Credibility and Incredibility

"Credibility" is a fancy word for "believable." We can accept certain statements as believable, and others as "incredible," not believable.

Religion has always had a problem with credibility. Some of the statements that religious groups make seem incredible to people who are used to working with scientific evidence. How could the dead rise again?

A few weeks ago I heard a discussion on National Public Radio. It dealt with a recent discovery by some scientists working, if I recall correctly, at the South Pole. They claim to have found traces of an event that occurred one trillionth of one trillionth of one trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

The Big Bang, of course, is the theory, now widely accepted, that our entire universe was at one time compressed into a space the size of an atom. That means that not only the earth I live on, but the entire solar system, and the 300 or so billion suns in our galaxy, and the thousand or so galaxies in our universe was in that space.

Of course, no scientific theory is provable, because scientists are always revising earlier theories in the light of new observations. Maybe there are better theories about how our universe started, but for the time being, the Big Bang seems to be the accepted theory.

Now, if you can accept the idea that all these galaxies, including our own, were in that tiny space, you should be able to accept almost anything. At the very least, you have to admit that some stories about what goes on in our environment seem incredible at first glance, but may have credibility anyway.

Here are some more scientific statements that seem incredible. My body in inhabited by trillions of bacteria, and each bacterium has a genome more complicated than the human genome. We used to think that all bacteria are harmful to our health, but now we are beginning to theorize that there are many kinds of good bacteria, and if we kill off the good bacteria, we cause problems.

I think back to the days of the "watchmaker God." God made the world like we make a watch. God made it, wound it up, and stepped aside and let it go from there. We understood how watches work--there are moving parts that we can see, and we theorized that our universe is just like that.

Now we know that the watch is not a good metaphor for the universe, and not even for such a small part of the universe as a human body. We are more like a zoo, with all kinds of living things on us and in us that contribute to our life.

What am I?

They used to say that the human body is made up of about $0.95 worth of chemicals. Our chemicals may be worth more than that today, but nobody will deny that our bodies are made up of atoms and molecules that are constantly coming and going--constantly entering and leaving our bodies. As a result, maybe 95% of my body today is made up of atoms and molecules that were not in my body a year ago. If I go back several years, the percentage gets higher.

If I am made up of atoms and molecules that are always coming and going, what am I?

I am the history of the comings and goings of those atoms and molecules, and of what those elements did while they were part of me. In other words, I am the history of me. I am a story.

Yesterday my pack of molecules went to the store and bought some grocery items (molecules that will soon be part of me). While I was there I met and greeted a friend. That friend and I have a shared story. All of us humans have a shared story. We are living together in the 21st century, and we are interacting, loving, hating, helping and hurting one another.

For that matter, every rock on the earth has a story. A geologist digs into the earth and finds a type of rock. The story of that rock is that its molecules were on the bottom of an ocean several hundred million years ago.

But the story of human beings is infinitely more complex than the story of the rock. We human beings are, we think, unique in that we are the only beings able to create and share stories.

Who gets to tell my story?

Am I am the only person authorized to tell my story? It is possible that I am unable to see certain aspects of my story, and that other people could do a better job than I in telling my story. (We say people often do not know themselves.) In a way, every person who interacts with me can tell my story. Of course, if our interaction is limited to 30 seconds at the grocery counter, the other person's story will be very limited. My own parents could tell my story in a much more developed way. But their version of my story ends with their deaths. After I die, other people will continue to tell my story, but I will not be around to correct them if they tell my story in a way that I think is not authorized.

Does God tell my story?

Here we are in the realm of incredibility. Is it possible that God can tell the story of each of us in a way that is even more accurate than the story that we tell about ourselves? Why not? Isn't that what we think God can do? Is it any harder to believe in a God who can do that than it is to believe in the Big Bang?

"In the beginning was the Word." When the Big Bang first occurred, God alone could tell stories. It took billions of years before creatures could evolve to the point that they could tell their own stories. And then, we Christians believe, God became one of us, Word made flesh. God merged God's own story with the story of each human being.

Jesus, we say, is God's story. If we want to know the story of God, look at Jesus. What is Jesus's story? It is the story of love. God is love, says the First Letter of John. What does that mean?

I use a rather mundane definition of love (mundane in the sense of being observable). Love is passionate, respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement. God is passionately, respectfully, vulnerably, and faithfully involved with the human race and with each of its members. The reason that God created (the reason for the Big Bang) is that God, who is love, wanted to share that love. God wanted to love and be loved. When God became human in Jesus, God modeled the kind of life that God wanted each of us to live. God wanted our stories to be like the story of Jesus, to be part of the story of Jesus.

When Jesus tells my story, he tells it in the most loving way possible. He tells it in a way more loving than I do myself. He knows every element of my story, the things that molded me and the things that warped me and wounded me. I am often tempted to tell my story in a despairing way. Jesus does not tell my story that way. Jesus, God, wants each story to evolve into a story of loving involvement. I say "evolve." Each of us is evolving just like the whole universe evolved. There was a lot of crushing and burning in the universe's evolution, and there is a lot of crushing and burning in my own evolution. But the end result of my life should be a full sharing in the life of Jesus, and of God.

A Vision for a Franciscan university

Corporation captures College

What vision are students at most colleges, including Catholic colleges, receiving these days?

Money.

The goal of a college education is to equip the student to make money.

Students will graduate, get a job, marry, and raise children. The children will go to college, and the parents will help finance their children’s education. The parents will get old and they will need money to live well in their retirement years.

There was a time when young people went to college because they wanted to expand their minds for the benefit of the community. They would become scholars or teachers or healers. It is much harder to do that now. College has become so expensive that students are forced to concentrate on money. A student who majors in liberal arts looks forward to a low-income future. True, the liberal arts equip some people for outstanding careers. But students majoring in them cannot count on being in that group.

It is not surprising that colleges and universities should be drifting in search of a credible mission. We as a nation have lost sight of any vision of where the nation should be going. In the absence of such a vision, we cannot blame students for deciding that making money is the way to live their lives. What else is there?

Past Visions

Back in the 1800s the nation believed in “manifest destiny.” The U.S. was destined to lead the world in democracy, technology, and overall quality of life. This vision inspired our subjugating of native peoples and our enthusiastic embrace of the industrial revolution.

Woodrow Wilson gave the nation a vision for World War I: make the world safe for democracy.

The “Greatest Generation,” the generation whose young men fought World War II, had a vision: get rid of Adolph Hitler and his Japanese counterpart.

Millions of young men came home from World War II and found a country freed from the Depression, ready for the Good Life.  They had a vision: make a home and raise a family. The “Baby Boomers,” their children, did not have the same experience of hardship and suffering as the background for a vision. In Vietnam they saw the World War II vision (“get rid of the bad guys”) crash and burn. Then during the 70s and 80s they saw the middle class dream of home and family slowly weaken as the nation became more and more unequal and more and more families dissolved in divorce.

The generations that have come after the Boomers, those born in the 70s and 80s, need a vision too. Even more than the Boomers, they face constantly greater inequality and increasing marital breakdown. Iraq and Afghanistan gave the nation a temporary glimpse of the old “make the world safe for democracy” vision, but, like the Vietnam generation, they have seen that vision fail.

What vision will children born after 2000 live for? What vision inspires their predecessors, the huge population of Boomers?

If the television commercials I watch are any evidence, the vision of seniors today is to be able to go fishing with your grandchild.  It is to live fantasies about things you could never do before because you were too busy making money. Since old age increases health problems, your focus has to include health. In order to go fishing with your grandchild, you must deal with arthritis, diabetes, and COPD.

Not an inspiring vision, especially if you do not care for fishing and you do not have grandchildren.

A Vision of Love

Here is a vision that I propose. It is based on one kind of Christian tradition, a Franciscan tradition. The vision I propose is this: the behavior of every person and every group (e.g. corporation) in our society, will be based on love.

This statement seems trite and self-evident. Haven’t we been doing that all along? Jesus said “love one another as I have loved you,” and we all claim to follow Jesus.

Our problem is that we have not had a working definition of love. “Love” can mean everything from chocolates to sex. Here is my working definition: love is passionate, respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement of one person with another. We will treat every person in the world with passionate respect, vulnerability, and faithfulness.

We will replace the great symbol of our present vision, the dollar sign, with the great symbol of love, a heart.

Some examples.

I start a business. My business is successful, and forty or fifty men and women are making a living working for me. I grow older and decide I do not want to manage my business any longer. I sell my business to a larger business, which closes my business and moves its operations somewhere else, leaving most of my employees high and dry.

This, we say, is progress. This is pain that we endure for the sake of a greater good down the line. But how are we treating those forty or fifty people? Are we treating them with passionate respect, vulnerability, and faithfulness? No. We do not respect the lives they have built in a specific place, with specific people. We say, if they want to work let them move to where there is work. Or we close our eyes and say that they will find other work. “Small businesses,” we say, “will create new jobs.” What good is it for small businesses to create new jobs when the small business gets swallowed up by the large business as soon as the small business becomes successful?

The 2010 Supreme Court decision, “Citizens United,” declared that a corporation is a real person, and has a right to expression just like an ordinary human being. Therefore we cannot limit what the corporation does with its money, because the first amendment protects the right of “persons” to free speech. Fine. If every corporation is a person, then every corporation should treat people with passionate respect, vulnerability, and faithfulness, not only its employees but its customers and its suppliers and those who supply its suppliers.

But, you say, a corporation cannot do that and stay in business. What that statement really means is that a business cannot treat people with respect and vulnerability and faithfulness and still make obscene profits. Executives and board members use profits as chips in fun games against their peers. This is worship of the dollar sign. It is idolatry. If you don’t worship the dollar, you blaspheme. The penalty for blasphemy is death. 

No, I say. The corporation must examine the effects of its policies on every person affected by those policies. It cannot, for example, go into Nicaragua, force thousands of people off the land that they have lived on for centuries, and use the land to raise cattle for fast food restaurants. It would have to take into account the well-being of each one of those people.

But that would slow down progress.

Yes it would. It would also slow down the damage to our environment, damage which threatens to make every business, large and small, extinct. We are creating the hell that is the punishment for idolatry.

Suppose that more of those small businesses could continue to operate as small businesses and not be swallowed up. Keeping things on a small scale will change the rules of the game, so people will have to be creative. How can we do fast food without hurting people? There is a question worth researching. But in order to take the question seriously we will need people who put love before money.

That is a bottom-up tactic. No actions of business or government will give us a vision. We will have to build a new society within the shell of the old.

We will resolve to treat every human being we deal with, both individually and as directors of corporations, with passionate respect, vulnerability, and faithfulness. We will work to make love the central value in our society. We will move as slowly as such a policy requires. We will not kill ourselves trying to invent the next thing that will save us from the problems that the last invention causes. We will test the effects of our inventions before we replicate the inventions on a massive scale. We will use our ingenuity to create, but our creations will be on a smaller scale, focused on the well-being of real human beings.

It is logically impossible for everyone in the world to continue to produce more and more with less and less for ever and ever--the standard definition of “productivity.” That model is a runaway train heading for the cliff of environmental disaster.

We will have a vision that does not presume unending economic growth, but that focuses on health and well-being from day to day, not just for ourselves, but for everyone in the world. The Boomers will lead us, because they are being forced to get out of the older game, and the dollar sign no longer has as much meaning for them. They need something else to live for. Here is what they will live for: love of every human being that God sends into their lives.

Sometimes when you act out of love, you lose, or get hurt, maybe even die. Christians call this “the paschal mystery.” The paschal mystery says that God will not let us lose in the long run. In the long run, if we live out of love, the God who loved us into existence will love us back into existence if we lose our life. That, we say, is what the story of Jesus teaches.

You don’t have to be Christian to live the paschal mystery. There are plenty of examples of people all over the world who are not Christian but are giving their lives for others. Being Christian gives us a powerful story to make our sacrifices meaningful.

Can we sell this vision? Can we make it the mission of at least some of our colleges and universities? Catholic universities? Franciscan universities?

Natural Law today

[Dr. Kent Lasnoski, Assistant Professor of Theology at Q.U., suggested that I read the introductory chapter to the following book and give my reactions.] 


I am responding to the introductory chapter of The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law in a Post-Christian World, by F. Russell Hittinger, William K. Warren Professor of Catholic Studies and Research Professor of Law at the University of Tulsa, Department of Philosophy and Religion.

I approach the question from my own undergraduate philosophy background focused on Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, and from my graduate education in sociology.

The Franciscan tradition sees both Scotus and Ockham as developing the insights of Thomas Aquinas, even to the point of what Thomistic opponents call "nominalism." We accept Leo XIII's "baptism" of Aquinas as meaning that Aquinas's methodology needs to be taken seriously, especially his melding of his faith with his speculation, but that we should challenge Aquinas's theories just as Aquinas challenged earlier thinkers.

One version of history has it that nominalism led to bad consequences, such as the Reformation. A different version would say that it was the first step in the direction of what is generally accepted today in social science.

From the standpoint of sociology, norms arise from the expectations that people have for each other's behavior. When norms rise to a certain level, society (a government) reinforces them with a penalty, and the result is what we call "law." So a law is just a norm with a punishment attached. Which norms become law is a matter of politics. The persons in charge of making laws determine what laws shall be drafted.

Which laws should be drafted? The law-makers base their law-making on their personal beliefs about what is good and what is bad for society. There is no "natural law" that we can use as a criterion for what is a good law or what is a bad law. This makes my position the same as that of Justice Taney, and of the Court today that the author cites on page xxxii (32): the Court is "the basal or 'root' power, functioning as a vicar of public opinion."

This does not lead to total anarchy. It took societies hundreds of years to come to the conclusion that slavery is morally wrong, but societies have come to accept that principle. Popes ever since the 1500s made statements against slavery, but their voice had little effect on Spain or Portugal or England or Brazil until those societies came to the conclusion, without natural law theorizing, that slavery needed to be abolished. Our own society today is deluged with new laws and expectations, which is hardly a symptom of anarchy.

I have confidence that human communities eventually arrive at a more sensitive appreciation of the good and the bad, based on their experience. There is no natural law that those communities can use as the criterion. Sometimes they are wrong, just as societies were wrong about slavery. But eventually they will come to the "truth" about morality.

Saying that morality is determined by a consensus of societies over time is to me very congruent with my favorite statement of Scotus: "In processione generationis humanae, semper crevit notitia veritatis." "Over the course of human generations, the knowledge of truth steadily grew." (Ordinatio IV, d. 1, q. 3, n. 8 -- Ed Vives XVI, 136a) (This edition is available in the Q.U.Brenner Library archives.)

Therefore, the criterion for good and bad laws resides in the minds and hearts of the people in society--a nominalist position. Christians should argue for what they judge as good or bad on the basis of their Christian values. But Christians should not claim that non-Christians are being irrational if they do not have the same perception, and therefore Christians should not expect society's laws to reflect their own judgment. Christians are entitled, like everyone else in a democratic society, to work to shape secular law in the light of their faith, but democratic government requires that the majority must be persuaded of the justice of the Christian position. When Christians such as John Brown go outside the realm of civil discourse, discourse which acknowledges the human dignity of the opponent, the result is fanaticism. A Christian approach must be nonviolent, and nonviolence aims to convert the opponent.

It is true that law teaches, and that bad law teaches bad things. But law that is not accepted by society ends up being ineffective. Our experience with Prohibition shows us the unintended consequences of having a minority moral opinion enshrined in law.

Syria

What should Mr. Obama do?

I think he should abide by whatever the Congress votes.

Senator McCain argues that if he loses the vote, his presidency is ruined. I think that if he goes ahead and takes military action against the vote of the Congress, his presidency will be ruined.

If he yields to the Congress, he might well improve his relations with the Republicans who have been frustrating so much of his agenda.

Here is my naive political calculation. Obama took a risk by deciding to submit the issue to Congress. I applaud his taking that risk. He went against his advisers. I applaud that. Now if he follows the will of the Congress, he will be seen as taking an important step away from the policies that got us into Iraq. The Congress will have to take part of the heat for the decision. He and the Congress will be in it together. He will be seen as a courageous leader who is not beholden to the forces that seem to propel us so easily into military action. He will put the ball into the court of the United Nations, where the rest of the world can put pressure on Russia and China to contribute to a political solution, a solution which everybody sees as the only way out of the present situation.

Suppose the Congress votes to let him go ahead with military action. In that case, he should back off and refrain from military action anyway. Again, for the same reason as above, he will be seen as rejecting the Iraq-style approach that has cost us so much.

If he can go it alone in sending troops, he can go it alone in declining to send troops.

But, to quote an old slogan, I am hopeful but not optimistic. I predict that he will take the military approach, and we will be in a mess for the next ten years.

Indirect Charity

The word “charity” has two meanings.

In Christian circles “charity” is a synonym for “love.” “Faith, hope, and charity” are Paul’s triad, and they are sometimes translated “faith, hope, and love.”

But the word “charity” has the meaning of “gift-giving that is demeaning to the receiver.” People say, “I don’t want charity.”

Nevertheless, I want to use the word “charity” here, and hopefully rescue it from its negative connotation.

Charity or love is “passionate, respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement” of one person with another person. In that sense, charity is the center of human life, and indeed of the universe--but I won’t get into the universe here. I want to talk about love or charity in relation to some of the most important challenges we face as a human race on this earth. The challenges are environmental, but they are caused by patterns of living that are economic and political.

I am inspired to write about this because of the recent Time magazine cover story on bees, and their disappearance. Frogs are disappearing, and I recently reflected that is has been years since I have seen a monarch butterfly.

It is easy to say that all human beings should be involved with each other respectfully etc., but that will not realistically deal with the problem. The problem is with our capitalist economy, and the way we structure the rules of its game.

Capitalism, its defenders say, is the greatest thing that has happened to the human race since the beginning of time. I agree that capitalism has solved some of humanity’s worst historical problems. It has almost eliminated famine, it has led to greater health and well-being for most of us, and it has contributed to human freedom by empowering women. One of its its opposites, “socialism,” has been a failure wherever it has been tried on a large scale. So I don’t want to eliminate capitalism. I want to make capitalism compatible with environmental survival. If we destroy our environment, capitalism will have turned from humanity’s greatest gift to humanity’s greatest evil. We are not doing capitalism well.

We need to extend our charity, our respectful involvement, to the rules of the capitalist game. Some of us have treated the capitalist model as an open invitation to selfishness

—“if we are all are as selfish as possible, we will all be better off.” That simplification ignores the reality that something as complex as a capitalist economy is a game structured by many rules. The rules are not set in stone. They can be changed, but if we operate on the principle that anything that threatens my self-interest is harmful, the people ahead in the game at the moment end up opposing any change in the rules of the game.

Indirect charity is the willingness to change the rules of the game to make the game compatible with human well-being, and indeed, of human survival. In that sense, indirect charity is no different from direct charity. It is simply our involvement with each other in vulnerable and faithful ways, but in ways that allow the changing of the rules of the game.

Why can’t we get a particular environmental problem under control? Because some of us are making money from a particular process--for example, the manufacturing of pesticides. Even if science leans toward saying that a product is environmentally harmful, some of us push ahead manufacturing it. After all, manufacturing provides jobs, and everybody favors creating jobs.

All of us need to be involved with the rest of us respectfully enough to consider changing the rules of the capitalist game even when changing the rules will diminish our profit margin. That willingness is what I mean by “indirect charity.” It is indirect because we will never see the people who benefit from the change, and so the term “involvement” does not apply in the same way that it does in face-to-face encounters. But the involvement is very real. It has costs and benefits. It might cost me and benefit someone else.

I mentioned that “science” can lean toward saying that a product is harmful. Here lies another problem with the way we are doing capitalism. If I operate on the principle that anything that diminishes my profit is harmful, I destroy the value of science.

Science can be the engine that drives capitalism, but if we play by the rule that we should ignore any scientific finding that we do not like, we kill the value of science. Science is never absolutely certain about anything. We can never prove a statement right--we can only prove statements wrong. A billion events that confirm a scientific idea will not confirm it absolutely, but one event that disconfirms the idea is enough to destroy the idea. Because we can never be certain about a scientific statement, it is always possible to find scientific studies that go against the general consensus. Look how long it took our country to accept the idea that smoking is harmful. Tobacco companies always found scientific studies that proved it is not harmful.

Global warming is a hoax, they say. There are scientific studies to prove it.

What capitalism needs is the willingness on the part of its practitioners to accept changing the rules when science seems to show a need to change those rules. That willingness is indirect charity.

A long time ago a political scientist named Karl Deutsch said that human organizations need faith. Faith, for an organization, is making decisions even when you are not absolutely sure about the benefit of the decision. Organizations need humility, in the sense that they need to question their own assumptions. I am arguing that they also need charity, in the sense that they need to be willing to accept some loss if the welfare of the larger human community is at stake.

Capitalism needs indirect charity.

Surplus population

We need a new economics.

Economics--in the sense of a way of thinking about exchanges, measuring exchanges, and rewarding exchanges.

Exchanging things is the heart of human interaction. The simplest human actions can be seen as an exchange. A mother smiles at her infant, and the infant smiles back. The exchange is rewarding to both. The reward is priceless--it cannot be measured in dollars and cents.

What has happened in our world is that exchanges have become more and more tied to money. Unless an exchange can be measured and symbolized by money, it is worthless. The result is that millions of people are unable to take part in the most fundamental exchanges: exchanges for food, housing, and medical care. Such people become, in the words of Charles Dickens, "surplus population." They are not needed. They should be allowed to die.

This is not what Jesus preached.

This is not a new problem. There was a surplus population in the thirteenth century, when the first followers of Francis of Assisi began to live among the people. Francis's approach was to forbid his followers to use money. In fact, they were not even to touch money. (Money in those days was confined to coins, and did not take the paper and electronic forms that it has in our time.) Francis saw people hoarding coins. With those coins they could buy land and drive people off that land. The coins represented power, just as money does today.

The difference between now and the thirteenth century is that back then the Church had great influence in society. The friars, as representatives of the Church hierarchy, used their influence to bring about a re-evaluation of how people looked at money. They focused on use, as opposed to possession. One ought to possess only what one could use in some meaningful way. Their re-evaluation had an effect on how people looked at money and exchange, and made the society more human and compassionate.

An executive today can "earn" $60 million in a year. What can he or she do with $60 million? One such entrepreneur in the 1980s would go into a restaurant, order everything on the menu, choose one item, and throw away the rest. Even that, though, would only cost a few thousand dollars. But $60 million?

Big house, big car. Huge house, huge car. Three huge houses, three private jets. What for?

It's a game. Show your rivals that you are important. What you use the money for is irrelevant. The point is to win the game of showmanship. But that money could be used to provide food and housing for thousands of people.

We need a moral re-evaluation of what money is for. "The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath," Jesus said. Money was made for human life, not human life for money.

We are facing a head-wind of ideology, a theory that explains why it is right and just that one person make $60 million in a year. The ideology says that unless we allow that, in fact, unless we praise that, people will quit exchanging things and the economy will fall apart. When we praise the "earning" of $60 million in a year, everyone is motivated to produce more, and everyone is better off. A rising tide lifts all boats.

But it doesn't. Many boats sink. A Christian society is concerned about the people in those boats. We cannot let a nice theory baptize the sinking of millions of boats and the people in them.

What can we do to change this situation?

I suggest that we do what they did in the thirteenth century: start focusing on how we use money. We should confine our possession of money to a reasonable expectation of what our money can be used for. We should quit using money as a marker for power and prestige.

There is no chance that the people now making $50 million will voluntarily change their thinking. But people make $50 million because they invent something that 50 million people want--for example, computer games, or cars with seats that raise and lower, move back and forth, and are warm in the winter even before people sit in them. The economy depends on things that people want.

We are those people. The more of us that think about how we can use what we have, and not on how what we have makes us look important, the more things will change.

But won't this cause people to buy fewer computer games and nice cars?

That brings me to the second aspect of what we need: new ways of measuring exchanges.

The Exchange of Services and How to Measure Such Exchanges

I have a neighbor who has had a stroke and can no longer work for her living. I go next door and get her shopping list, go to the store, and buy what she needs for dinner. I exchange my time and effort for . . .  for what? For her appreciation and gratitude.

Right now there is no way to measure the value of that exchange. The exchange is worthless in our economy. We have to figure out some way to pay me for what I do, and to let her have the resources to pay me.

We need a new kind of money. Let's call it the "prayer." One prayer can buy fifteen minutes of my shopping time. My neighbor can reward me by giving me three prayers.

This is not a new unit of measurement. Some years ago Catholic Charities in my town would give a monthly food basket to people in exchange for prayer. That was not a meaningless exchange. Even a homebound and ill person can pray, and thereby avoid the stigma of accepting "charity."

A prayer is a combination of time and attention. When I pray, I spend time doing it, and I attend to what I am doing. That is valuable. That creates an exchange.

Prayer can be exchanged for regular money. You give me $50 and I give you five prayers.

I don't have to believe in a god in order to pray. I just have to take time and give my attention to the well-being of my exchange partner.

We have never been able to figure out how to provide enough "jobs" to get everybody involved in economic exchange. There are only so many things we can make, and we are on the verge of destroying our environment by making so many never-used things. I walk through a department store and ask myself, "how many of these things will end up in a landfill without ever being used by any human person?" The landfill gets bigger and bigger, and the atmosphere gets more and more carbon-saturated. The oceans rise higher and higher, and the storms get fiercer and fiercer. We need to slow down, quit trying to measure everything by traditional money, and start basing exchanges on something that a) allows even the weakest among us to contribute to exchange, and b) does not increase power and prestige.

A prayer has the advantage that it involves an exchange between two specific human beings. It cannot be hoarded. It can't be stored up. It makes us slow down and smell the roses.

Recently I attended a meeting that showed an hour-long film titled "Transitions." The film suggested ways that people can use other forms of exchange. One form was quantified, so that a person could go into a market stall, get a batch of carrots, and "pay" the owner by exchanging a text message recording the units of payment. No money changed hands, but the medium of exchange allowed the transaction to take place in an ordered way. After the film the group of about thirty people broke up into small groups and envisioned society in 2030. One idea that came up more than once was the idea of a "time bank." People could exchange their time for a tangible good. That seems very similar to what I called a "prayer" exchange.

Some years ago I read a review of a book that proposed that there be a separate kind of money for high-flying investment games, and for ordinary day-to-day exchanges. Economists can tell us if and how such a scheme might work.

We need to find such a scheme. It is unconscionable that in a world with as much creativity as ours, millions, billions, of people cannot contribute their time and ability to others.

There should be no such thing as surplus population.