(388)S15E11 Simplicity: The Worship of Mammon
Welcome back to the Fourth Wave podcast. We just spent a number of episodes talking a bit about technique and how we as humans try to control the world through technology and methodology. We elevate objectivity, we elevate goals and success, as we define success anyway, usually output, speed, efficiency, those types of things. But we talked about two people in particular we we brought up a bit, which is Ehler and Vernard Ehler and Jacques Ellul, and they show us that technique can very quickly devolve into dehumanization. And one of the prime examples that, Ehler gives and one that I feel as someone who commutes for two to two and a half hours every day, is that we now have mass transit and we are all seeking ways to get to work efficiently.
Derek:One of among many things we're trying to do efficiently, And it's often we're trying to do this efficiently, get to work efficiently to a job that is now far away from homes, far away from families, far away from our immediate communities that we we live around, and it's in a centralized building, usually an office building. Obviously, there are people with all different types of jobs, jobs that, know, require moving around, service industries where you or different labor industries, you know, repairmen, all that kind of stuff where you're going out. But like, a lot of our culture is this centralized office culture. And we go to these places, these centralized places with other people who aren't really our friends and our family, and sometimes they do become friends, but a lot of times we're we're just kind of friends by convenience, you know, because we just so happen to be or by circumstance, we just so happen to be with each other. And together, the thing that that brings us together is that we are all honing our technique to be as good as it can get.
Derek:And our work is more often than not work that is divorced from those immediate communities, not just not just in distance, but also, you know, in impact. The job that I do isn't really for my my community. And rather than meander through the fields and enjoy the splendor of nature on our way to work, rather than be enchanted by the beauty of creation, rather than be human subjects, we have now, a lot of times, been objectified by the very technique that we wield as we ourselves become objects. We become efficient machines. So when you think about it, it really seems that we are no longer enchanted by the world around us.
Derek:We've become objects. We've become tools. We're zombies to material and processes. It reminds me a little bit of the book or the the documentary, The Botany of Desire. You know, you think that you're in control of the plants that you eat and the way that you manicure your lawn and all that kind of stuff, but, you know, in in some sense, at least, if not in a major sense, those things are really using you.
Derek:You can size up our current situation in a lot of ways depending on how you look at it. And in most of those assessments, it really looks like we have lost our enchantment with the world, and we are simply machines that are being used. But as a strong believer in the Imago Dei, the image of God in humanity, I can't really believe that humanity would ever become disenchanted with the world. I just don't think that that's the way that we're we're designed, that's not the way that we're wired, not not at all. It's just that now our enchantment lies in something which tends to obscure or corrupt rather than something that displays beauty and feeds our souls.
Derek:I think we're enchanted, we're just enchanted with with something else, something that we're not really made to be enchanted by. And you could you could characterize that enchantment in a lot of different ways, but, you know, since we've talked about it, I think I'll go with technique. We are enchanted by technique, and more specifically, a technique that is tuned to lead towards one specific goal, one specific end.
Derek:And that goal, at least today, tends to be wealth or mammon.
Derek:There really are no atheists, and those of us who are theists are usually still monotheists. But rather than worship a God who infuses himself into the creation that he upholds for his glory and for our enjoyment, rather than worship a creation infused with divinity, we worship a God who sucks the life and power out of creation. A God who doesn't give his life for creation and infuse his life into creation,
Derek:but a God who takes from creation, a God who distills the power that the true God infused into creation. Now,
Derek:rather than finding our joy, our sustenance, and our power in each of the millions of stars and flower petals that we experience in our daily journey through life, the God of Mammon condenses, refines, and manufactures the power of creation, distilling that power into our hands if we have sufficient knowledge and technique to summon him.
Derek:What good do the stars do out there? Now,
Derek:Cecil Rhodes, famous guy who, you know, known for the the Rhodes scholarship, he's the guy who found doctor Livingston, you know, doctor Livingston, I presume. Right? Cecil Rhodes once bemoaned this very problem, the the distance of the stars, you know, the fact that the stars are out there. Rhodes said, quote, the world is nearly all parceled out, and what there is left of, it is being divided up, conquered, and colonized. To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach, I would annex the planets if I could.
Derek:I often think of that. Makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far away, end quote. If only we could annex the stars and the planets, harness and distill, monetize their power. No. We are no longer enchanted by the God of all creation, the God who spoke the stars and the planets into existence.
Derek:The God from which power is exuded and infused into those celestial orbs of light. Rather, we are acolytes to the God of mammon. A God who doesn't create ex nihilo out of nothing. A God who has no power of his own, but rather a God who fabricates his power from others, a God who transforms and distills all substance around him. Mammon is the God not of creation,
Derek:but of recreation. We in
Derek:the modern world, we fool ourselves into thinking that we live in a disenchanted world. Scientism and materialism convince us that we are masters over all rather than servants to a anything really, but especially not to a malevolent and capricious deity, deity like mammon. But really, we serve at an altar just like all other humans have done throughout history, sacrificing our sons and our daughters, their futures, and ourselves. We are enchanted by, we are enchanted with mammon, and we are enchanted by it for the same reason we are enchanted by most things. We're enchanted by it because of its display and promise of power.
Derek:Karl Marx has a very thoughtful insight into this very power of mammon to shape and control the world around us. Marx said, quote, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore,
Derek:I'm not ugly, for the effect of ugliness, its deterrent power, is nullified by money. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid, but money is honored and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money besides saves me the trouble of being dishonest and therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is
Derek:the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has the power over the clever not more clever than the clever? Do not I, who, thanks to money, am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary? End quote.
Derek:Mammon has the power to transform the world around us, to transform our very appearance in the eyes of others. It can negate reality creating its own. For if I'm ugly but have money, I'm really no longer ugly because I don't experience the effects of ugliness. I can buy directly with my money or indirectly through the influence it affords me. I can buy attractive women, friends, legislation, policies, and you name it.
Derek:All that is solid melts in the air in the presence of mammon, and all of our resources, or at least the vast majority, are employed in mammon's service. All or most of our strategies are strategies intended to invoke this deity and appease it. Our lives are living sacrifices, sweet smelling aromas, incense offerings to the God of mammon. We are enchanted with and by mammon. Now, as we look around us though, it seems like choosing to serve the god of mammon really does pay off though, at least for many of us here in the West anyway.
Derek:The provisions and luxuries that we enjoy today eclipse what any other time and place has experienced in all of history. Mammon seems to have been and continues to be a benevolent god. A god who has distilled power to us down through the ages. Formerly in massive bars of gold, coins of gold, then into more compact stacks of paper. Now with the power so great, it is distilled down into a single plastic card or even just the push of a button or the swipe on a screen.
Derek:The power of mammon grows with each passing age, and the servants of mammon have been granted great power to reign alongside their master. But as we've already touched on this topic of distillation in previous episodes, you'll remember that while distillation can bring great power, it also tends to bring great peril. The distilled power of mammon really is no different. Behind the power of mammon that is so obvious to us lies a great deal of peril. It's a peril we don't want to acknowledge, however, because to ameliorate the peril would be to emasculate the power.
Derek:The power of mammon which we can't bring ourselves to neuter, Marx has already illuminated for us in this episode. The power of mammon is to reshape reality, and it does this in two primary ways. First, it transforms space, and then it transforms spirit. We could trace the idea of money or goods back a long way if we really wanted to, but believe it or not, if we go back too far, we start finding ourselves in contested water between economists, sociologists, and experts from other domains. A great place to begin exploring some of these contentions is in David Graeber's book entitled Debt, which is really it's a whole lot more interesting than it sounds.
Derek:Trust me. So to avoid too much contention, let's just let's just go back five hundred years into the past. Around the fifteen hundreds, the landscape of Europe had been reshaped pretty dramatically. Marco Polo had helped to reignite European interests and trade with the East a bit before. Columbus then came on the scene, and he had confirmed that new lands lay to the West.
Derek:Then the reformation began right around
Derek:the fifteen hundreds, and mercantilism entrenched its roots in
Derek:the soil of rising nation states. The power of politics was being distilled and centralized, as was the power of finance and capital. The world was opening up through trade and travel. There were new goods to be obtained, new markets on which to sell a nation's goods. Once divided and relatively weak clans and groups were now unified and found power in collectivizing their minds and their numbers.
Derek:And these centralized powers sought to do what all growing bodies seek to do in order to sustain growth. They sought to feed, for growth and strength require consumption. Being relatively limited by space to expand within Europe, most European countries sought to feed their growth by looking outside of Europe, by finding quicker and more efficient trade routes to the East, by shaving costs and increasing margin, and by finding and obtaining new lands from which resources could be extracted for the homeland. The early explorers succeeded in doing all
Derek:of this. Over the next five centuries,
Derek:the desire for wealth drove exploration, exploitation, and conquest of new lands, and subsequently changed the landscape. We could provide a plethora of examples, but since we have done a deep dive into the nation of Haiti in a previous season, let's just take this case as a prime example. Over a very short period of time, Haiti, the pearl of The Antilles as it was called since it provided so much wealth to France, had all of its native Taino population wiped out from disease, overwork, and cruelty. And its lush fertile land stripped and sucked of its productivity. A whole people were wiped off the face of the earth and a whole island reformed.
Derek:The calling card of a God who has no power of his own. Of course, this is just the story from one speck of land lying in the middle of a vast ocean. Stories like this abound across the globe. But for now, let's stay zoomed in on Haiti. With the discovery of Haiti by the worshipers of Mammon, the first order of business was to figure out how to best extract it of wealth.
Derek:A letter written by Columbus documenting his first voyage illuminates this well. It says, quote, besides, this Hispana abounds in various kinds of species, gold and metals. The inhabitants are all, as I said before, unprovided with any sort of iron and they are destitute of arms which are entirely unknown to them and for which they are not adapted, not on account of any bodily deformity for they are well made, but because they are timid and full of terror. But when they see that they are safe and all fear is banished, they are very guileless and honest and very liberal of all they have. No one refuses the asker anything that he possesses.
Derek:On the contrary, they themselves invite us to ask for it. They manifest the greatest affection towards all of us, exchanging valuable things for trifles, content with the very least thing or nothing at all. I gave them many beautiful and pleasing things which I had brought with me for no return whatever in order to win their affection and that they might become Christians and inclined to love our king and queen, the princes and all the people of Spain, and that they might be eager to search for and gather and give to us what they abound in and we greatly need, end quote. Another quote. Quote, they brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawk's bells.
Derek:They willingly traded everything they owned. They were well built with good bodies and handsome features. They do not bear arms and do not know them, for I showed them a sword. They took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron.
Derek:Their spears are made of cane. They would make fine servants. With 50 men, we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want, end quote. You can find much more by Columbus and other explorers in regard to their motivations, intentions, and actions with the lands and the peoples that they discovered. Of course, alongside wealth and exploitation, you will find the seemingly antithetical notion of seeking to Christianize the souls of the natives.
Derek:But as evidenced by the treatment of the natives, commodification and commerce were the primary, ultimate, and I would argue probably really only the the sole concern of most of the explorers. There's a there's a guise of Christianity that that of course comes along with it, but
Derek:yeah. Anyway, within a a very short period of time, the Taino people who were native to Haiti were wiped out and a new workforce was needed. Fortunately for the Europeans, there was
Derek:a very large vulnerable labor force that they were able to tap into to replace the Taino laborers. And I think that this is something that a lot of people miss in our modern assessment of enslavement. Enslavement often coincides with empires. It's not just white Europeans who have problems with enslavement, it's just that they've had the dominant empire over the past several centuries. But just think about all the iterations of slavery that you know about.
Derek:If you think about ancient slavery, you might think about the Romans who had a huge slave society. Rome conquered lands and subjugated people, continuing to prime the market through war. We've read from Joseph Pierre Prudin several times in relation to this, how the empire appeases the people through distraction and wealth influx by subsuming more usually or often through war and conquest. You typically have wars to conquer lands, lands that lead to wealth and provisions. And to have a war where you slaughter other human beings, you generally have to first dehumanize the other.
Derek:So you conquer these new lands and you have these new avenues to wealth of these people who didn't deserve to have those lands anyway. You conquer these others, these other people who are less than you as you've been propagandizing in your media, right? And as you've proven through your victory over their inferior culture that you did deserve it, right?
Derek:You were stronger, you were better, you were smarter, you deserve what you got. So now, after you do all this, under empire,
Derek:to best extract wealth and to certain maintain dominance, you put these others to work. Large scale slavery like this is a staple of empires. Whether the peoples enslaved find themselves in chains or in locked factories with suicide nets, empires are fueled by the enslaved. It's how their insatiable growth is fed. Now, if we fast forward to a relatively modern example, long past Rome and even beyond the nineteenth century shadows slavery, we can take a look at Hitler's Third Reich.
Derek:Hitler's main goal, as Mein Kampf lays out and as historian after historian will point out, was not the conquest of Europe, particularly not Western Europe. Hitler wanted his German people to be able to thrive and compete. And as he looked in around and he saw the colonization and exploitation of his European neighbors, you know, all across the globe, Yeah. Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Great Britain with all these these lands that they've had across the globe. He recognized that his people needed land, space to thrive and compete with the other empires.
Derek:They needed more resources, land in particular. And many of the easily accessible lands abroad were already taken by other European nations, and Germany's naval capabilities weren't all that great. I mean, they they're they're known for, like, their submarine warfare, but that's partly because they had to be kinda sneaky because they didn't have, you know, great access to the the waterways and stuff. And so, they didn't have the greatest navy, which meant that Germany had to look to to get land to feed their empire more locally. And he didn't look to the West to conquer, he looked to the East.
Derek:He wanted to conquer Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and those surrounding areas. And as Hitler began to invade these other nations, one of the first things that he did was he created forced labor programs. Hitler had hundreds of thousands, if not millions of slaves working for him at any given time. Slaves who fueled the furnace of war and kept his nation fed. Of course, a lot of times people focus on the the Jews because they were a substantial amount of the people that Hitler persecuted.
Derek:But, I mean, lots of Eastern Europeans didn't even have to be Jews. There is there is a large labor force, not just in the concentration camps, but a large force that Hitler enslaved for the war machine, for the empire. So please note that the rapid growth of an empire or the the sustaining of an empire is frequently, if not always, accompanied by extensive enslavement of some sort. I mean, you even see this back in the Old Testament where as the nation of Israel conquers its way into new lands, they lay out ground rules for the enslavement of certain peoples conquered in war. They even have a whole people group, the Gibeonites, who they enslave.
Derek:Empire, war, conquest, expansion, and enslavement, all go hand in hand. So as explorers like Columbus found new lands for their empires to conquer, those empires wasted no time in extracting wealth for their nation, and they did so through the exploitation and enslavement of the natives that they conquered. But as the natives died out, new workers had to be found, and thus began the Atlantic slave trade. In The United States, most people think of this trade as beginning in 1619, but really, the trade began at least fifty years earlier, and possibly even as much as a hundred years earlier as the Spanish sought to bolster their dwindling labor force in their newly conquered lands. With the newly acquired lands, European traders were able to offer not only new and exciting goods on the market, they were also able to take those things which had once been luxury goods and turn them into staples.
Derek:And if not staples, they at least made them accessible. Free land and free labor tend to do that sort of thing to the price of products. Of course, when you think about it, the land wasn't really free. I mean, it cost the Taino people their freedom, their lives, their whole culture. And nor is the labor really free.
Derek:Quite the opposite, the labor was captive. The availability of products then, both in terms of quantity and cost, really, it was tied to the objectification and the exploitation of others. And that's a theme which really hasn't changed all that much today, no matter how much we'd love to deny it. Whether that's the declining cost of electric vehicles thanks to the sacrifice of Congolese lives, or the low cost of myriad items thanks to the sacrifice of Chinese, Vietnamese, and many other
Derek:lives. Overabundance, excess, whatever you wanna call it, it has a cost. But hey, if it's cheap and available, it's not my cost to bear. That's kinda nice.
Derek:Soon after the new world began to be exploited by Europeans, one item in particular transformed from a luxury item to an item that the masses could now enjoy, and that item was sugar. As a US citizen, when I think of the slave trade, I typically think of cotton because that's what largely drove the southern slave system here in The States as far as we view it anyway. But really, the foundation of the slave trade began and continued to be fueled really by sugar. And there are probably a lot of reasons for this, which we could delve into, but really, there's one reason that trumps all of them, and that's demand. As sugar's price dropped due to the increased supply, demand rose due to its accessibility to a broader swath of consumers.
Derek:And as demand rose for sugar, so did demand for the enslaved. Not merely because slavers were seeking to start up new plantations, but because the life of a sugar slave was brutal. The work was grueling and dangerous with death a frequent occurrence. The enslaved were constantly in need of being replaced. The demand for sugar harvesters was high both because the demand for sugar was high and because the lives of the enslaved were expendable.
Derek:Due to their abundant supply, the lives of the enslaved were also relatively cheap. And because their lives were cheap, so was their labor and that which they produced. Pass on those savings, right? Now, how cheap exactly were the lives of the enslaved? I mean, we can actually quantify what human life was worth.
Derek:It was estimated that the average life of the enslaved on a sugar plantation would result in about 450 pounds of sugar. So that's what a human life was worth, 450 pounds of research. Now, I did a little bit of research and I I don't know how accurate it is. So I would love for people to to check this. But as I was you know, it was easy to figure out what the price of 450 pounds of sugar is today.
Derek:And I looked at buying it in bulk and stuff, and it looks like a reasonable price for 450 pounds of sugar today would be something like $500. Have you went to the grocery store and bought a bunch of one pound bags up to 500? Might not be $500, might be more, but I think you can get about 450 pounds of sugar today for $500. Looking through as best I could find, it looked like the price of sugar pretty much stayed the same. But obviously, the the cost of currency has inflated a lot.
Derek:So if you figure, you know, the the price for 450 pounds of sugar today, $500, figure $500 for 450 pounds of sugar back in 1800, what does that come to? It comes to something like $12,500, something like that. So I don't know. I might be way off. This isn't my area of expertise to kind of dig into archives and do that kind of stuff.
Derek:But if it holds, the value of a human life of of an enslaved individual on a sugar plantation was something like $12,000, ten to fifteen thousand dollars. Right? That's the value of a human life. So whatever the price actually was back in the day, the point is that like human life is invaluable and they were quantifying this and really it wasn't that much money. Like, if you're gonna quantify a life and you put it at $5,000,000, at least for most people, be like, okay.
Derek:Now, you still shouldn't objectify somebody, but $5,000,000, it means you at least think that somebody's valuable. But even if even if it was like $50,000, the equivalent of $50,000 to enslave somebody, you'd be like, man, life is just so cheap. So anyway, the the abolition movement, they totally latched on to this idea, this this quantifying of the price of the enslaved. And that was they were able to make this a whole lot more objective to people. Right?
Derek:When you think of enslavement, a lot of people didn't really like it, if if you kind of talked about what it was, but it was just kind of part of the system. But if you can show people, like, how egregious it is and and what the disparity is, it really helps it to become that much more atrocious to people. So the abolition movement, they they latched onto this 450 pounds of sugar, And that helped them to envision the end of this system that was that was otherwise so nebulous. It helped to put flesh on this system. I mean, one probably couldn't envision ending the institution of slavery, but but they could envision reducing or ending their consumption of a product.
Derek:Now, as the abolition movement grew, abolitionists focused on this quantifiability of the slave trade to to awaken, to prod the consciences of others, and to foster action, not this helplessness because of this nebulous system. When you could declare that eight families enjoying sugar for nineteen and a half years would result in the death of a 100 slaves, that puts things into perspective. Or if one family would forego eating sugar for less than two years, they could put a slave sized dent into the slaver's purse. Right? Just forego sugar for two years, and there's the life of a slave.
Derek:And for modern Americans who consume an average of more than 80 pounds of sugar a year, it would take or would have taken an individual a little bit over five years of sugar consumption to reach that level. Now apart from conscience prodding by the abolitionists, if we zoom into the level of a family or individual, in the whole sugar issue, it it really seems benign, doesn't it? Right? Comparing slavery
Derek:to sugar.
Derek:I mean, when I think of sugar, I picture a Thanksgiving meal in a warm home with smiling faces all around and a a table decked out with all kinds of food and especially, like, your favorite Thanksgiving desserts. Desserts packed with fantastic sugar. It wouldn't be Thanksgiving without sugar. I mean, I don't I don't feel like it would be. I grew up on jams and desserts, and I mean, most thanksgiving foods are really to, like, sweet potato, casserole, pumpkin pie, like, everything is jam packed with sugar.
Derek:And putting sugar on the table,
Derek:it doesn't seem like that's really supporting slavery. I can just go down to the market and buy it from my nice neighbor. I mean, my nice neighbor wouldn't support slavery or, I mean, okay, they buy sugar,
Derek:but like, they're they're they don't really care
Derek:about the institution of slavery. They feel kinda bad for the the
Derek:enslaved. The sugar, by the
Derek:time it gets to my friend, the grocer, it's been through so many hands even if there was slavery attached to it. Like what am I really going to do? Not buy from my neighbor, my neighbor who needs to make a living? And then my neighbor is not gonna buy from the supplier that they're friends with, who doesn't buy from their supplier, who doesn't buy from the shipping company, the shipping company who then can't pay their sailors or their accountants or their office personnel. I mean, what is that family really going to do by not eating sugar?
Derek:Are they gonna single handedly overthrow the institution of slavery? I mean, you can see how this this family, this individual, they're not really being selfish by buying sugar. Right? They're not propping up slavery. It's not about them refusing to eat sugar, it's about their neighbors, their neighbors, their community, their family.
Derek:Are they going to turn down all the desserts at social functions now too? Right? Are they gonna be snooty like that? Are they gonna judge other people and pass guilt trips? Are they gonna be rude to their hosts and hostesses all the time?
Derek:And are my kids gonna suffer too? Are they gonna be seen as weird in school if they don't eat birthday cake when their friends bring in dessert for their birthdays? And even thinking beyond my local community, I mean, I know people who work for the sugar company, like good guys. The Sugar Company provides so many jobs to people and they've even got great internships for the for those coming out of school. They have scholarships, and they give scholarships and and they do a ton for the communities.
Derek:And not just for a few communities, sugar actually plays a significant role in my nation's GDP, and the whole nation would suffer if I stopped buying sugar. So I think you can see the dilemma here and the the irony, and the irony is that one refuses to boycott a product for the exact opposite reason that one says they must continue to purchase this product. I mean, think about the claims here. Right? Refusing to purchase a product won't have any impact in overthrowing an entrenched institution like slavery.
Derek:I mean, what can I, just one individual, what what can I do? Right? Yet, one must continue to purchase said product, lest their neighbors become destitute and the nation's financial well-being crumble in an instant. What is this action that can ruin a whole nation and its inhabitants, yet fail to have any impact over a tiny subset of those inhabitants of the nation who are being oppressed and exploited. When you see dissonant arguments like this, just these these ideas that don't hold together that that don't make sense, you know that something's amiss, and that something tends to boil down to self interest.
Derek:A self interest which when illuminated, like it was by those early abolitionists, I mean, it becomes complicity, an excuse to be complicit with the system. Now, you can plug in any number of different products here or any number of different issues and actions. It doesn't just have to be sugar. While the sugar industry is still associated with injustices today, and you can find a lot of different documentaries and and videos out there, whether it's through Netflix or on YouTube or whatever, there there's a lot of stuff out there. I don't know that it should really be the poster child for injustice today as much.
Derek:We have plenty of other products that we could highlight here. The point is rather that these arguments we just looked at are the types of rationales that we tend to go through when it comes to our ethical dilemmas or so called dilemmas related to consumption, and that's in part because of complexity. With the conquest of land, and not just any land, but land that's thousands of miles away from your nation and community, complexity tends to grow. More players come into view, more businesses become entwined with the state and with trade, and information becomes skewed due to relational distances from the oppressed and due to disparities in what different groups are saying. On the other hand, you have a direct relationship to the sugar that sits on your table, and that relationship is a less ambiguous, a more tangible one, and it's one that's it's right in front of you, and it's a beautiful relationship.
Derek:A relationship that not only tastes good, but one that creates beautiful moments and memories, like family around the Thanksgiving table or baking Christmas cookies with your children or with your grandchildren. And sugar, it might remind you of mom and pop store owners down the street who you buy sugar from or your best friend whose son received a scholarship from the sugar company. Your relationship to sugar is is local. Like, it's simple. It's wonderful.
Derek:It's memorable. And conversely, the experience of the enslaved who produce the sugar is beyond horrific. Yet through complex systems of trade and distancing, you feel as though you have no relationship to the horrific. And really, you rarely even feel anything about it. You rarely have to suppress the feelings of guilt because the system's set up so that you learn and see little about this aspect of what you consume.
Derek:You can live in ignorance, willful ignorance, and denial, I mean, very easily or at least you could until those damned abolitionists started poking your conscience. But whatever they wanna say negative about sugar, you know otherwise because you taste and see that the sugar is good. You know, there's a lot that we could talk about in relationship to globalization. There's a lot that's really good about our world having become smaller. I've talked before about Frederick Douglass' What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?
Derek:And how he discussed this aspect of globalization which sheds light on injustices. When a country relies on other countries to survive and when news travels so easily, it's a lot harder to hide injustices like the horrors of slavery in Douglas's day. And that's one reason that Douglas was optimistic about slavery's end. He knew that globalization, that the world being made smaller, it was shining light into those places which had recently been the dark recesses of the continent, those places that were impervious to light. Now that light was being shined into all parts of the globe for everyone else to see due to quicker transportation and quicker modes of information, there were a lot fewer places for darkness to hide.
Derek:But here's the problem. While our shrunken world can deliver news in an instant, the distance of space still acts as a filter. And news is news only if it has some relation to your life. And I don't really care to read about the weather in Nantucket or the crab harvest off the coast of Juneau. So while I care about all humanity, I don't really wanna read stories about the murder rate in Ghana or government corruption in Uzbekistan.
Derek:Not only do I not have any connection to those places there other than my shared humanity with the people that live there, but there's really nothing I can do about either of those things. And that right there was one of the pernicious aspects of slavery for the, for Europeans. And most of the slavery was kept at a distance from them. Europe was 4,000 miles from many of their slave plantations. At a time when news would take weeks to travel that far, I what I mean, 4,000 miles, that that has nothing to do with your world.
Derek:There was very little connection to the plight of the enslaved, and what little news connection there was came through those whose interests were served by the continuation of slavery, I mean, by and large. That's in part why the rise of slave narratives and stories like Frederick Douglass, Equiano, Clawdell, or Uncle Tom's Cabin, why those stories were so important. They provided insight and connection to a people and a plight, which were otherwise obscure and distant. It put flesh onto those stories. And you may not ever see a slave plantation.
Derek:You probably can't even envision it if you're living in in The UK back in the eighteen hundreds. But you could see and you could hear from a former
Derek:slave, one of you could see one of
Derek:the enslaved representatives right in front of you. And you might even be able to see the scars of enslavement on him if he chose to lift up his shirt and and better envision, like, what that horror was like. But, I mean, even then, their stories were not stories that one usually wanted to hear. As a change to the system that would be implied by, you know, the horrors that they told, it might mean that friends and family were gonna lose their income. It might mean increased sugar prices.
Derek:It might mean a loss of national prestige and trade. I mean, one probably couldn't change a system so large anyway even if you were willing to give up those sorts of things. And even if you could, why would you wanna help those at a great distance by hurting oneself or your family or your your fellow countrymen? I think this is where Kierkegaard is especially helpful for us as we think through these types of things. See, complexity has a tendency of preparing the soil for consequentialism to take root.
Derek:And imperialism and globalization are not just flower bed sized plots of soil. I mean, they're Iowa farm sized plots of soil in which consequentialism is is ready and raring to go in that fertilized soil. When a flower bed has some weeds in it, you can call them by hand in in less than a minute. When a thousand acres has weeds, only mass destruction will do. Industrial herbicides controlled burns, and the whole area has to be ravaged in order to prepare the soil for new life to thrive.
Derek:So if you play video games too much and you find yourself spending a lot of money on them or wasting a lot of time on them, you just get rid of your console and the problem goes away a whole lot easier. When your town was built by an oil baron who obtained his lands through exploitation of indigenous peoples and now dumps chemicals into the waterways and poisons people, where what are you gonna do? Where do you even start with that? You gonna stop buying items with plastics in them because you'll be supporting him since he's able to sell his waste products and and refined products to help make the plastics that that you're gonna buy that are in everything? You're gonna stop working at the only job there is in town?
Derek:You don't have enough money to move anywhere else? You don't have any skills to find another job? You're gonna move somewhere and find another job? Like, risk it, try it without filling up your vehicle at the gas station that sells this guy's gas on your way out of town? Without eating the food transported to the grocery store using his gas product?
Derek:I mean, in an industrialized, globalized world, the web of complexity is is not only large, it's just extremely sticky. And I think that's why all empires go through the cycle that they do, you know, ending like the empire characterized as Babylon in the book of Revelation, with the merchants and politicians and false prophets, a very overlapping group, mind you, with all of them crying out that their city, wealth, and power are being
Derek:destroyed. The rich exploiters weeping in terror, but
Derek:with the masses shouting for joy at the empire's destruction. When injustice becomes so complex, when it becomes baked into the system, when it has been left to spread and sprout in an untended field, controlled burn is the only solution.
Derek:In the meantime, as we wait for Babylon to burn, I mean, what ought we to do? Do we twiddle our thumbs and resign ourselves to fate? Do we whip out our fiddles? Do we play with the band as our ship goes down? No.
Derek:Not at all. That's not the the biblical response at all.
Derek:The Bible depicts a number of instances of how we as Christians can act in hope. And one of the the biggest ones that comes to mind is the story of Abraham interceding for Sodom. Right? Asking God, you know, God, please spare the city. If if you only find, I don't know, know the number, like, 30 righteous people.
Derek:God doesn't find 30. Okay. If if you can only find 20 righteous people, please spare the city. And he, like, whittles it down to five or something like a small number. And Abraham just intercedes and intercedes and intercedes on behalf of the city even as the situation becomes more and more dire, just desiring for the people to come to repentance, for God to withhold his judgment just for the sake of a few righteous people.
Derek:Or I think of
Derek:the story of Jonah and Nineveh. Right? He did not want Nineveh to repent. Nineveh, that was part
Derek:of the Assyrian empire, it was a horrendous empire. The things that they did to their victims, to the people that they conquered were absolutely atrocious. I mean, one of the worst in in all of history, just horrendous. And you understand why Jonah didn't want them to repent. Yet, in the the story depicted in Jonah, you you see that God desired their repentance, and they did come to repentance.
Derek:And where people repent, God does pull back his judgment. So there there are there might be moments where you can have a nation sized revival, where there is repentance, and where you don't need a controlled burn just because of a miracle of God. So our our job is not to pass judgment, but to call out evil and to do justice. And so we we are prophets who call out the evil, and we pray for repentance, and we do justice knowing that Babylon will probably burn, but looking to the only one who can prevent that from happening and bring about repentance.
Derek:So for those who believe in God, we also believe in miracles. God can change the landscape of the nation because he
Derek:can change the landscape of the individual heart, and nations are composed of individuals, aren't they? But beyond the possibility of a miraculous national awakening, we as Christians ought not to base our hope only in our own temporal good because we believe that in in the ultimate value of the ultimate good and because we want others to embrace that good as well. Right? And because we believe in the continuity of history, a history that crescendos into eternity. We might be living in weed infested soil that is going to need to be to have a controlled burn or to have some industrial strength pesticides sprayed onto that land.
Derek:We're gonna have to get rid of all those weeds. Right?
Derek:But, I mean, as people who believe in the continuity of history and who want to uphold the good, we ought to want to prepare the future to embrace that good. Right? We want to see the crops come to fruition after the weeds are gone, and we want to sow seeds that some may find safe shelter deep in the soil. Right? Throw the seeds out onto the ground knowing that
Derek:a controlled burn is gonna come, but hoping and praying that some of those seeds end up deep into the ground and are spared by the fire so that they can sprout when the fire dies down, surviving the fire and and sprouting into new life once the flames have passed. I think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, somebody that we talked a bit about in our last season. When I think about him living in a horrendous time in Nazi Germany, when there was a controlled burn or an uncontrolled burn going on, and weeds were were popping up and popping up and popping up and and then being razed to the ground. You have somebody like Dietrich Bonhoeffer who had premonitions of his early death, his early demise, yet chose to do the good and the right thing and decided to speak truth. Right?
Derek:He didn't necessarily do it for himself. Of course, he desired to live, but he did it for the good, and he did it hoping that the good would sprout in the lives of those he discipled and in the lives of future Germans.
Derek:In order to produce these good seeds, we
Derek:have to come from
Derek:a healthy tree though, a tree that grows high into the heavens. Jesus said that we are to set our minds on things above, not on
Derek:things on the earth. We need to seek God and his kingdom first and foremost. You know, Gustavo Gutierrez said something similar when he said, quote, the one who starts with heaven is sensitive to those who live in the hell of this earth, whereas the one who begins with the earth is blind to the situation of exploitation upon which the earth is built, end quote. It's only by setting our mind on heavenly things that allows us to be of any use when we fall to the
Derek:ground and die, when the fire comes. It's only that, our eyes on the heavens that allow us to produce good fruit with good seeds. And it's only those who have fallen from the heavens who can multiply and produce that upward growth that we're looking for.
Derek:The thorns and thistles that lie shallow rooted and spread close to the earth, they know not the heavens and produce only those who likewise have no vision for the vast expanse above. They do not survive the fire.
Derek:And one of the main problems with mammon is that it's shallow, it's a weed, it's fleeting, it's fickle, and propagates like a weed too. It creates networks and systems that seem ubiquitous and entrenched and unassailable. I mean, where
Derek:do you even begin when you're overrun by weeds? I think you can see this sort of sentiment very well in a letter that Patrick Henry, a a famous American revolutionary, he wrote to a Quaker acquaintance about slavery and abolition. And he really respected from my understanding, he really respected the Quakers, and you can kinda kinda get a feel of that in his letter. But Patrick Henry, he recognized the evil of slavery and God's desire for all men to be free. I mean, heck, this guy this this guy, Patrick Henry, he was fighting for freedom.
Derek:Right? This is the give me liberty or give me death guy. Liberty is a big deal. Freedom is a big deal. But listen to what Patrick Henry says in this letter, what is it, letter to, Robert Pleasance.
Derek:He wrote it in 1773. Listen to this.
Derek:Quote, I take this opportunity to acknowledge the receipt of A. Benezzette's book against the slave trade.
Derek:I thank you for it. It is not a little surprising that Christianity, whose chief excellence consists in softening the human heart, in cherishing and improving its finer feelings, should encourage a practice so totally repugnant to the first impressions of right and wrong. What adds to the wonder is that this abominable practice has been introduced in ye most enlightened ages, times that seem to have pretensions to boast of high improvements in the arts, sciences, and refined morality, have brought into general use and guarded by many laws a species of violence and tyranny, which are more rude and barbarous, but more honest ancestors detested. Is it not amazing that at a time when ye rights of humanity are defined and understood with precision in a country above all others, fond of liberty, that in such an age and such a country, we find men professing a religion ye most humane, mild, meek, gentle, and generous, adopting a principle as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible, destructive to liberty. Every thinking honest man rejects it in speculation.
Derek:How few in practice from conscientious motives. The world in general has denied ye people a share of its honors, but the wise will ascribe to ye a just tribute of virtuous praise, for ye practice of a train of virtues among which your disagreement to slavery will be principally ranked. I cannot but wish well to a people whose system imitates ye example of him whose life was perfect. Believe me, I shall honor the Quakers for their noble effort to abolish slavery. It is equally calculated to promote moral and political good.
Derek:Would anyone believe that I am a master of slaves of my own purchase? I'm drawn along by ye general inconvenience of living without them. I will not, I cannot justify it. However culpable my conduct, I will so far pay my devoir to virtue as to own the excellence and rectitude of her precepts and to lament my wants of conforming to them. I believe a time will come when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil.
Derek:Everything we can do is to improve it if it happens in our day. If not, let us transmit to our descendants together with our slaves a pity for their unhappy lot and an abhorrence for slavery. If we cannot reduce this wished for reformation to practice, let us treat the unhappy victims with leniency. It is ye furthest advance we can make towards justice. We owe to the purity of our religion to shew that it is at variance with the law which warrants slavery.
Derek:Here's an instance that silent meetings, ye scoff of reverend doctors, have done yet which learned and elaborate preaching could not affect, so much preferable are the genuine dictates of conscience and a steady attention to its feelings above ye teachings of those men who pretend to have found a better guide. I exhort you to persevere in sow worthy a resolution. Some of your people disagree or at least are lukewarm in the abolition of slavery. Many treat ye resolution of your meeting with ridicule, and among those who throw contempt on it are clergymen whose surest guard against both ridicule and contempt is a certain act of assembly. I know not where to stop.
Derek:I could say so many things on this subject, serious review of which gives a gloomy perspective to future times, end quote. There is absolutely so much there. So much just came to mind that I wasn't even planning on talking in there. I mean, Henry said that it is obvious that slavery is against Christianity, that for as barbarous as people were, you know, in generations before him, like, you know, before the 15, whatever, before the people who came over to the the colonies, like, slavery was not really a big thing. Right?
Derek:It wasn't a thing really until relatively recently. Yes, sure, of course, slaves existed, but as an institution,
Derek:it just in Europe, it wasn't too much of a of a thing,
Derek:of an entrenched and established institution. And Henry's acknowledging this, and he's saying it is just absolutely abhorrent to just conscience. It's obviously wrong from a a human perspective, like a human rights, a humanism perspective, but it's also right when you compare it to Jesus Christ. I I forget what he calls him, like the the perfect one. Right?
Derek:He's just like, it it is so obviously wrong, and everyone who who speculates about it knows that it's wrong. He says that. He says that they know that it's wrong. Every thinking honest man rejects it in speculation. Right?
Derek:But we all have slaves, and Patrick Henry said he has a slave. He said he wished that they could get rid of it. He could get rid of slaves, but, you know, it was a little bit too inconvenient. Right? Everybody else had them.
Derek:It was hard not to. He respected the Quakers for trying to get rid of it and the institution of slavery. And he said, look, like, even I know you Quakers are really trying to get rid of it, but there's still some of you who, you know, are affirming it. He's like, but I appreciate those of you who aren't. And this was just I forget when it was.
Derek:It was like 1789 or 1779, I don't remember. But like, right when the constitution was being ratified, the Quakers, they were abolishing slavery. They were saying, you cannot have slavery and be a Quaker. Like, it it's not compatible, not at all. We talk about this in our Benjamin Lay episode, which I did a repeat of in quite a number of seasons because it was such a it's such a good story to see the consequentialism, and there's so many principles you can kinda pull out of it.
Derek:I'm not gonna repeat it in this this season, but I recommend you go back and listen to it or or read a little bit up on Benjamin Lay. But the Quakers, right, had the same problem. They were consequentialist. You had you see, especially in the story of Benjamin Lay, he was basically pitted up against wealthy people. It was the wealthy people in the congregation who ended up getting leadership roles, and the wealthy people tended to have slaves, and so they had a vested interest to perpetuate slavery and to not acknowledge what was on everybody's conscience, which was that this is a terrible thing.
Derek:Yet in this letter, we get from Patrick Henry this honesty. He knows it's wrong. He absolutely knows it. He knows it's antithetical to Christianity. He knows it's antithetical to the very revolution he's backing, right, this revolution for liberty.
Derek:He 100% knows it. But why can't he get he he stop it? Well, he sees in the Quakers that when you try to speak against it, you lose a lot of things. I mean, the American Revolution, the Quakers were persecuted. They lost lands, they lost property, and not just the Quakers, but like Mennonites and other people who refused to to fight as well, right, who refused to pick sides.
Derek:They were kicked off of their lands, they had their stuff taken. Life was hard. There was sacrifice and there was there were consequences, unjust consequences for not having slaves, particularly speaking out against slavery, against the institution. So Henry, he says, it's unfortunate we can't get rid of this at this time. We can just try to make it as lenient as we can of an institution, and, you know, speak against it, and hope somebody else in the future can get rid of it.
Derek:Essentially, I'm not willing to take the consequences, I'm not willing to take the inconvenience now, but hopefully, our children will be stronger than we are, and and they can get rid of the institution. Jefferson says something somewhat similar. He's got a couple quotes on slavery or God's justice coming and stuff that are are well known. Right? These guys know it.
Derek:They're not men of their times. They know what they're doing. Now, Henry, I really appreciate his honesty, and I think, you know, it's easy in our day to look back on them and criticize them as just being extremely barbarous, and sure, it is, But to think that we're really any different, I don't know. We're different on the issue of shadow slavery in the South having slaves pick cotton on plantations. Okay.
Derek:I can check that box off as being against that and not participating in it, but are we really that much different than them? Don't we still worship mammon and the convenience that it brings? Do we really elevate others, the liberty of others that much that we're willing to sacrifice our own and sacrifice
Derek:of our own well-being, our own comfort, that we're willing to give up convenience? I don't know that we are. Well, I know that we aren't. We aren't. We're just like Patrick Henry, except Henry at least
Derek:has the honesty to admit it when most of us don't have that honesty most of the time. Like Henry, I think most of us, most of the time, we look up to the heavens. Right? We we see Henry saw the heavenly seed of the Quakers, the Quakers who were falling to the earth being cast down, right, from the heavens. They were lying on the ground.
Derek:For us, might not be the Quakers, but, right, we see other groups of people, not the abolitionists who aren't buying sugar, but other abolitionists who are trying to end other injustices. We see these other people sacrificing of themselves, giving up conveniences, whether that's boycotts, social, you know, social inconveniences, what whatever it is. Right? We see these other people who look up to the heavens and are falling to the ground, sacrificing themselves, and we tell ourselves that they're not really doing good. Right?
Derek:Like, what good does that do? What good can one person do? What good can I do? Why inconvenience myself? Hopefully, one day, somebody can take care of that.
Derek:Maybe one of our children can invest differently. Maybe some of our children can can end these injustices and and put up with the inconveniences. Right? So Henry, I mean, he saw the Quakers doing this, being persecuted and sometimes even killed by American revolutionists for their refusal to take up arms and and to take the revolutionary side. Henry had glimpses of heaven, yet he found himself entangled in the weeds of mammon, Money, convenience, comfort, provision, social standing, power, and whatever that all entailed.
Derek:Right? Mammon's allure is powerful, and we're fools to think that that we aren't allured with that power as well. And we can see the allure of mammon in another story as well, a story which had it gone differently and might have prevented the horrors of the Transatlantic Transatlantic slave trade from ever happening, ever even getting off the ground in the first place, or at least to the extent it did. The event occurred in 1564, fifty years before the 1619 date that at least we in The United States tend to attribute to slavery in the state's beginning. And right around the time that the Spanish began significant increases in the slave trade to replace the Taino harvesters who were dying out, All this happened right at right at this time, this very important time in the history of European enslavement in the Western Hemisphere.
Derek:John Hawkins, a British merchant sail sailor, he made one of the first successful slave ventures outside of Spain and Portugal. And up to that point, Spain had monopolized the slave trade, I mean, what maybe little trade there was at that point, due to the strength of their navy and preventing others from encroaching on their business. But as the book Black Cargos relates, there is an interesting incident here with with John Hawkins. Quote, when queen Elizabeth heard of Hawkins' slaving venture, she said, it was detestable and would call down vengeance from heaven upon the undertakers. Well, Hawkins went to see the queen and showed her majesty his profit sheet.
Derek:Not only did she forgive him, but she became a shareholder in his second slaving voyage. That was in 1564, and Hawkins then had four vessels. Before setting out, he issued his famous sailing orders, became a tradition in the British Navy. Serve God daily, love one another, preserve your victuals, beware of fire, and keep good company,
Derek:end quote. So Hawkins, he somehow was able to get through I I don't know if he
Derek:had to, like, pay the Spanish bribes or if he somehow snuck his small fleet through the the, like, Spanish blockades and stuff or however he did it, he ended up getting a bunch of slaves, which was not normal for for Britain. Right? This was kind of a new thing and and a new thing because the slave trade was new or just starting up, but also new because Spain had a monopoly on this up to this point. And so Queen Elizabeth is like, that's terrible. How dare you?
Derek:Like, you're gonna call down wrath on on you and maybe even England, The UK, whatever it is. You're gonna call wrath down on
Derek:the nation because of this evil that you're participating in. Right? But then, John Hawkins is like, well, just why don't you take a look at my profit sheet here? And Queen Elizabeth, all of a sudden, had a change of heart. She did a one eighty.
Derek:She saw how profitable it was to sell other human beings, and she said, go for it. She was all in, helped increase his fleet and prominence and everything. That was only twenty four years after Queen Elizabeth bowed the knee to Mammon that the British defeated the invincible Spanish Armada in 1588. Now, I
Derek:don't know enough history about this period to know what all went into that defeat, how all of this stuff went down. I have I don't know. But I do wonder, like, wonder how much the allure of wealth drove Great Britain to confront Spain head to head. Like, how much did slavery have to do with the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the way that the British were motivated to to build that up? I don't know.
Derek:But it's just it's just a really interesting time period in my mind there. Now, whatever the motivation, the defeat of the Spanish Armada paved the way for Great Britain's rise as the empire upon which the sun never set. An empire built on the backs of the enslaved from across the globe, from Africa to The Americas to India, and even to Britain itself. And, of course, the slavery I'm referring to in Britain wasn't the same injustice as the shadow slavery or the plantation slavery found on other continents. In fact, the Somerset case of 1772 implied that any so called slave who touched British soil would be free.
Derek:And so there was not technically any slavery in Great Britain. And if a slave touched British soil, they're free. But economic enslavement and injustice, it ran rampant there, and it's, you know, perhaps seen best in the writings of of someone like Charles Dickens, who spent a whole lot of ink writing about economic injustices. Slavery de facto, despite it being illegal, bezure. As nation states came onto the scene and the power of politics was distilled into more and more potent forms, from small tribes and fiefs to larger areas, eventually to nations, nation states, with a distillation of political power, the power of mammon was also being distilled, often by the very same people distilling the political power.
Derek:I don't think there's anything too new for you in telling this story. It's just that the problem is this is really where the story ends for most people. Yes. The whole history of the rise of shadow slavery and the rise of nation states and imperialistic domination and exploitation, it was bad. But those times have largely ended.
Derek:Right? And sure, those particular iterations of economic distillation have ended, though the horrors of nation states have only grown. But economically, the distillation process looks different. Living in Georgia, I don't pass large plantations with hundreds of black field hands being worked to death. That might just be because I don't have to drive past any prisons or through any ghettos on my hour long commute each day.
Derek:I don't have to see the emaciated bodies of the Congolese laborers or the faces of suicidal Chinese factory workers because the globalized economy pushes that exploitation far away from me. Because even with the reach of global communication, such things aren't news. The masters who distill power the most have made sure that I don't have to observe such things. I have to go out of my way to see injustice today. Detour off of my quickest, most efficient route to work, to see the modern field hands and the byproducts of empire, or break out of my social media algorithms if I'm going to see those types of things, these algorithms that I'm I'm locked
Derek:into. In a
Derek:lot of ways, we're much closer to the faces of the oppressed today, like Frederick Douglass showed us. Communication and and everything. Right? There is light that can shine into any dark corner of the globe today. We have much greater access through both transportation and communication to see what those with power don't want us to see.
Derek:Yet the oppressed might as well be an eight week sea voyage away on some obscure island because we never take the time to glimpse their faces. And that's because it's true. Those with power don't want us to see them, and we fail to recognize that we are so often part of that group who wield power. We don't want to see the oppressed. Now, might say that this is because we're actually trying to live in the vein of simplicity.
Derek:We can't solve all the world's problems. I mean, that's to presume that we're God, isn't it? It's best that we don't worry about a famine in Africa, or a genocide in Gaza, or the plight of workers in The Congo. I mean, those people aren't local to us. We only have so much presence and power to expend in the world, so shouldn't we do that locally?
Derek:Shouldn't we help those within our reach rather than try to play God across the globe? Now, there are days when I'm really sympathetic to that argument, and I think there is a bit of truth in it in in some ways. But when I think back to the nineteenth century abolitionists and to their sugar boycott, it snaps me to my senses. See, if there's a civil war in Latvia, maybe I don't have any influence there. Maybe I'm not connected to it in any way.
Derek:I've got that general sympathy, you know, for human life being lost, but I'm not gonna spend a whole bunch of time and energy thinking about that or trying to do something about that because that's like trying to play God. I I don't need to play God in a civil war in Latvia should that ever happen. But if The Congo is good enough for me to get my EV batteries from, if I can take the time to invest in EV stocks that make their money from the exploitation of poorer nations like The Congo, if I find my votes influenced by trades and tariffs with particular countries and for particular goods, if I can make offerings to Mammon and receive Mammon's rewards from a faraway place, then surely I bear some responsibility for what goes on there. If we reap rewards there, then we seem to have responsibility there. How hypocritical is it to have our investments connected to an exploited place with exploited people for an exploitative product, and then say that we bear no responsibility for that place or the people who make that product?
Derek:How dare we say that we best not play a benevolent god in the midst of us playing a malevolent one? How can we pay homage to the divinity of mammon exported out of The Congo while being unconcerned about the Imago Dei there? Now, I'm not saying that this is easier, that I'm doing this or I'm going to do it
Derek:well, but we at least need to start by being honest, maybe being a little bit more like Patrick Henry, by throwing off hypocrisy, by identifying the standard that we don't adhere to and admitting it. Sure, there's a lot of complexity here,
Derek:and it's hard to know where to even begin to start untangling it. And it might just be a whole lot easier if I say, screw it, let my kids deal with it. But the mere presence of complexity, that's not any excuse not to start untangling things. We must begin by taking Kierkegaard's one short step towards the good. Take one step backwards, and then another, and then another on the road of repentance.
Derek:For those nineteenth century abolitionists who recognized the complexity of commerce, politics, and enslavement in their day, a first step looked like a refusal to purchase and consume sugar, a decision to hurt the enslavers where it hurt them most, in their distilleries, where they were converting and concentrating human labor into hoarded capital and wealth. Refusing sugar was a small, simple step. You can call it simple, even though you and I wouldn't have done it. But such is the composition of complexity. A tangle of many small steps accumulated and tangled together, and that's what complexity is.
Derek:The banality of evil is not best fought and conquered with more power with a comparably complex distillation of power, rather it is best defeated by the banality of the simple good, that one small step. We will likely find that even these simple steps are difficult to implement because, we feel pain in doing them. It costs us something. It's inconvenient
Derek:to use Patrick Henry's ideas. The thought of giving up sugar is likely really hard for most of us. But the thought of giving up smartphones, now that's unfathomable. And the only reason we could give
Derek:up sugar now is because we know how unhealthy it is for us, and we'd really just be giving it up for ourselves anyway. Our comfort and our power are so wrapped up in the exploitation of others that even taking a simple step like boycotting sugar or certain electronics is nearly impossible for most of us.
Derek:That's the power of mammon. That's the
Derek:power that Marx observed and bemoaned all those years
Derek:ago. We live in a fluid world where all that is solid melts into air, where injustice is obscured, where profits dictate what is moral or feasible,
Derek:where comfort justifies oppression. We have created a liquid world because that's what distillers need to do their work at their still, concentrating more and more power while discarding the extraneous components. We're seeing that power concentrate more and more before our very eyes. Most of us are grasping at a piece of this power ourselves, not wanting to be left out, condemning it only in so much as it excludes and alienates us from a piece of it.
Derek:But as we discussed earlier in this season, we know what distillation leads to. Yeah. Yeah. I know. It leads to more and more potent products, more power, but simultaneously, it produces more volatile components.
Derek:We can choose to continue contributing to the complexity of the system and scrambling for our share. We can choose to take one simple step away, then another, then another. And I
Derek:pray that you can begin taking that one step. And I ask that you would pray for me to be able to do the same.
