The long conversation that is the warp and woof of civil and communal life

Oh, dear. A couple of days ago I mentioned that I had picked up Marilyn Chandler McEntyre's Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies and was looking forward to reading it. I still am looking forward to it but on slightly different grounds after having read the first few pages.

She is a graceful writer and I happen to agree with many of her conclusions and recommendations regarding reading, writing, words and conversation. Yet the rational which she offers, the basis for her recommendations, is so factually wrong that you can't help but feel bemused.

The trouble begins on page 17 when she departs from her field of expertise, theology and English, and seeks to create an analogy based on economics to underpin the threat to language.

The ecological crisis that we are facing might briefly be described in terms of three general problems. First, the ways we provide food, clothing, and shelter for ourselves in the industrialized West - methods of agricultural production, water management, fuel extraction, and resource use - have become unsustainable. Second, terms like "productivity" and "healthy economy" have obscured the idea of stewardship in ways that dull the conscience and blind the eye to practices that are fundamentally destructive of the common good. Third, the radical imbalance in resource distribution and ownership worldwide is unprecedented. "Multinational" corporations largely under North American management control a wildly disproportionate amount of the world's resources and labor. Those of us in the North American church are, as Ron Sider so eloquently put it, "rich Christians in an age of hunger." Practices that benefit us directly harm others.

Where to start in this field of unconscious misanthropy, ignorance and self-loathing? I guess at the beginning.

the ways we provide food, clothing, and shelter for ourselves in the industrialized West - methods of agricultural production, water management, fuel extraction, and resource use - have become unsustainable.

Just plain out and out wrong. Our methods of agricultural production, etc. have become dramatically more efficient and sustainable. We are extracting more engergy per ton of coal, more food from less land, better allocating water resources, etc. all the time. Better than five years, almost unbelievably better than fifty years ago. The issue is not in the methods but in the driver - population. As long as the world population is growing faster than our increase in efficiency and productivity, then we risk greater ecological damage.

It is easy to flay the evils of faceless commerce, business and multinationals. Easy but wrong. It is much harder to admit what she is actually complaining about, that there are too many people. Hence the accusation of unconscious misanthropy. If you believe there should be fewer people, say it. But don't expect anyone to step up to the table and wish to be part of the solution to that particular problem.

The reference in this sentence to "ourselves in the West" also illuminates a further intellectual blind spot. Our methods of production and our technology are dramatically more sustainable than those in the past or in the rest of the world. If we were to try and produce the volumes of food, clothes, and shelter required using the technologies and methods of fifty years ago or which are used elsewhere today, the ecological impact would be cataclysmic. This factually unsupportable desire to blame the West leads to the accusation of self-loathing. Popular in academia I am sure, but a trait with little benefit or attractiveness, especially when based on ignorance.

terms like "productivity" and "healthy economy" have obscured the idea of stewardship in ways that dull the conscience and blind the eye to practices that are fundamentally destructive of the common good

An unsupported statement, a belief without evidence. Maybe this is happening but there are many reasons to believe not. Most businesses, and certainly the overwhelming number of large businesses, are very much focused on stewardship. Stewardship of their people, their customers, their resources. They exist in an environment of constraints and are in constant pursuit of sustenance and continuity. There are very few businesses established with an expected end date. How well businesses pursue their goal of sustained growth is a different matter. They show the same variation in effectiveness that is so evident in all fields of human endeavor. But are businesses and our language of business dulling the conscience and blinding the eye? I don't know; perhaps. But I would certainly, if I were Ms. McEntyre, read my Adam Smith first, remembering that he was first, last, and always a moral philosopher and not, as he was subsequently dubbed, an economist.

The real meat for the accusations of ignorance, misanthropy and self-loathing lurk in her final point which because of its density of error, warrants detailed parsing.

the radical imbalance in resource distribution and ownership worldwide is unprecedented

Certainly not unprecedented. Whereas today, the bulk of surplus capital (productivity) is concentrated in North America and Europe, in the year 1,000, it was similarly concentrated in India and China and in 2000 BC it was concentrated in Egypt and the Middle East. The concentration is not new. What is new is the reduction in concentration. In the immediate post World War II years, the US was as much as 50% of the world economy. We are now about 21% of the world economy. Given that we are about 4% of the world population that does still mean that we are enormously productive and disproportionately wealthy. The reduction in that concentration though, reflects a fifty year journey of more countries sharing in more of the benefits of global trade. The increasing productivity and wealth of countries such as India, China, and Brazil reflect an equalizing of income across the globe that, disruptive as it is in the short term, is enormously beneficial in the long term.

It is almost inconceivable that any intelligent person could have been reading any reputable papers or magazines over the past twenty years and not be aware that the world is becoming wealthier and that that wealth is becoming more equally distributed.

"Multinational" corporations largely under North American management control a wildly disproportionate amount of the world's resources and labor.

Wrong and becoming more wrong every year. As referenced above, the US (and its multinationals) are less and less of a percentage of the global economy each decade, not because we are declining but because others are becoming more productive.

Yes, US multinationals control a disproportionate amount of resources still but that control is sharply constrained (both by our laws and the laws of those sovereign nations in which they operate), and it is eroding. To take the simplest of examples and a bug bear that has haunted the imagination of academia for decades; the oil industry. For all that Exxon, BP, Shell, Chevron, etc. strike fear and loathing in the hearts of conspiracists and academics, there are only two western oil companies among the top twenty global oil companies and their share in percentage terms of global oil and gas resources is in the low single digits. There are some few industries in which American multinationals dominate, but they are few and under constant competitive threat.

To believe that American multinationals call the shots across the globe would seem to reflect a decades long Rip van Winkle event.

Those of us in the North American church are, as Ron Sider so eloquently put it, "rich Christians in an age of hunger."

No doubt that North American churches are disproportionately wealthy, but in an "age of hunger"? Please. The whole of human history was an age of hunger up until sometime in the sixties or seventies. Death by starvation was a frequent occurrence in good times and bad. What percentage of the global population today dies of hunger each year? A miniscule percentage. When and where it happens, it is a tragedy which I do not belittle. But it happens rarely. This is not, except in the fevered imagination of isolated intellectual populations, an age of hunger.

Finally, McEntyre saves the biggest humdinger of all till last:

Practices that benefit us directly harm others.

It is as if Ms. McEntyre has never heard or comprehended the concept of comparative advantage (known and understood in economics for some 150 years). It is as if she believes all human affairs are a zero-sum game, a notion demolished in detail by the author Robert Wright in Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.

So I face the conundrum of an author whose argument is in part built on analogical argument that, were it not so sad, is laughable in its fallacy. And yet . . .

As erroneous and fallacious as her predicate analogy might be, I do not dispute her summing up. I agree with her conclusion, not the path by which she reached that conclusion:

Those of us who preach and teach and minister to each other need to focus on the word - on words - more explicitly, intentionally, and caringly as part of the practice of our trade. This is necessary and urgent activism: to resist "newspeak," to insist on precision and clarity, to love the bald statement, the long sentence, the particular example, the extended definition, the specifics of story, and the legacy of language we carry in our pocket Bibles and on the shelf with Shakespeare. We are stewards of treasures that have been put into our keeping. We're not doing too well with fossil fuels and wetlands. I commend those causes to you as well. But along with them, conversation itself - the long conversation that is the warp and woof of civil and communal life - is in need of preservation and renovation.

Peter's admonition to "be sober, be watchful" applies to this enterprise. Noticing how things are put, noticing what is being left out or subverted, takes an active habit of mind.