarily concerned with concrete socio-economic realities. It is our post enlightenment assumptions that have largely stripped our readings of scripture of that important context. Specifically, he notes that the socio-economic realities of the societies from which scripture emerged were divided between a "vast majority of people who lived at subsistence level and a tiny minority of rulers who gained their wealth and power by expropriating a portion of the people's produce." Scripture's economic concern is rooted in that tension between the majority poor and the few wealthy who oppress them.

This is where things get sticky, I think, for many modern readers in our current, Western context. One of the ways that capitalism has tried to ease the conflict and division between the poor and the wealthy is through the concept of a middle class. Capitalism depends on this myth that anyone can move from poor to rich as long as they work hard enough. It keeps people's faith in upholding the economic system even when it's not fully serving them. The middle class falls into this strange not-quite-poor-but-also-not-considered rich grey area, which makes it tricky when reading the critiques of wealth or the solidarity with the poor in scripture.

The middle class (which is shrinking, I know) is, by comparison to the majority poor across the world, very wealthy. That wealth is also, perhaps indirectly, built off the exploitation of others. Yet, in comparison to the super wealthy, the middle class is closer to poverty. Many live paycheck-to-paycheck, in a dependency that can feel like being poor. The middle class is trapped just like the poor, but are benefitting off the flow of wealth in a way that makes them beholden to the system that traps them.

So how then does scripture read our context today? Something I am hoping to dig into more as I work through Horsley.

Settling back into my regular reading routine with Jonathan Haidt's 'The Anxious Generation.' If you haven't heard of this book, you should check it out (especially if you have or work with kids).

My reflection this morning is on a section where Haidt talks about the way our society has increasingly lost any meaningful age milestones for kids as they mature. Where many cultures around the world have historically had rites of passage that would mark a child's transition into adulthood, our modern secularized society has eschewed such practices. He then goes on to say how this has become even more pronounced in the internet age.

"On the internet, everyone is the same age, which is no particular age. This is a major reason why a phone-based adolescence is badly mismatched with the needs of adolescence."

Kids will always try and seek out experiences that are older than they are. Rites of passage and milestones helped keep that in check by providing something to work towards. Online, kids can essentially be any age they choose. They are given access to information and experiences that are beyond their maturity levels. Basic parental controls are not enough to mitigate this problem.

Haidt's suggestion is to reintroduce some form of rites of passage to help kids move at an appropriate pace towards more responsibility, freedom, and maturity. All of this should precede giving them access to online spaces; which he recommends being age 16 (at the earliest).

Picked up a book from the library the other day called The Joy Experiments: Reimagining Mid-Sized Cities to Heal our Divided Society. Early on, one of the authors has this interesting bit on Danish culture:

"In Denmark, there’s a belief that there should be a healthy balance between private spending and public good. In other words, an acknowledgment that life is played out in the public spaces of cities as well as in private homes, and the things that give us joy should be in both realms... Without questions, their taxes are high, but the people I spoke to felt they got satisfaction from this form of allocation of their Joy budget. They saw joy as part of their habitat."

This feels like a direct contrast to the values that I see here in my area of Canada. Here, the protection of the private realm is prioritized above all else, even at the cost of the public good. We can see this in the way that public resources are underfunded in favour of private alternatives (healthcare, education, leisure services). It is also revealed in the way our private experiences of shared spaces have become cultural battlegrounds.

Perhaps the major difference is the way in which people in Denmark still see themselves as sharing in the benefits of the public realm. Here in Canada, it increasingly feels like the public-private divide is becoming a class war and those with the means to fund public services are taking their ball and going home, so-to-speak. Advocates for public goods need to make sure that they are drawing their lines of division in ways that include the most amount of people possible.