I hear the word often enough, but I haven’t known what it means.  To this uncertainty is added confusion because the only time I’ve used the word in the past, it is has been as a theological description — rather than a cultural one.

Looking at the world, through neoliberalism

In ‘The Special Case for Neoliberalism’ (31-61), Clapp describes neoliberalism and the way it becomes the lens through which people look.  It is ‘a panoply of cultural and political-economic practices that set marketized competition at the center of social life — even as the sole ruler of social life’ (32).  All kinds of assumptions are held a-critically: (1) There is the ‘enshrinement of freedom‘ (37) because people are constituted as individuals with a ‘freedom from the interference of or dependence on others’ (1); (2) competition becomes ‘the primary virtue and solidarity and genuine care for others are signs of weakness, to be ignored or exploited’ (52); (3) ‘the necessary outcome of unrelenting competition is inequality‘ (41); (4) the entrepreneur becomes the ‘ideal and model human being’ (44); and when all these operate together and unrestrained, (5) ‘a start of precarity’ (49) prevails, creating lots of ‘losers’ in the world — maybe a bit like this cartoon that appeared in our media recently — with David Seymour, the leader of our libertarian ACT political party. 

In this world we find reality-TV shows like Survivor which ‘are nothing if not preeminent neoliberal training films’ (53).  And yes, I know what you are thinking — but neoliberalism does not align as easily as you think with political affiliations.  Sure, Thatcher and Reagan championed its ascent, but Clinton and Obama did little to facilitate its descent (38-41). 

 

Rodney Clapp suggests another way of looking, by switching the lens at work.

Looking at neoliberalism, through the gospel

The first thing Clapp does is probe the vulnerabilities in neoliberalism.  There are ‘cracks’ (54) appearing.  He identifies ‘The Five Crises of Neoliberalism’ (54-57):

1. An epistemological crisis: it goes ‘unnamed … (presenting) itself as neutral and natural’ (54).

2. A social crisis: its ‘atomistic individualism cannibalizes society and erodes familial binds, ethnic bonds and bonds of faith’ (54).

3. A moral crisis: it ‘ignores justice’ (54).

4. A demographic crisis: it wants ‘few and perfect children, if any at all’ (55).

5. An ecological crisis: it is not sustainable in ‘a clearly finite and much-exhausted world’ (56).

In a word, the crisis neoliberalism confronts is one of sustainability. It is not sustainable epistemologically, socially, morally, demographically, or ecologically.  Yet it remains strong, with committed adherents.  Its strange force must be accounted for in another register.  It is time to name neoliberalism capitalism as a religion (56-57).

That is a lot of crises! This is the stuff of apocalypse.

Using Cohen’s lyric as a starting point, Clapp finds hope in these ‘cracks’.  They let the light in — and Clapp responds to apocalypse with apocalypse. but a different kind of apocalyptic.  

Reminiscent of the author of Hebrews, he writes, ‘I choose to confront apocalypse not with an argument for the elimination of all apocalypses but with a proposal to return to a better, truer, and even promising apocalypse: that of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  As we will see, apocalypse need not be all bad.  In fact, apocalypse is our only and best hope’ (65).  Apocalyse is seen, for Clapp, ‘not as imminent doom and gloom but as the throbbing heart of Christian faith and hope’ (x). 

Here is the lens through which to look.  

‘We see the present evil age … but we see by the new age’ (79-80).  Or, quoting Douglas Campbell, ‘Paul the apocalyptic theologian reasons not from plight to solution but from solution to plight’ (80).  At this point, Clapp draws heavily from Emma Donoghue’s novel, Room — especially one line in it: “Whats New?” Everything…” (76-81).  ‘After apocalypse, nothing will go untouched, unrenewed, unrestored’ (71).

There is a beautifully-written section —’Freedom After Apocalypse’ (81-84) — in which neoliberalism’s ‘negative freedom from’ is met with an ‘apocalyptically interpreted’ (81) ‘positive freedom for’. [Quoting Hauerwas, he asserts, “We have made ‘freedom of the individual’ an end in itself and have ignored the fact that most of us do not have the slightest idea of what we should do with our freedom” (81)].

If I may persist with my language of the lens, do you see what Clapp is doing here? He demonstrates how the ‘natural-neutral; unnamed-unnoticed’ neoliberalism functions currently as a lens through which people look at the world.  Then he takes out this lens and examines it and, finding it to be in ‘crisis’, and he begins to look at it through the apocalyptic features of the gospel.  The lens has been switched — and the bulk of the book is about what he sees:

1. Freed From the Overweening Market, Freed For Covenant (89-114)

Apocalyptically speaking, neoliberalism is named in and through the cross, unmasked and denaturalized as one of or the constituting element of the world and its ultimate workings … (but) new creation has arrived, though it is not yet fully manifested.  In it, the capacious economy of God has been revealed.  Beside it the neoliberal economy is puny and constricted.  The market as a gigantic information processor cannot and does not contain or process care for the weak and the ‘loser’ — in a word, mercy — or care for creation or nature as a good in itself.  It does not embrace community, covenant love, grace, or miracle.  In the economy of God, all of these realities live.  And they thrive. (113-114).

Neoliberalism, with its individualism and thoroughgoing competition, has no place for the solidarity of humans with one another and with all of creation.  Solidarity is a reality it at best ignores and at worst tears down.  The church’s catholicity, however, embraces peoples from all nations and inclines the church towards solidarity not only with persons from all nations but with the entirety of creation (143).

Future generations may look back on us and, mashing up the verb squander and the noun scoundrel, call us something like ‘squandrels’ … Creation is speaking, even shouting now.  How much more blessed we will be —cocreatures and coworshippers all, men and women, rocks and trees, dogs and bees—if humans relearn how to hear creation’s voice, not just at a scream, but at a whisper (170).

The Christian with Paul’s apocalyptic perspective then looks at all reality “bifocally”.  On the one hand, she looks unsentimentally at the world and sees its darkness and sometimes diabolical brokenness.  She refuses to turn away from the ravages of pain and death and is always prepared for service in their face. On the other hand, she knows that Christ is and will be the victor, and she gathers the courage to confront injustice, oppression, and sin in all its manifestations over and over again.  She is at once vulnerable to suffering and open to joy.  Her hope is not mere optimism but a hard-won confidence that ultimately amid all the setbacks, the long arc of God’s universe bends toward justice, peace, and wholeness.  To put it otherwise, she knows that reality at its bottom is now cross-shaped and that at the cross, death does its worst but does not have the last word (174-175).

There is one glaring difference between the early church followers’ circumstances and ours: theirs were pre-Christian and ours are post-Christian.  In their world, Christianity had not yet been tried.  In ours, many believe Christianity has been tried and found wanting.  It is probably impossible to say who had or has the more daunting task.  The early Christians, with the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, had to invent Christianity from the ground up.  Learning from the mistakes of our predecessors and admitting them as such — which is no small part of what a living tradition does— we have to (empowered by the same Holy Spirit) re-present the faith (196).

While on the subject of worldview…

I’d love to ban the use of the iceberg as the illustration of worldview.  Not only is it culturally irrelevant for most of the peoples of the world, it is inadequate in what it represents.  All it communicates is that some features are hidden and others are visible.  The situation is far more subtle!  As we have seen, the lens helps us understand that that there is a looking-through as well as a looking at (what Michael Polanyi described as ‘tacit awareness’ and ‘focal awareness’).  Then there is also the tree, which exposes a weakness in the iceberg by recognizing there to be a relationship between the hidden and the visible, in that the hidden determines the visible, as a root determines a fruit — a critical issue which floats past iceberg-users.  So, let’s melt the iceberg, metaphorically-speaking…

Here is the tree, with its ‘root’ representing issues of worldview, like the aforementioned ‘unnamed-unnoticed; natural-neutral’ neoliberalism.

As someone who has played with “-isms” (as in issues of worldview) and “-ologies” (as in categories of systematic theology) — looking at every possible “-ism” through each of the seven “-ologies”, in turn, as a way to sharpen and deepen my capacity to think biblically about the world — Clapp’s book was especially satisfying, even thrilling for me.  Basically, at the end of the day, what is he affirming? The way to engage with and respond to neoliberalism is to have a robust ecclesiology and eschatology. 

nice chatting

Paul