Sunday, July 2, 2017

Ride the wave: Reflections on anger, rage and social change #1

"You say you want a revolution, well, you know, we all want to change the world"

Social change is like the waves of the ocean. The trends have been building in volume, intensity and speed for hundreds of years, like the waves have for hundreds of miles. You can bide your time, choose a wave you like, and "ride the wave," or you can drop anchor and try to ride them out. What you cannot do, is to try to stop the waves or reverse them.

Individuals, institutions and specific social movements can only very rarely bring about significant social change. Apparently Gandhi said “if you want to change the world, begin with changing yourself.” Most of us can hardly change our own bad habits or lifestyle. When we live with the expectation that we should be able to change the world around us, or, to put it another way, when we live in a high level of tension with society (as is the case with almost all religious sects), it generates feelings of frustration and even rage.

The only way a religious sect or a partisan ideological movement can hope to bring about significant social change is if the it happens to “catch a wave” of economic, social or cultural change. I will provide two historical examples.

The Protestant Reformation.
Most of the reformers who came before Martin Luther (1483-1546) had the misfortune to end up being burned alive at the stake, condemned by the Holy Inquisition. What was different about Martin Luther? Why did he become the father of the reformation rather than meeting an untimely end at the stake? (by-the-way, this year, 2017, is the 500-year anniversary of the Protestant Reformation)

Luther and the other reformers who came after him had the good fortune of riding a cultural and economic wave of change that was washing over Europe at the same time as their principled objections to the abuses of the sale of indulgences in Roman Catholic Church.

First, the Church had been seriously weakened by the Black Death and a series of crises of corruption including The Western Schism which brought about a split within the Catholic Church which lasted from 1378 to 1417.This was only resolved barely a hundred years before Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door. In most of Europe, but especially in Germany, the Roman Church had a serious problem of credibility.

Second, Luther began writing his protests at just the time that a new technology, the printing press, made possible the mass distribution of his writings in colloquial German. This also made possible the wide distribution of his translation of the New Testament in German, along with a German dictionary, establishing a standard German language, and feeding into the rising tide of German nationalism.

Third, The Protestant Reformers caught a tide of rising nationalism. This was the era of the beginning of nation-states, especially in England, Holland and France (Germany would not succeed in becoming a unified nation-state until the nineteenth century). Although France was not a Protestant nation, it was becoming a powerful and unified nation-state, pursuing its own empire and national interests, with a large Protestant minority. You might say that Luther and the other reformers were lucky, or perhaps their timing was impeccable.

The movement to end slavery
Slavery had existed in Western Civilization from the time of the Roman Empire and the letters of Paul in the New Testament (it also existed pretty much everywhere else in the world). Throughout the history of Christendom, it might be argued that Christianity (at its best) occasionally ameliorated the condition of slaves, but it never tried to abolish slavery.

Once slavery become lucrative and powerful engine of economic growth with the establishment of sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations in the Americas, it also became associated with race or color, and was justified as a natural condition by Aristotle, and ordained by the God of the Old Testament who had cursed Ham and his son Canaan.  The theory was that Canaan had migrated into Africa with the mark of slavery and that it was therefore justifiable and God-ordained to enslave Africans. Even more, by capturing Africans, or purchasing them from other Africans, and forcibly baptizing them as they were brought on board Portuguese ships bound for the New World, the thought was that Catholic slave traders were “saving their souls” while destroying their lives.

The first “Christians” to begin to challenge the slave trade on moral grounds were the early Moravians and Quakers (although admittedly, there were also Quakers and Moravians who owned slaves in the Caribbean). Gradually, Quakers insisted that their own members be disfellowshipped if they refused to give up their slaves.  The Moravians and eventually the Methodists joined the abolitionist movement and began to agitate, criticize and oppose the Atlantic slave trade. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (1984)[1] points out the astounding phenomenon of the abolitionist movement, almost entirely composed of evangelical activists, which in a scant one hundred years was able to completely change the sentiment of Christendom, and turn complacency and rationalization of the slave trade on its head. From the early 1700s to the early 1800s, the overwhelming consensus of Christians changed 180 degrees regarding slavery.

However, it is important to note that a number of scholars, such as Eric Williams[2] of Jamaica and historian Erick Wolf have shown that it was propitious timing. The early phase of economic capitalism, which depended on plantation slavery and the slave trade for the vast accumulation of capital, had run its course. The capitalist system now needed consumers, and consumers needed to be able to earn wages for their labor in order to “buy stuff.” Slave economies, such as existed in the American South, Brazil and Cuba, were now part of the problem, not part of the capitalist solution. Thank God for the evangelical movement which placed itself on the right-side of history to oppose slavery. But it is important to note, that they were not the only cause of the end of slavery. There were many variables involved, of which perhaps the most powerful was economic.

Finally, in both of these examples, even with a hundred years of constant activism and agitation, and powerful cultural and market forces favoring change, the eventual changes did not come without great violence. The Protestant Reformation engendered almost continual violence for over a century, culminating in the brutal Thirty-Years War and the Peace of Westphalia (1648). The end of the slave trade came with the deaths of nearly an entire generation of men in the United States’ Civil War.  

One might not like secularism, pluralism or modernity. One may not like the changes in gender identity, marriage equality or the value of personal and individual liberties in Europe and North America. However, pause and think long and hard before signing up for some quixotic crusade to “take back America” or to turn back the tides of history.  Discern and learn to sail on the waves of social change, don’t fight them or you will, at the very least wear yourself out, and, more ominously, find yourself at the center of a vortex of anger, rage and violence

I think it appropriate to close with the immortal words of John Lennon:




[1] Davis, David Brion. Slavery and Human Progress. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.




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