BOOK REFLECTIONS
FAITH AND PUBLIC LIFE:
A REFLECTION ON ILL FARES THE LAND
BY TONY JUDT
In
his most recent book (Ill Fares the Land, New York,
Penguin, 2010), Tony Judt, University Professor and Director of the
Remarque Institute at New York University, reflects on the state of
political life in the United States and Great Britain. His title is
drawn from a passage in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village:
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a
prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men
decay.
As a historian, Judt points out that the greatest political crises
occur when an untenable disparity of wealth between segments of a
society develops. He believes that the crises in which we today
find ourselves are due to this disparity. He reminds us of some now
quite familiar statistics.
In 2005, 21.2 percent of US national income
accrued to 1 percent of earners. Contrast 1968, when the CEO of
General Motors took home, in pay and benefits, about sixty-six times
the amount paid to a typical GM worker. Today the CEO of Wal-Mart
earns nine hundred times the wages of his average employee. Indeed
the wealth of the Wal-Mart founders’ family was estimated at about
the same ($90 billion) as that of the bottom 40 percent of the US
population: 120 million people. (p. 14)
Growth in inequality corresponds to growth in many social
problems, in fact, Judt’s data shows that it is not the wealth or
poverty of a country that accounts for its degree of social ills but
rather the level of inequality. He points out: “We spend vast sums
on healthcare, but life expectancy in the US remains below Bosnia
and just above Albania.” (p. 20)
Most informed citizens are well aware if not of the magnitude at
least of the basic reality of this economic disparity. What Judt
adds, however, is an analysis of the pervasive and corrosive effects
of this every increasing disparity on our relationships to each
other and on our social and political discourse. Although he never
uses the word, reflecting on his text leaves one with this question:
Is social democracy possible where there is not a fundamental faith
in each other and in the possibility of a “government of the people,
by the people, and for the people.” We live in a society that
distrusts government, at least in part, because it does not see that
the government is the mode of realizing its shared needs and
aspirations. For Judt “it is the gap between the inherently ethical
nature of public decision-making and the utilitarian quality of
contemporary political debate that accounts for the lack of trust
felt towards politics and politicians.” (p. 180)
A significant part of the argument of this very topical and
important text concerns the impoverishment of our political and
ethical discourse. Can we even begin to create a more just and wise
society as long as our sense of value remains confined to the
economic? What is of value and how do we measure worth? Judt asks
how we as a society determine the value of programs which enhance
the sense of self worth and reduce the sense of humiliation in many
of its members. What is the value in providing transportation for
those who are poor or who live in relatively unpopulated areas?
What is the social value of providing education and health care to
the very large segments of society that cannot afford them
privately? To have lived through the recent health care debate in
the United States is to be well aware that even the proponents of
more universal health care coverage had to frame their arguments
principally in terms of fiscal prudence. Where was the discussion
of the value of human lives lost and individuals and families
threatened and demeaned for lack of health insurance? Where even
more importantly was the question of our responsibility toward each
other? One of the most indicative “Icons” of the entire debate is
of an older person screaming at a rally for “the government to keep
its hands off my Medicare.” As we well know,
Medicare is a social program based on a social contract, a contract
that the society’s younger working members have with its older
members to help provide for them after their working years, in the
way that these older members of society did for those before them.
This contract is the responsibility we have toward and for
each other and to those who both came before us and who will follow
us. It is only out of such a sense of responsibility that as
societies we can address the larger and long term problems that
confront us: the environment, infrastructure, international
relations, healthcare, education, culture and the arts, and many
others. Much of the sense we have that government is “broken” lies
in our inability as a people to confront and find ways of dealing
with these life issues and, as stewards of the inheritance left to
us by those who have come before us, to take appropriate care of our
world and those with whom we share it in the present and to meet our
responsibilities to our children and all those who will
follow us in the future.
A central question that emerges from Judt’s analysis is, in fact, a
spiritual one. Recently we attended a lecture entitled Religious
Faith and Public Policy given by a respected leader in American
religious life. As we listened, we were reminded of the distinction
between faith and belief made by a young John Rawls in his
undergraduate thesis at Princeton University, newly printed under
the title A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith.
Rawls writes that faith is always faith in a person while belief is
assent to a tenet, doctrine, or ideology. In the course of the
lecture, it became clear that the speaker was speaking not of faith
but of beliefs. This is in itself a very important topic as
indicated in the talk’s subtitle: The Role of Religion in a
Pluralistic Society. For the believer, however, the question of
faith may be a deeper one. It is to this question that the “secular”
text of Tony Judt draws us.
Living in faith is living in relationship. It is to live in
remembrance of the fact that the ultimate horizon is that of Mystery
and that all of us “live and move and have our being” in that
Mystery. For the Christian, faith means to live in abandonment to
and trust of a personal Mystery that we take to be the Parent of all
of us, making us all God’s children. We often hear the assertion
that the United States is a Christian nation. Thus, how is it that
social responsibility and a sense of personal and moral value beyond
the economic are so absent from our political discourse? Could it
be that the life of faith, of relationship, is often lacking despite
our avowed beliefs? We have no trouble incorporating the language
of personal morality into the public sphere, but the language of
relationship, responsibility, and trust remains missing.
How specifically would real faith as relationship manifest itself in
the public sphere? Two examples emerge from Judt’s text. The first
would be an increased trust in each other. Perhaps as always but
certainly in our day, the profit motive drives public media to
foster fear and conflict among us. The language of public policy
for us is competitive and militaristic in nature. We are
entertained by the conflicts between pundits and the rage of
gatherings of ordinary citizens who fear for their own and their
children’s futures. We are surrounded by cultural pulsations that
foster mistrust and distance between us. The true practice of
faith, with the sense of trust at its core, could thus be a great
contribution to our public life, a fostering of the great aspiration
of the authors of the US Constitution, the ongoing formation of “a
more perfect union.” Much of our current political discourse,
including unfortunately the contributions of many religious leaders,
is driving us into further disunity. There can be no possibility of
union between persons without trust, and there can be no trust
without faith in its deepest sense.
The second aspect of trust would be the ability to trust in the very
possibility of “a more perfect union.” There is no small degree of
nihilism behind the ever increasing propensity toward an autonomous
and self-enclosed libertarianism. It seems to be an inability to
have faith in the possibility of a workable union, a public sphere
where the conflicts between the demands of the self and the needs of
others can somehow be creatively engaged. Transcendent faith
carries with it not only trust in the possibilities of repentance
and conversion, but also the hope that “by little and by little,” by
the grace of God, we can become less fearful and selfish and more
loving and caring. Part of the difficulty with the intersection of
belief and public life in our time is that belief is often brought
to the public sphere in a sense of arrogance and superiority. On
the other hand, faith, as relationship, is always humbly aware of
its failure in relationship. The person of faith is one who knows,
through the purification of relationship, that our own pride form is
always intruding on our attempts to relate more deeply and abandon
ourselves more fully to God. And in this we are taught that
humility is the prerequisite for the possibility of any social
interaction or relationship. It is through a coming together
grounded in humility that we may find ourselves open to Divine
inspiration and direction. It is only by means of a transcendent
faith that we can live in the hope that sinful human beings can
become servants of the Divine will and discover, in our diversity,
the way of developing most fully our human possibilities. It is
only by the trust born from seeing our lives and times against the
Divine Horizon that we can continue to work together toward those
goals that seem so distant and often feel impossible.
The perspective of faith does not give us answers to the political
question of which branch of political thought affords us the best
way to incarnate this faith. (Judt, who is writing a historical and
political and not a spiritual text, believes that a renewed form of
the politics of the Social Democrats is best.) What the
relationship of faith does call us to, however, is a trusting
engagement born of humility and love. Because it is a relationship
that is never an isolated one but one in which we discover not only
our God but the God of all, it summons us to offer ourselves not to
an ideology or utopian vision but an ongoing work of doing what we
can for the common weal. Judt writes: “Incremental improvements
upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for,
and probably all we should seek.” It is a most humbling, and
oftentimes discouraging, experience to recognize how hard we must
work for, at best, incremental improvements in our own life and in
those of our brothers and sisters. But a coming together in such
humility and trust of those who give themselves in dispositions of
repentance toward self and generosity toward others is precisely
what the intersection of faith and public life would look like.
