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Land, Power
and National Identity
Modern Russia and the Spirituality of
Nationhood
- a View from
Scotland
a theological reflection commissioned from Alastair McIntosh
of the Centre for Human Ecology, Edinburgh, Scotland,
by Dr Dmitry Lvov, Academician-Secretary of the
Department of Economics,
Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow
Autumn 1999
I know no Russian and you know no
Scots
We cannot tell our voices from the
wind
The snow is seeking everywhere: our
hearts
At last like roofless hearths that
it has found,
And gathers there in drift on
endless drift,
Our broken hearts that it can
never fill.
- Hugh MacDiarmid, Farewell to Dostoevski
in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.
1. Introduction
2. The Spiritual Vocation of Nationhood
2.1 Russia: “I glimpse again in you that mightier power”
2.2 The Spiritual Basis of Power and Nationhood
2.3 Saint Andrew - National Identity in Russian-Scots Mythology
3. The Political and Intellectual Validity of Spiritual Insight
3.1 Spirituality and Russia - a New Body of Political Knowledge?
3.2 Taproot versus Grassroot Politics
3.3 Religion and Statecraft: the Challenge to Modern Leadership
3.4 The Problem of the Status of “God”
3.5 The Liberation of Theology
4. Biblical Economics of the Judeo-Christian Land Ethic
4.1 Land and Productivity in Contemporary Russia
4.2 God’s Passion for Land Economics
4.2.1 Creation
4.2.2 Providence
4.2.3 Covenant
4.2.4 Fall
4.2.5 Redemption
4.3 Some Objections to a Liberation Theology of Land
5. Land, Nationality and Empowerment in Scotland Today
5.1 Medieval European Origins of Feudal Tenure
5.2 Landed Power and Highland Clearance
5.3 The Modern Scottish Land Reform Movement
5.4 The New Scottish Parliament’s Legislative Proposals
6. Case Studies in Scottish Experience
6.1 The Isle of Eigg Trust - Developing Vision
6.2 The Harris “Superquarry” Inquiry - Reverence for Nature
6.3 The GalGael Trust - Community Building
6.4 People & Parliament - Discerning the Vocation of Nationhood
7. Conclusions
7.1 Honouring yet Freeing Spiritual Traditions
7.2 Bringing Mir Down to Earth
7.3 The Profit of the Earth for All
7.4 Sanctification
Foreword,
Introduction & Afterword
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Notes &
Translator's annotations
Click here for pictures from the
seminars
Click here for Russian iconographic pictures
I am honoured to be able to respond to the invitation of
Dr Dmitry Lvov, Academician-Secretary of the Economics Department of the
Russian Academy of Sciences, to write this reflection on the relevance of
Biblical insight to the question of land economics, power and the national
renewal of cultural identity in Russia today.
This opportunity has come about through Fred Harrison of
the Centre for Land Policy Studies. He was aware of my involvement with land
reform on the Isle of Eigg and elsewhere in Scotland. Here, after 900 years, we
are finally taking steps to abolish the feudal system. The legislative
programme for our newly re-established Scots Parliament is committed to making
it easier for land to be transferred from unaccountable private ownership to
democratic community trusts[A1] where
this is the will of local people. The Scottish Parliament’s first White Paper[A2],
published in July 1999, is therefore on land reform. It pledges rights of
access[A3] to the
land and “sustainable development of [the] community as its primary objects.”[1]
Like the Russian mirs, and in a manner that resonates with the principles of land
value taxation, these community land trusts, of which there are now about ten
in Scotland even before the legislation takes effect, use rents for the benefit
of the local people. Residents become, in effect, their own secure tenants. No
longer can such communities be controlled by the dictates of those whose sole
qualification to own land is the possession of disproportionate wealth. No
longer is part of a peasant family’s earnings applied to finance the idle
lifestyles of a rich landlord whose primary interest is to secure a return on
capital whilst exploiting the resource, wherever possible, as a vehicle for tax
avoidance by calling it a “business.”
During the last decade of the twentieth century, the main political
parties in Scotland have come to recognise that a people’s relationship to the
land is of central importance to creating the conditions necessary for
community cohesion and ecologically sustainable development. We Scots have come
to understand that land is not just of economic importance. It is also vital to
our cultural, psychological and spiritual wellbeing. Land is the primary
contributor to our sense of belonging as a peoples[A4]. From
a sense of belonging we derive our identity - our sense of who we are. National
identity carries values - the guiding principles of a people or peoples. Only
when equipped with these can citizens be expected to develop responsibility for
both the community and ecology of where they live. Accordingly, any programme
aimed at sustainable national development - any attempt to recover national
identity, pride and values - must address very carefully the potential to
create integrity[A5] in
people’s relationship to the land. As a Scots folksinger, Dougie MacLean, puts
it, “You can’t own the land; the land owns you.”
Looking beyond Scotland, privatisation and
collectivisation are two polar-opposite approaches towards relationship with
land. This text, based on recent Scottish experience, proposes community
ownership as a third way, galvanised around bioregionally[A6]-defined
geographical areas. However, in the absence of a robust intellectual framework,
the principle of community ownership could be seen as merely backward-looking
parochialism by political leaders whose scale of remit must address national
issues at a global level and within a wide plurality of sub-cultures. I
therefore want to suggest that a pattern of land tenure that builds upwards
from the local in the manner of subsidiarity[A7],
provided it is not exclusive of the wider national concerns, is the very
opposite of “backward.” Furthermore, I want to suggest that there are
psychological and spiritual reasons for believing that if a people’s identity
can be firmly grounded in a place with which they have a sense of belonging,
the characteristics of that place will contribute to the strengths necessary to
cohere also as a nation. But for this
to rise beyond petty ethnic rivalry it is necessary to have a vision and
understanding of nationhood that affirms core human values. It must do this
whilst simultaneously accommodating diverse sub-cultural streams.
It is my experience in community empowerment[A8] work
that certain principles in Biblical theology - whether we believe in “God” or
not - are powerful in offering the constellating[A9] vision
to achieve necessary integration between land economics, political power and
national identity. Scotland has already learned much from Russia through her
poets and political thinkers. As we Scots, like Russians, find ourselves
rethinking national identity, perhaps there is also something to be offered
back. In making a modest attempt at this I shall address the following
structure.
1.
Provide outline ... as follows, by text section
number:
2.
Explore with respect to Russia and Scotland the
ancient but little-understood idea that nations, like people, have “soul,” and
that cultural renewal proceeds from distinguishing the higher spiritual
vocation[A10]
of nationhood from its degraded “fallen” state.
3.
Discuss the intellectual validity of using
spirituality - the inner ground of being from which our profoundest concerns
arise - as a basis for understanding national vocation.
4.
Consider what the Biblical understanding of
these principles has to offer in the modern world, looking not to those
oppressive forms of religion that have been “opium of the people,” but rather,
to a “liberation theology” that has emerged partly from the confluence of
Christianity and Marxism in countries of the South.
5.
Review land tenure in Scotland today as a critique
of European feudalism and therefore, as a warning of the dangers of
neo-feudalism.
6.
Offer four case studies of the application of
spiritual methodologies to cultural renewal. These are community land ownership
on Eigg (pronounced “egg”), environmental protection with the Isle of Harris
superquarry public inquiry, urban community building with Glasgow’s GalGael
Trust, and People & Parliament -
a process by which some 450 community groups in Scotland carried out a values
discernment exercise with which to inform the new Parliament of national
aspirations.
7.
Conclude by recognising that whilst different
needs will apply in Russia than is the case in Scotland, spiritually informed
community empowerment may nonetheless strengthen people in their relationship both
to the soil of local place and to the mountainside of nationhood. If God is
kept out of politics the nation will fail. If God is informally at least
allowed in, politics will be difficult but, arguably, sustained by hidden
wellsprings of life that nourish the deepest roots of our common humanity.
Today Russia stands at a cultural turning point. The constellating
energy that has crystallised national identity in the past has weakened. The
wisdom of centralised collectivism has been called into question. The West’s
proffered alternative of advanced capitalism is suspected of being at worst a
Trojan horse for resource colonialism; at best, a stimulus to
marketing-manufactured greed that would socially stratify society by replacing
the ethic of co-operation with divisive competition. The option of a “fair
trade” economy has been left unexplored, trust has broken down and vision,
without which the people perish,[2] is
blurred. The result is a society that has become compromised in its capacity to
know life’s joy. Life grinds on, but for too many citizens it falls short of
being “life abundant.”[3]
There is a sickness in the soul of the nation. The soul is
too weak to engender the depth of responsibility necessary to build social
cohesion and environmental sustainability. The soul is being preyed upon by
external interests, internal mafias and numbing apathy. The soul is heavy, old
and tired. We all know that this is true - Russians and non-Russians alike know
it.
I speak here of “soul,” and we can even accept, can we
not, that it is somehow meaningful to talk of issues of national despair in such
terms? Indeed, what other vocabulary grips the heart deeply enough? What other
way is there to understand the present crisis but as a crisis of spirit, aye[A11],
of the very spirituality of nationhood?
And so, let us cradle
[A12]the
soul and consider Russia. Let me consider it from the standpoint of a Scottish
nation that knows how much your people love our greatest of early-modern
national poets, Robert Burns. Let me consider it from the standpoint of a
nation that, for 300 years, has had its national aspirations suppressed and
colonised through collusion with an imperial project - the British Empire - but
which, as I write these words, is restoring its own Parliament and redefining
its sense of national vocation.
Allow me, then, to accept your invitation to look east to
Russia. And as I look through and beyond all the pain of present times - all
the pollution, corruption and meaninglessness - let me say and know that I
would be saying it for many of my fellow Scots - “I glimpse again in you that mightier power.” Not, please note,
“mighty power,” as in the military or imperialistic sense; but “mightier
power,” which is something else. This quotation is not my own. These, rather,
were the words with which Scotland’s greatest and best-loved modern poet, Hugh
MacDiarmid, chose to address the Russian soul. I would like to say a little
about MacDiarmid if I may? His work better than any represents the depth of
common insight that perhaps resides between our two countries.
MacDiarmid clearly saw a relationship between the Russian
and the Scottish national psyche that reached to metaphysical depths. Our
countries’ mutual love of poetry embodies this. In his poem, First Hymn to Lenin, from which my
just-quoted line and the title of this section of text is drawn, MacDiarmid
makes an astonishing but revelatory assertion. He says that “the flower and
iron of the truth” that Lenin stood for was nothing less than spiritual. It was
“The work of Christ that’s taken over-long to bring.”[4]
It is not for me to judge here whether MacDiarmid’s
appraisal of Lenin was wisdom or folly. Indeed, MacDiarmid’s diffidence about
facing up to and distancing himself from some of the excesses of old-style
communism lost him many friends, and rightly so in my opinion. What does
concern me here is this archetypally Scots poet’s profound understanding of the
spirituality of nationhood - what he called “a mystical sense/ Of the high
destiny of a nation.”[5]
This capacity causes him to be quoted almost daily in public life in
contemporary Scotland just now as we rethink nationhood with our new Parliament
that has substantial powers devolved from Westminster. To Scots, it is
unsurprising that a poet should have such a place in politics. Poetry has
always been vital to our affairs of state. It lubricates the connections
between power, people and the soil. “A Scottish poet,” MacDiarmid once wrote,
“must assume/ The burden of his people’s doom,/ And dare to break their living
tomb.”[6] In
other words, the poet must intercede with those forces that would bring death
to a nation. She or he must free the wellsprings of life. Like all true “bards”
or poets who speak to the soul of a nation, MacDiarmid knew that only spiritual
renewal could refresh that weariness born from the historic burdens of fortune.
He saw this task as requiring what he called, “The poetry of one the Russians
call ‘a broad nature’/ And the Japanese call ‘flower heart’/ And we, in
Scottish Gaeldom, ‘ionraic.’”[7] In
his Second Hymn to Lenin, MacDiarmid
asserted that, “Poetry like politics must cut/ the cackle[A13]
and pursue real ends,/ Unerringly as Lenin.” And he addresses Lenin directly.
He urges Lenin to make his politics one of a poet’s depth of engagement with
soul: “Ah, Lenin, politics is childs’ play/ To what this must be.”[8]
In using poetics to actualise the spirituality of
nationhood, MacDiarmid saw that the power of a nation was vested in the very
nature of its land. He poured vituperation upon those who, “Cannot see
Scotland/ Cannot see the Infinite/ And Scotland in true scale to it.”[9]
With a refreshingly honest diffidence about his spiritual subject-matter he
said, “Let men find the faith that builds mountains,/ Before they seek the
faith that moves them ... These stones [in the wilderness that he, like Christ,
wandered upon] go through Man, straight
to God, if there is one.”[10]
And he related national identity to an understanding of wild nature that in its
totemism reveals the bard as tribal shaman:
I cried: Here is the real
Scotland,
The Scotland of the leaping
salmon,
The soaring eagle, the unstalked
stag,
And the leaping mountain hare.[11]
In his evident passion for the Russian soul, MacDiarmid
went far beyond his controversial membership of the Communist Party of Great
Britain. He referred to the “Celtic Union of Soviet Republics”[12]
and reached out, I think it would be fair to say, to the very core of what been
called, “Holy Russia.” MacDiarmid’s vision for the Scottish limits of his
Celtic Union was to “unite Man and the Infinite.”[13]
“I shone within my thoughts,” he said, “As God within us shines.”[14]
His First Hymn to Lenin faces
unflinchingly all the suffering of the world - the “agonies in the cosmos
still.” And yet, he says, the gift of never fully yielding to despair is, “your
secret, O Lenin, - yours and ours.”
The snow may build in drift upon drift upon the hearths of
embers chilled. But to MacDiarmid it will not freeze “our broken hearts that it
can never fill.”[15] Joy
will resurge. His is a theology of insistence. The hearth’s fire will rekindle.
The soul itself, as his Fist Hymn to
Lenin concludes, “is the power in which we exult,” for -
Every fool has folly enough for
sadness
But at last we are wise and with
laughter tear
The veil of being, and are face to
face
With
the human race.[16]
To understand the spiritual dynamics of nationhood such as
bards like MacDiarmid seem to be in touch with, it is necessary to explore the
spirituality of power. For the past three years I have been invited to lecture
on this to 400 senior military officers from many different countries on the
Advanced Staff and Command course at the Joint
Services Command & Staff College in England. Allow me to use my lecture
material here, noting that these are personal views and not those of the
college. My specific remit there is to explain to army, air force and naval
officers how it is that pressure groups like the land reform or anti-nuclear
movements, which renounce the use of violence, nevertheless succeed in exerting
considerable influence over the operations of government. My interest in
sharing this understanding is to propagate knowledge of the dynamics of
nonviolent action. This is important not just for pressure groups, but also for
nations. That is why I am willing to share such understanding with those who
presume to guard the soul of nationhood - the armed forces of states associated
with NATO and equally, through the Russian Academy of Sciences - even though I
may differ from both these in my personal objectives and methods. Gandhi urged
open-ness in following the principles of nonviolent action. It reduces fear,
builds trust, and who knows, possibly wins adversaries over.
Both non-governmental pressure groups (NGOs) and the
governments to which armed forces and cultural institutions are accountable are
in the business of exercising power to influence the nature of social reality.
All would usually claim to be working for peace. In Britain, the supreme
commander of the armed forces is Her Majesty the Queen. Central to her title as
sovereign is “Defender of the [Christian] Faith.” As such, an oath of military
loyalty is, at its deepest level, a spiritual oath; an affirmation of faith.
I find at staff college that most senior officers are
thoughtful women and men. Many appreciate the spiritual underpinning of what
they understand to be their vocation. They are willing to give considerable
attention (and a very warm reception) to considering the spiritual dimensions
of power. They are willing to face the spiritual implications of subordination
in a command structure to sovereign powers that, rightly or wrongly, may
require them to lay down their lives ... or take life.
In presenting my analysis to them I develop the spiritual
critique[A14]
of political power that is given in the American theologian, Walter Wink’s
trilogy, Naming the Powers, Unmasking the
Powers and Engaging the Powers.[17]
These are now summarised in one excellent short volume, The Powers that Be.[18] Wink argues that power is central to
the spiritual expression of life. It constellates or crystallises reality. It
might be seen as the will to be. We
are familiar with power’s exterior expressions in people, institutions,
buildings, nations and natural processes such as the growth of a tree. But it
has also, according to Wink, an interior dynamic. This interiority is
“spirituality.” Such spirituality underlies the outward manifestation of
things. In other words, outward forms of reality are shaped by their inner
spirituality. This is certainly not to deny the importance of molecular
structures, genetic sequences, and the laws of physics. It is simply to say
that spirituality is at the root of all these things. It accounts for certain
of the emergent properties that arise from systems that would not have been
expected when anticipating only the sum of component parts of a system.
Spirituality is, for example, the difference between an aggregation of carbon,
water and a few other compounds and a human being.
The following matrix illustrates how power finds
expression through reality. Based on Wink’s theology, I suggest that it has an
interior, spiritual face and an exterior, physical face. This is shown on the
downwards y axis. Through both of these faces power can then be expressed via a
dynamic that can be physical, psychological and spiritual. This is shown moving
right along the x axis. Peace, I suggest, is a process by which a nation’s
expression of power shifts from left to right along this spectrum.
Spectrum of
Socially Expressed Power
|
Level
of Power |
Physical |
Psychological
Type I |
Psychological
Type II |
Spiritual |
|
Dynamic |
Coercion
by hard sanction of terror - death, torture, loss, detention, injury, shock. |
Persuasion
through soft sanction of fear - prison, fines, social conformity, obedience. |
Persuasion
through convincement leading to empowerment, especially at community level. |
Transformation
from within being empowerment, satyagraha, autopoesis.
Comes from the soul. |
|
Interior
Face |
Power
over others by use or threat of brute force, usually but not always violent
against the person - authoritarian. |
Power
over others by strength of rules, law, ideology, governance, motivational manipulation
- authoritarian to authoritative. |
Power
with others - solidarity, education as “leading out,” courtesy, trade,
governance, advocacy, conscientisation - auto-authoritative. |
Power
from within - grace of God or Goddess, vocation, self-realisation, a
prophetic and liberation theology - spiritual authority. |
|
Exterior
Face |
Armed
forces, violent revolution, monkey-wrenching,[A15] saboteur action, actual
industrial action such as strikes and boycotts. |
Police
law & order, tax authorities, institutional discipline, manipulative
marketing, sects, threat of industrial action, whistleblowing, social
conditioning. |
Democratic
political processes & open government, schools & universities,
industry lobby groups, trade unions, religious & non-governmental
organisations. |
Touching
of hearts, creativity/art, holistic worldview, joy, non-violence, witness,
martyrdom, fun - mostly individual but may be collective through community. |
Because the idea that a nation or institution might have a
spirituality may at first seem strange, let me take the Russian Academy of
Sciences as an example. I presume that it is made up of the molecular
components of its buildings, the genetic sequences of its staff, and many
complex social and natural factors that interact in building a cultural
institution. However, an emergent
property of all this coming together is that the organisation will have a
certain personality, a certain
organisational ethos or soul. If the academy is typical of other
such institutions, this ethos will be influenced by individuals such as its
Secretaries and Academicians, but it will probably go deeper than any one
individual or even any one dominant power grouping because the institution will
have a certain life of its own. This ethos, presuming that the Academy is
genuinely what its title claims it to be, will be rooted in the very essence of
what Russia as a country stands for. It will be rooted, in other words, in that
terrain of nationhood that, as MacDiarmid saw, is spiritual and therefore
requires consideration of “soul.” Inasmuch as the Academy serves the soul of
Russian nationhood going from “her” people all the way through natural
biodiversity to the soil, waters and atmosphere, then the Academy might be
expected to prosper: the institutional “soul” will be in right relationship to
its own deepest objectives. The efforts of staff and other stakeholders will
thereby attain an organisational focus that brings about goal convergence even
of diverse and sometimes contesting efforts. The strategic planning objective
of shifting from where the institution is now to where it wants to be in the
future will be harmonised by such a constellating common understanding that
focuses both energy and visionary direction. Diversity and differences of
opinion will be not just tolerated, but valued - provided that, within the
wider framework of honouring the spirit of Russia, they pull towards the
greater goal. However, if they violate this, then the organisational immune
system can be expected to come in to play. A right balance will be restored
between what is central to the organisation and what pulls it off-centre. As
such, a progressive institution ought to develop in which task and process orientated
activities are balanced and academic life thrives.
This does not mean that such an institute will always be
free from persecution. On the contrary, it must expect to be persecuted
inasmuch as the nation may have forces at work within it destabilising core
values. But if the institute holds fast to the “soul” of its “mission”
statement, it will at least preserve integrity. It should not be forgotten that
in the realm of the psyche,[A16]
and we are talking here of organisational psyche, the holding on to integrity
is prerequisite to ensuring survival.
Moving away from our example now and towards wider
considerations, we must ask whether such an understanding of institutional
spirituality makes the institution, or the Party, or the state, into “God”? Is
there a danger in this kind of thinking of spiritual totalitarianism? When
raised to the level of nationhood, can it open the door to authoritarian
theocratic regimes?
The answer is, of course, that it could indeed do so, and
this is why the theology of nationhood must be carefully and caringly
understood. The danger would lie in failure to distinguish the twisted values
of a degraded spirituality from the radiant values of higher vocation. Just as
persons are, in terms of Judeo-Christian theology, “fallen,” in the sense that
they fall short of their God-given potential, so too the “Powers that Be”
(Romans 13:1)[19] that
govern the inner spirituality of institutions and nations are “fallen.” They
therefore require constant calling back to their God-given potential. Walter
Wink consequently distinguishes between the fallen personality of a nation, and its higher vocation or “calling” of nationhood. He says:
In a little-known essay of 1941,
[Martin] Buber acknowledges that every nation has a guiding spiritual
characteristic, its genius, which it acknowledges as its “prince” or its “god”.
The national spirit unfolds, matures, and withers. There is a life cycle for
every nation. Every nation makes an idol of its supreme faculties, elevating
its own self as absolute, and worshipping its own inner essence or spirit as a
god. But to be limited to oneself is to be condemned to die. When the national
spirit decays and disintegrates, and the nation turns its face to nothingness
instead of participating in the whole, it is on the verge of death... Whenever
the state makes itself the highest value, then it is in an objective state of
blasphemy. This is the situation of the majority of the nations in the world
today, our own included.[20]
What are the implications of this for we who work in a
“fallen” world? Based upon a Biblical exegesis of the “Principalities and
Powers” that has startling relevance to the modern world, Wink derives the
following formula:
The Powers are good.
The Powers are fallen.
The Powers must be redeemed.[21]
We can see the enormous strength of this if, as Wink
intends, we substitute for, “The Powers are” etc., the name of a person,
institution or nation that we know. Conflict between others and ourselves can
then be seen in a framework that makes strife both inevitable but also,
mutually redemptory. It can help us to face our enemies without hatred, with
love; to search for ways to free their higher God-given vocation whilst, at the
same time, allowing them to question ours: and to look into their faces and see
in the remnants of a wounded child grown older a wondrous promise - a potential
perhaps yet to ripen in the fullness of life. It is at this level that
“education” can be understood in the original Latin meaning of the word - “to
lead forth.” Here, too, we can see why Plato’s Socrates, whose mother was a
midwife, understood philosophy as “miaeutics” - the midwife-like process of
fully birthing the soul. To Socrates this was the task of true philosophy -
“philo-Sophia” - the “love of the Goddess of Wisdom.”[22]
We in turn must consider whether we are prepared to uphold such a philosophy as
the vocation of any “academy” worthy of that name - a name for the university
first used two-and-a-half millennia ago by Plato, the pupil of Socrates and
teacher of Aristotle.
In Wink’s tripartite schema of naming, unmasking and
engaging the Powers the first stage - “naming the Powers” - places handles upon
psychodynamic processes that are otherwise difficult to get a grip on. In the
Bible, these had names like as “Moloch,” “Mammon” and the “Golden Calf.” Wink
suggests that such principalities or “gods” remain present in the idolatry of
modern life. We don’t notice them because we have been persuaded to think that
they belong to a bygone age, yet they dominate many of the structures of our
lives. We see them in the worship of such obsessions as war, money, power,
drugs, sex and so on.
“Naming the Powers” entails a recognition and therefore
the restoration of a visible power
dynamic. This is because naming calls into existence - it makes manifest a
feature of reality in consciousness. Once that is established, we can proceed
with “unmasking the Powers” - that is to say, stripping off the disguises and
camouflage to expose the means by which the psychodynamic principles in
question cause degradation and corruption. For example, nuclear weapons and
their massive cost can be seen as being psychologically similar to the worship
of Moloch - that Old Testament fire-filled stone god, into whose arms the
children were sacrificed to purchase prosperity. Or to take another example, it
can sometimes be useful to personify
the spirit of a greed-led economy by using Jesus’ term, Mammon - the worship of
which, he said, was incompatible with loving God.
Only after naming and unmasking can we attempt “engaging
the Powers.” This aims not to destroy power, which was originally a God-given
organising energy, but to redeem it
from a “fallen” or degraded state. Wink sees nonviolence as being central to
this task. If violence is used to combat what he calls the “domination system”
of oppression it will ultimately fail, because the domination system actually
feeds on violence. More violence is how violence clones itself. Wink therefore
refers to the theory that violence can be redemptive as, “the Myth of
Redemptive Violence.” If social transformation is to be effective, he says, it
has to avoid being sucked into the very problem that it is trying to address.
For these reasons if peace is to become a long-term condition
of society and not merely the temporary absence of war, it is imperative to
shift along what I called above the “spectrum of socially expressed power.” It
is necessary for nations to learn how to evolve from coercive forms of
governance that express “power over” others, through persuasive techniques that
express “power with” them, and even into the autopoetic[A17]
transformative mode of “empowerment within.” In my military staff college
presentation I therefore suggest that this spectral shift is necessary not just
to be “nice,” but to have effective consensual governance in the long-run. As
it raises the application of power from a physical level of being through
psychological ones to the spiritual, it moves towards progressively greater
degrees of recalling the world to a higher vocation. In so doing, the exercise
of power as a necessary and legitimate function of social organisation can
start to shift away from that gaucheness by which its genocidal weaponry
threatens the very survival of civilisation. It is in this light that we can
view the deepest calling of human governance. We start to realise that effort
towards the advancement of human dignity will consistently fall short unless
the highest possible vocation of nationhood is aspired. That aspiration is the
spiritual transformation of a people.
This is the practical work of redemption, and it is the
opposite of destruction. Its core dynamic is creativity, leading to new
creation. It operates with an understanding of power that Gandhi called satyagraha or “truth force.” This is the
well from which the bardic politics of a MacDiarmid and other similar
expressions of the soul of a nation draw their energy. From here comes the
deepest and most noble expressions of a people’s national identity. Here
politics and destiny converge. This makes trust in God imperative if a people
are to hold fast in their courage whilst under enemy fire; and under fire they
will most certainly come when caught in the sights of those forces to which
spirituality - life as love in action - is a threat. And by the way, Jesus did
not say not to have enemies: he simply recommended loving them.
History is, of course, littered with those who have abused
religion for destructive ends. It is, after all, quite possible to speak untruthfully
or in ways that militate against the dictates of love. Hitler used German folk
music to evil ends and made a cult of violence. But according to various
traditions of bardic politics from around the world, the consequence of such
manipulation of cultural soul is the eventual loss of power and
self-destruction. “What goes around comes around” - you get back the spirit
that you give out. Adherence to truth
and the highest principles of humanity are therefore the hallmark of a
spiritual politics of transformation. In contrast to the totalitarian approach
of, say, Stalin, the end must not be used to justify the means because, from a
spiritual point of view, the means is the
end. This is why satyagraha is so
uncompromising: truth implies an opening up to God. No more can be asked of us
than that. There is nothing bigger. The decision to be truthful or to be not so
is one of the few choices that is always in our control, but the most tempting
one to compromise. Truth establishes accurate perception of the very fabric of
reality. To lie is therefore to distort the path upon which we and others step.
To hold fast to truth therefore requires us to acknowledge power and hold it
openly and accountably. Power denied is power abused. It is on the battleground
of truth that the real war is fought and the foundations of nationhood are
tested. This is why the bards of a nation, in that widest sense of
practitioners of all the arts, can and must play a vital role underpinning the
concerns of state. For as Bloomfield & Dunn say in The Role of the Poet in Early Societies:
[The bardic power of truth] will
not work unless it is true... The poet finally makes possible the success of various people and
activities. He blesses them as the priest blesses the fishing boats before they
set out on their tasks. He brings supernatural powers to the support of the
king and the activities of his people. Without his help, success is impossible.
Unless the powers of the universe are on
the side of the man or the activity, both will fail.[23]
One of the ways in which the spirituality of nationhood
manifests is in national symbols. Sometimes these must be discarded because their
function is no longer consistent with the vocation of nationhood. Germany, for
example, has abandoned the swastika. Other times a symbol itself needs to be
redeemed - we need to remind ourselves of the original meaning by which it
spoke, and perhaps still can speak, in calling the nation to its God-given
vocation.
In the past one expression of such symbolism was through
the idea that every nation had its “patron saint.” It so happens that Russia
and Scotland share the same patron in Saint Andrew. I have found that Andrew is
surrounded by mythology in the Celtic tradition that deeply links Scottish
identity with the Black Sea southern reaches of Russia.
The ancient Scots traced their origins to “Greater
Scythia” - an area which, going by maps of Old Testament times - ranged from
the Caucasus mountains of Georgia through the steppes of Russian Caucasia and
into the Ukraine.[24]
This origin myth was used in the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath when the leaders
of Scotland set out the basis upon which they claimed to be a nation separate
from English control.
According to the later Greek versions of the apocryphal
but widely influential Acts of Andrew,
the apostle Andrew had personally
converted the Scythians.[25] The 9th century monk, Epiphanius,
claimed that virtually every tribe around the Black Sea appealed to Andrew as
the founder of its church. Ivan the Terrible thereby boasted to a papal envoy
that the Russians had received their faith from Andrew at the same time as it
had reached Rome.[26]
According to ancient Irish-Scots origin myths, the
original Scots had left Scythia during the Old Testament era.[27]
They retained blood links with the ancestral Caucasian homeland and this would
appear to be the basis on which Andrew’s reputed evangelisation of the
Scythians imparted a special relationship between him and Scotland.
The
Declaration of Arbroath states that the Scots “journeyed from Greater Scythia
by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long
course of time in Spain ... thence they came, twelve hundred years after the
people of Israel crossed the Red Sea, to their home in the west where they
still live today.” The Declaration goes on to state that Christ had “called
them, even though settled in the uttermost parts of the earth, almost the first
to His most holy faith.” It affirms that, “Nor would He have them confirmed in
that faith by merely anyone but by the first of His Apostles by calling[28]
- though second or third in rank - the most gentle Saint Andrew, the Blessed
Peter’s brother, and desired him to keep them under his protection as their
patron for ever.”[29]
In other words, Andrew’s reputed evangelisation of Scythia appears to have
conferred lasting benefit on those mythological children of the Black Sea
diaspora - the Scots - who were given their name after their leader married
Scota, the daughter of Pharaoh, whilst residing in Egypt.
Often during the medieval era Andrew was used as a patron
saint of war. However, in reading modern redactions of the Acts of Andrew we find that he actually resisted the military power
of the Roman Empire by teaching nonviolence and respecting the spirituality of
woman. As such, the Saint Andrews Cross flag or Saltire of Scotland, which
symbolises the dessucate[A18]
cross upon which he was crucified according to the Acts of Andrew, can be seen as a symbol of peace between nations.
It rejects the militarism of Empire. I would suggest that this enunciates the
higher vocation of Scotland and, perhaps, Russia too. With a little imagination
- and we are here talking poetry - it might give spiritual meaning to
MacDiarmid’s designation, the “Celtic Union of Soviet Republics.”
To consider the possibility that spirituality might be
relevant to politics must at first seem audacious in a paper for the Economics
Department of the Academy of Sciences of a nation which, for most of the
twentieth century, has been paradigmatically[A19]
atheistic. However, earlier we agreed, I think, that the gravity of political
questions facing Russia make it meaningful, at least in a poetic sense, to
speak of “soul.” I wish now to push that imagery further and test whether it is
mere imagery, or something underlain by a tangible reality. I want to suggest
that whilst it is true that much of the religion of the past has, as Marx
pointed out, been “opium of the people,” the idea of spirituality of nationhood
merits review as a body of practical knowledge relevant to governance.
Spirituality differs from religion in that it is
pre-political. It is the source of religious inspiration that comes from both
the human heart and traditions such as scripture and ritual. Religions develop
as the political expressions of spiritual experience - that is to say, they are
socially mediated. The purpose of a religion is normally to advance a body of
spiritual knowledge. In most cases it is assisted in this by developing a
theology - an intellectual construct comprising a body of knowledge about “God”
or whatever name might be given to the “supreme being,” “the ground of all
being,” or whatever other phrase might be used to describe matters of “ultimate
concern” that underwrite reality.
Most theologies are given religious expression as a
church, sect or cult. In practice this often becomes more socially significant
than the original spiritual inspiration. Thus, in Christianity we frequently
observe a compromise of Christ’s teachings through the religious institutions
of what might be called “Churchianity,” or strong emphasis on one particular
theological interpretation such as that of St Paul, which has been called
“Paulianity.” Marx’s famous remark about opium was therefore prompted by the
observation that very often religion was used by those in power to sedate the
people. This was seen, for instance, when peasants were cleared from the land
in eighteenth and nineteenth century Scotland. Clergy of the established Church
of Scotland who had been appointed by landlords under the 1712 Patronage Act
often told the people that their suffering was due to their sins and so should
be silently endured. At the same time, the landlord’s wealth was presented as
representing divine “assurance” of providential blessing from God. Such a
division of oppressed and oppressor into the categories of “the damned,” who
were presumed to be going to Hell, and “the saved,” who hoped they were going
on to Heaven after enjoying the fruits of worldly life, shows how twisted and
malicious the abuse of religious authority can be.[30]
The inclination of many thoughtful people is therefore to
have nothing further to do with religion, theology or spirituality. Those in
particular who have had religious instruction forced sometimes cruelly upon them
as children often conclude that the whole thing is both dangerous and
irrational.
It is my contention that this position, whilst eminently
understandable, fails adequately to fit the facts of human experience. On the
question of damage or what we might call “spiritual abuse,” it is a fact that
all good things in this world become the object of theft. If it is the case
that spirituality is actually the deepest source of human power and national
identity, then we must expect that every effort will be made to corrupt
religious institutions by those who wish to steal and abuse that power.
However, just because, say, a work of art is stolen, it does not mean that the
art itself becomes bad. Rather, it must be recovered. Similarly, the history of
most world religions reveals continuing cycles of degradation and reformation.
A period of corruption leads to decline; fresh spiritual inspiration generates
renewal, and that generates or regenerates institutions which, if they are
wise, must remain on guard against fresh corruption.
If, then, religious insight merits political
rehabilitation, it is reasonable to expect that it will not only feel right in
our hearts but will also think straight in our heads. It is inconceivable that
the ultimate ground of our being - “God” - would provide us with rational
facilities to think, and then expect these capabilities to be completely
suspended when it comes to divine relationship. Certainly, too much thinking
can block the subtler capacity of the heart to feel. It can lead to
intellectual aridity. But as the dismal history of religious cults shows, too
little rational application inhibits that great spiritual gift - discernment -
and thereby paves the way for spiritual abuse. We therefore need to engage both
heart and head if we are to attempt to set hand to the plough of spiritual
life.
For these reasons I must request the atheistic reader to
stay with me whilst I articulate a case for spirituality. Whether that case is
valid, and whether its implications for the relationship between people, land
and nation are those that I draw from it, you must decide. Meanwhile, I
respectfully beg the generosity of a hearing.
To be able to rise to its full power a political debate,
particularly in a democracy, must be alive at the “grassroots”[A20]
level of the people. However, as every botanist knows, there is a deeper level
from which strength and nourishment can be drawn. This is the taproot. In a
young oak tree the taproot often extends further beneath the ground than the
leading shoot reaches above it. So too with nations, especially those that are
young, or have been pruned back, or as in Scotland today, have been repotted
for a new beginning.
The grassroots of political dynamics are sufficiently
accessible to normal consciousness to be partly understood from the standpoint
of psychology and sociology. We see them in such popular cultural pursuits as
television, drinking parties, spectator sport, popular music and party
politics. Taproot politics, by contrast, demands spirituality to be made
visible.[31] This
can be observed wherever cultural activity takes place of a nature that, in the
English language, might be described by such expressions as “stirring the
soul,” “moving to tears” or being “earthshattering.” Spiritual taproots are
reflected in art, music and national endeavour that stirs a sense of pride in
one’s country or people. This is not necessarily the “great art” or “high
culture” of state - indeed, the deepest taproots originate from the folk
cultures and shamanistic remnants from which “high culture” often draws its
energy and inspiration.[32]
We see this, for example, in Tchaicovsky’s and Dvorak’s inspiration from folk
music.
Another example of where we see it is in the western world’s
love of the Red Army Choir. This is not a love inspired by the fact that this
choir are the ambassadors of the military wing of a state of which most western
governments have, in the past, disapproved. No. That love comes about because
few people endowed of a heart with which to perceive soul can listen to the Red
Army Choir for long without being moved to feel that, as MacDiarmid has it, “I
glimpse again in you that mightier power.” The Red Army Choir, in other words,
is a state-endorsed grassroots expression of the taproot energy of a Russia
that is, at this level, sometimes perceptible as “Holy.” It represents a
successful integration from taproot all the way up the trunk to the visible
blossom of nationhood.[A21]
The taproot of a nation draws on the deepest sources of
inspiration and energy that give power. It goes to the heart of a nation’s God
- whatever that God might be. In war it is from the taproot of nationhood that
people are persuaded to die for their country. Whether this necessarily also
entails killing is a matter that I will leave aside for now. To this extent
taproot politics is well understood and often exploited by demagogic
politicians. These make an idol of their ideology. It is in this sense that
nationalism is often discredited. History reveals many examples of such
idolatrous use of spiritual power for purely secular ends. One, as we have just
noted, was the manner in which feudal lords in Britain used patronage - the
right to appoint clergy - to control the church and present their power to the
people as God-given. Another example is Islamic extremism where political
groupings lay claim to “fundamentalism” to bolster the legitimacy of their own
sect. A third is the use made of the fundamentalist Christian right by American
presidents - particularly Reagan - in marketing a political ideology that has
in the past characterised Russia as an “evil empire” consistent with the
demonology of the Bible’s book of Revelation. It was telling to observe how
Islamic fundamentalists during the Iranian revolution turned this theology
around and projected it back onto America as “the Great Satan.”
In the case of Russia the relationship between church and
nation has at times been very strong. Richard Charques’ A Short History of Russia states that:
The degree of unity attained
through the power of the grand princes of Kiev could not have been won without
the support of the Greek Orthodox Church... With Christianity, which Russia
took from Byzantium, there came ... the Byzantine conception of the sanctified
state... The doctrine which, even in conditions of Russian disunity, impressed
itself most deeply ... proclaimed the divine right of the sovereign ruler...
Thus the attempted unification of the Russian lands by the princes of Kiev
always had behind it the authority of the Church. Greek Orthodoxy in Russia,
from the first a central prop of the state, was in later years the keystone of
the arch of imperial autocracy [whereby] the Church recognized in the ruler of
Russia God’s supreme representative on earth.[33]
Later, with the Russian Church’s emergence after the fall
of Constantinoble, Ivan III refuted the Habsburgh Holy Roman Emperor by
proclaiming, “We have been sovereign in our land from our earliest forefathers,
and our sovereignty we hold from God.”[34]
In all this we see the drawing upon a taproot politics of nationhood grounded
in spiritual earth. However, the autocracy that was attached to it draws in an
unreconstituted manner upon Romans 13:1-4 where an authoritarian Paul
proclaimed:
Let every person be subject to the
governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those
authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists
authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur
judgement. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you wish
to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive
its approval; for it is God’s servant for your good. But if you do what is
wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain!
It is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer.
We might question whether Paul, unlike Christ who
frequently challenged authority, has failed in this particular passage to
distinguish between state power as “fallen” and its higher vocation. Walter
Wink’s theology suggests a way forward here. His work sets Paul in its wider
context of, for example, Ephesians 6:12, where Paul says, “For our struggle is
not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the
authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the
spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Power, then, comes from God
and so, yes, state power is, in one sense, divinely ordained. But it is also
invariably corrupted. The Powers are good but the powers are fallen. The
implication, as recognised for example by the sixteenth century German
theologian, Thomas Müntzer, is that honour is due to the authorities only
insofar as they honour their responsibility to defend the faith. Where they
fail in this, the metaphorical sword, said Müntzer, “will be taken from them
and will be given to the people who burn with zeal so that the godless can be
defeated.”[35]
The place of spirituality in national debate, then, is to
call the nation constantly back to its higher vocation. The nation must be
engaged with, but nonviolently so in Wink’s view in order to transform rather
than destroy the sources of its power. As Paul himself said in the chapter
immediately preceding that just quoted and in apparent contradiction to his
remark about the legitimacy of bearing the sword, “Bless those who persecute
you; bless and do not curse them ... Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take
thought for what is noble in the sight of all” (Romans 12:14, 17). Here we see
Paul falling into line with a Christ who rebuked Peter’s use of the sword
saying, “No more of this,” but a Christ who, nonetheless, was prepared to use
non-lethal civil disobedience in turning over the money-changers’ tables for
making the temple “a den of robbers” (Luke 22:51, etc.).
At the deepest level, then, national vocation and the
identity that derives from it is God-given. This at least is true of the
Judeo-Christian tradition in which the nations are clearly understood to be
spiritual entities - to have soul - as if partaking of the qualities of a
“prince” or “angel.” It was a task of the prophets to engage the “angels of the
nations,”[36] by
prophesying to their secular power holders and proclaiming a vision of God that
which would “bring forth justice to the nations” (Isaiah 42:1). Eschatological[A22]
completion[A23]
in the Judeo-Christian understanding is to be found in the “healing of the
nations” (Revelation 22:2). The roots of the “tree of life” from which this
healing derives rest in the spiritual waters that flow out from beneath the
seat of God.[37] God’s
intention for the world is both human and ecological: it is to re-set the seeds
of Eden.[38] Jesus
sometimes represented this as a future millennial reality; other times as a
realised eschatology - an understanding that Heaven was already present on
earth in the hearts of those who had eyes to see and ears to hear.[39]
A further point is that in Christ divinity goes beyond gender
and thereby incorporates the femininity of God, expressed in the Scriptures as
Woman Wisdom or Sophia.[40]
Like the Wisdom of Solomon,[41]
Proverbs 8:22-36 reveals Sophia as having been mythologically present as God’s
delight at the creation of the world. “Whoever finds me finds life,” states
Sophia. “But those who miss me injure themselves; all who hate me love death”
(Proverbs 8:35-36). In his history of Russia, Charques mentions that the
earliest of the Russian churches were “the cathedral of the Holy Wisdom (St
Sophia) in Kiev and in Novgorod, both begun in the middle years of the eleventh
century.”[42] It
might be opportune to consider whether, if the wellspring of national life is
to be rediscovered, injury avoided and the politics of death refuted, there is
something to be learned from the spiritual roots of Mother Russia that the
western tradition lost in the Photian Split between the eastern and western
churches.[43]
It can be seen that, according to the theory of power that
I have advanced, effective political organisation requires harmonious
connection between the archetypal taproots that constellate national vocation
and the popular grassroots. Only then can the liaison between identity and ideology
be a harmonious one. And only if that sense of national identity rests in
something deeper than a human-constructed ideology will the political processes
avoid reduction to idolatry.
The majority of a people are likely to understand this no
more than they might understand what it is that moves them on listening to a
great piece of music. However, at a time of radical social change their
leadership must understand it if they are to use power as a service rather than
abuse it as their right. National leadership must therefore have some alignment
with spiritual vision.
The former US president, Jimmy Carter, understood this
very clearly. In his forward to an important work, Religion, the Missing Dimension of Statecraft, he writes:
Historically and currently, we all
realise that religious differences have often been a cause or a pretext for
war. Less well known is the fact that the actions of many religious persons and
communities point in another direction. They demonstrate that religion can be a
potent force in encouraging the peaceful resolution of conflict.
Personal experience underlies my
conviction that religion can be significant for peacemaking. The negotiations
between Menachem Begin, Anwar el-Sadat, and myself at Camp David in 1978 were
greatly influenced by our religious backgrounds... If the talks at Camp David
engaged statesmen in the search for a political settlement, in the final
analysis they also involved religiously committed men. Each of the principals
at Camp David recognised peace to be both a gift from God and a pre-eminent
human obligation. As mediator of the talks, I am convinced that to have
overlooked the importance of religion for both Sadat and Begin would have
resulted in a failure to understand these two men. Such a failure could have
had a pervasive and incalculable impact...
[Such] cases suggest that the
world’s religious communities possess moral and social characteristics that
equip them in unique ways to engage in efforts to promote peace... [We] must recognise
the growing importance of religious factors for peacemaking and develop ways,
both informal and formal, to cooperate with religious leaders and communities
in promoting peace with justice.[44]
The great Swiss psychologist, C. G. Jung, saw that the ideologies
and symbols of nationhood mediate power from the collective unconscious of a
people into political action. In one of his last essays, The Undiscovered Self, he wrote of the danger that, “Where love
stops, power begins, and violence, and terror.”[45]
“We are living,” he said:
in what the Greeks called Kairos -
the right moment - for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” of the fundamental
principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of
our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who
is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous
transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its
own technology and science...[46]
So much is at stake and so much
depends on the psychological constitution of modern man. Is he capable of
resisting the temptation to use his power for the purpose of staging a world
conflagration? Is he conscious of the path he is treading, and what the
conclusions are that must be drawn from the present world situation and his own
psychic situation? Does he know that he is on the point of losing the
life-preserving myth of the inner man which Christianity has treasured up for
him? Does he realise what lies in store should this catastrophe ever befall
him? Is he even capable of realising that this would in fact be a catastrophe?
And finally, does the individual know that he
is the makeweight that tips the scales?[47]
“The religious person,” Jung continues, who is able to
stand apart from the mindless madness of his or her times,
is directly influenced by the
reaction of the unconscious. As a rule, he calls this the operation of conscience. [She or he] is accustomed to
the thought of not being sole master in his own house. He believes that God,
and not he himself, decides in the end...
I am convinced that it is not
Christianity, but our conception and interpretation of it, that has become
antiquated in face of the present world situation. The Christian symbol is a
living thing that carries in itself the seeds of further development. It can go
on developing; it depends only on us, whether we can make up our minds to
mediate again, and more thoroughly, on the Christian premises... Whereas the
man of today can easily think about and understand all the “truths” dished out
to him by the State, his understanding of religion is made considerably more
difficult owing to the lack of explanations... If, despite this, he has still
not discarded all his religious convictions, this is because the religious
impulse rests on an instinctive basis and is therefore a specifically human
function.[48]
“You can take away a man’s gods,” Jung continues, “but
only to give him others in return.” Accordingly, unaware of the depth
psychology of their circumstances, “The leaders of the mass State could not
help being deified.” Jung is therefore critical of what he saw as being
“Marxist education, which seeks, like God himself, to remake man, but in the
image of the State.” Whilst his political position was sometimes reactionary,
his insight, as he put it elsewhere, that “Where love rules there is no will to
power,” was life-giving. That, however,
requires opening to an instinctual sense of the presence of God. Jung therefore
concludes that:
The individual who is not anchored
in God can offer no resistance on his own resources to the physical and moral
blandishments of the world. For this he needs the evidence of inner,
transcendent experience which alone can protect him from the otherwise
inevitable submersion in the mass.[49]
We now have seen the ways in which spirituality is
arguably of consequence to statecraft. In this one is reminded of the manner in
which Old Testament prophets such as Abraham in Genesis 18 and Moses in Exodus
32 would haggle with God, using their personal spiritual authority to procure a
stay of execution where God, who was often depicted by the Bible writers as
being filled with a vindictive wrath, planned to bring destruction on a
corrupted people. One is reminded, too, that one of the tasks of the prophets
was to “gather the remnant[A24]”
of the few remaining faithful people of God to maintain a taproot of righteous values from which regenerative
shoots might grow - rather in the manner that an ecosystem can regenerate from
a “remnant” island of ecologically unspoiled nature. In 1 Kings 19, Elijah
pleads with God to die because he thinks he is the only righteous person left
in the land, but God tells him he is mistaken - there are another 7,000 good
people out there who he has not yet identified. As Jung saw it, here lies the
need for the personal integrity of the “individuated” person - the individual
who can stand back from the crowd - in politics today.
Even though we might feel that we are the only ones left
and the game is nearly up, there’s more hidden support and causes worth
fighting for than we might see if, as MacDiarmid had it, we have only “folly
enough for sadness.” God therefore
councils not giving up hope in any concern so long as the least remnant of
integrity remains. “Run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem,” he told
Jeremiah (5:1). “Look around and take note! Search its squares and see if you
can find one person who acts justly and seeks truth - so that I may pardon
Jerusalem.” [A25]
Jung suggests that the key to avoidance of such folly is
“transcendent experience.” This brings us to the question of whether spiritual
insight is compatible with a rational view of the world. Let us touch upon the
empirical evidence.
A spiritual perspective presumes that reality is shaped
by deeper layers of meaning than materialistic understanding can, on its own,
account for. In the world’s religions
the underlying ground of reality is variously called by such names as “God,” or
variants such as “Allah,” Brahma,” “Tao,” “Goddess” or “the Buddha nature.”
However the idea that there is a spiritual realm of God
underlying reality frequently offends the rational mind. If spirituality is to
be taken seriously as underpinning nationhood, it must have an accompanying
rationale. There are two main directions from which this can be approached. One
is that of faith in the revelation of the holy scriptures. For many people
faith has powerful persuasive force in constellating their world view. However,
it is a problematic basis for objective argument. Faith is not only a very
private affair; it is also, within some Judeo-Christian interpretations, a
God-given one. It is not us who choose to have faith. Rather, the Holy Spirit
imparts faith upon us. It cannot therefore be commanded as a basis for finding
national unity.
The other direction from which spirituality might be
legitimised is rationality. I wish to focus here particularly on that
scientific understanding of rationality that constitutes empirical philosophy.
This argument says that if God is central to the nature of reality, it ought to
be possible to detect evidence of God’s presence. We experience ordinary
reality by empirical means - through our thoughts, feelings and senses. God, if
God exists, should be the same.
During the 20th Century and starting especially with
William James’ classic study, The
Varieties of Religious Experience - this line of reasoning has opened up a
specialised field of social research into the question of God’s existence. The
research spans statistical parapsychological studies of such ostensible
paranormal phenomena as telepathy to research into the nature of normal and
altered states of consciousness. Here I wish to address work such as that
undertaken at the centre founded by the great English biologist, Professor Sir
Alister Hardy. This has shown that typically one third of the population have
had some sort of an experience that would traditionally have been called
“mystical.” The so-called “Alister Hardy Question,” for example, asks members
of the public:
Have
you ever been aware of or influenced by a presence of power, whether you call
it God or not, which is different from your everyday self?[50]
When such experiences are analysed even across different
cultures, surprising common characteristics emerge. One appraisal lists nine
characteristics of mystical consciousness as follows:[51]
1.
Unity - a sense of
undifferentiated unity with all of reality.
2.
Objectivity and
Reality - a powerful sense that the experience is both real, and gives
objective insight into reality at a deeper level than normal.
3.
Transcendence of
space and time - a sense of being outside normal dimensions, in eternity and
infinity.
4.
Sense of sacredness
- an awe-inspired, reverential response to the reality being experienced.
5.
Deeply-felt
positive mood - euphoria focused on feelings of joy, love, blessedness and
peace.
6.
Paradoxicality -
paradox in that normal laws of logic seem to be suspended; for example, feeling
that one is both everywhere and in one place at the same time.
7.
Alleged
ineffability - the feeling that the experience cannot be adequately expressed
in words.
8.
Transiency - the
experience is of short duration - usually lasting for seconds, minutes or just
a few hours.
9.
Positive changes to
attitude and/or behaviour - the experience leaves the person changed in their
approach towards themselves, others, life in general and in their openness to
mystical insight generally. It is here that the seeds of faith are often sewn.
In short, mystical experience can be thought of as being
like waking up out of a dream. In a dream one’s dream self will interact with
other dream people and realities and feel very real. But when we wake up we see
that all this took place in our now-alert greater mind. So it is that mystical
experience is like a wakening up to the greater mind through which all our
lives are interconnected.
The core principle of spirituality, then, is the
interconnection of life. Here I shall use the word, spirituality,
to mean that by which our consciousness
can know the meanings of life as love in all its passions. Spirituality is
about becoming alive to the aliveness of life. Like the fingers on a hand, we
are usually only aware of ourselves as separate entities - even just as the
nails on each finger. But as we enter into that wrestling-match engagement with
love in the company of others we move down the fingers and the psychospiritual
distance between us reduces. Ultimately, the perspective of God consciousness
is the view from the main body of the hand looking upwards. We can then see
that each finger, each life, is part of the whole. We are, as John 15 has it,
all branches on the vine of life; “members one of another” in the Body of
Christ as Romans 12:5 says; and to be syncretistic ... all parts of the “Body
of Islam”; expressions of the “Buddha nature”; offspring of the Goddess or, as
the Hindus say, “Tat tvam asi” - “That thou art” - meaning that individual soul
(Atman) is ultimately at one with universal soul (Brahma).
Theology
is the study of the nature of God. During the 1960’s and especially in Latin
America, a revisionist perspective on Christian theology developed amongst
activists working with the urban poor and for land reform. As a leading work
puts it, “the departure of liberation theology is recognition of the awful fact
that millions lead subhuman lives.” This oppresses not only the poor, but also
the rich themselves because, “A life cannot be truly human if it ignores
relations with other humans and with nature.”[52]
Social and ecological justice therefore implies liberation for all sentient
beings.
In
1968 at Medellin the Latin American Catholic Bishop’s council endorsed a
commitment to a “poor church” that would “bear witness to the evil” that
poverty represents. The bishops committed themselves to “solidarity with the
poor,” going beyond mere charity to “make ours their problems and their
struggles.” This, they concluded, had to be “concretised in criticism of
injustice and oppression, in the struggle against the intolerable situation
which a poor person often has to tolerate.”[53]
The
discovery that God had been misrepresented, and the “good news” that “he,” or
“she,” was actually on the side of the poor, lent legitimacy to aspirations for
social and ecological justice and legitimacy is central to making the
psychological shift from oppression to empowerment. Because secular power
sometimes seeks to control a population from the very soul, legitimatisation of
a freedom struggle by spiritual affirmation reverses the process. Accordingly,
it can release tremendous energy in a people. The Philippines’ largely
non-violent revolution against the US-backed dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, is one
of a growing number of well-documented examples of this happening.[54]
Because liberation theology is a highly practical approach
grounded in the most pressing needs of the poor, it can often be presented in
very secular ways such as through education or pedagogy. This has led to
confusion with Marxism. Whilst Marx has certainly been drawn upon by liberation
theologians, their over-riding concern goes beyond class struggle to the
liberation of all human beings through the release of humanity’s deepest
values. This is necessary because the oppressor is, his or her self, the
consequence of oppression. For example, in his greatly influential Pedagogy of the Oppressed the Brazillian
educator, Paulo Freire, addresses the practical importance of redeeming all
fallen power. “This is,” he says,
... the great humanistic and
historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors
as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit and rape by virtue of their
power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed
or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will
be sufficiently strong to free both [because it] will actually constitute an
act of love opposing the lovelessness which lies at the heart of the oppressors’
violence, lovelessness even when clothed in false generosity.[55]
Freire therefore urges “conscientisation” of the people by
the people - conscientisation being an awareness of the dynamics of oppression
that builds up from combining the perceptual quality of consciousness with the moral perception of conscience. Here in his praxis - the linking of practical action
and reflection - lies the power of the poor and the marginalised. Here too, we
might speculate, lies the power of a damaged nation to take its rightful place
again in the ecology of nations. For this - the power of love - is the only
power really worth having. It is the fruit of humanisation in a dehumanised
world. Conscientisation, concludes Freire, is therefore the process whereby:
To surmount the situation of
oppression, men must first critically recognize its causes, so that through
transforming action they can create a new situation - one which makes possible
the pursuit of a fuller humanity. But the struggle to be more fully human has
already begun in the authentic struggle to transform the situation. Although
the situation of oppression is a dehumanized and dehumanizing totality
affecting both the oppressors and those whom they oppress, it is the latter who
must, from their stifled humanity, wage for both[A26]
the struggle for a fuller humanity; the oppressor, who is himself dehumanized
because he dehumanizes others, is unable to lead this struggle...
The central problem is this: how
can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing
the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they discover themselves to be
‘hosts’ of the oppressor can they contribute to the midwifery of their
liberating pedagogy. As long as they live in the duality where to be is to be like, and to be like is to be
like the oppressor, this contribution is impossible. The pedagogy of the
oppressed is an instrument for their critical[A27]
discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of
dehumanization. Liberation is thus a childbirth.[56]
Freire’s
work may not appear overtly spiritual, but it was developed, partly, whilst
working for the World Council of Churches. It is implicitly a liberation
theology the spiritual depth of which may be judged by the force of its witness
and power of its compassion. Liberation theology characteristically starts with
the experience of the poor. Only later does it equate this with scripture as a
tool for deepening reflection. In this respect liberation theology functions in
reverse from top-down theologies that deliver creeds and dogmas to the poor. It
is, as the Peruvian theologian, Gustavo Gutierrez, puts it, theology from “the
underside of history.” As such the poor can own it to a depth that is difficult
with rigidly institutional churches. Of course, it might be objected that such
an approach will inevitably yield examples of spiritual error. That is true,
but does God not teach and forgive?
If
I were to simplify the scriptural basis of liberation theology down to as few texts
as possible, I would point out that Gutierrez defines “to liberate” as being
“to give life”.[57]
Jesus said we should be living not just any old life, but “life abundant” (John
10:10). This is not some transcendent pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die promise of
deferred gratification, but a very practical concern. It starts with such
outward necessities as having “daily bread” (Matthew 6:11) in a this-worldly
immanent[A28]
realm of God that is “all around” or “within” (Luke 17:21), and from there it
develops an inner life of living from more than just “bread alone” (Matthew
4:4). But the sequence is important: before preaching Jesus liked to see that
the people were fed (Mark 8).
In
launching his ministry in the synagogue at Nazareth, Jesus placed primary
emphasis on social and ecological justice (Luke 4:18-19). He does this by
taking a reading from Isaiah 61 and 58, thereby linking Old Testament prophesy
to his mission. Consistent with the insight that “God is love” (1 John 4:8) and
concerned not with self-interested tribalism, but with the “healing of the
nations” (Revelation 22:2), Jesus’ reading is intriguingly selective. I find it
telling that he proclaims good news for the poor, liberty to captives, healing
of the blind, freedom for the oppressed and, rather pleasingly in some
versions,[58]
succour for the broken hearted: but he misses out what Isaiah also said about enjoying the “wealth of
the nations” and having the “sons of the alien” placed in subservient service
(Isaiah 61:5-6). That is, he omits the passages that are not consistent with a
liberating gospel of love[A29],
choosing instead to highlight what liberationists call, “God’s preferential
option for the poor” (Luke 7:22; Luke 6; Amos 5).
The
ecological, land-rights and economic dimensions of Jesus’ ministry, are
incorporated where he concludes his Luke 4 mission statement by proclaiming in
verse 19 something called the “acceptable year of the Lord.” This refers to the
“Jubilee” cycle of seven years and fifty years of Leviticus 25, which make
provision for the periodic returning of the land to a state of nature,
redistributing the land so that it is not owned in perpetuity by anyone except
God, and the cancellation of debts and economic relationships of bondage.
Liberation theology additionally understands God as being
revealed through history.[59]
Not only does such an evolutionary understanding of human relationship with God
liberate us from the construct of God as expressed in barbaric parts of the
Bible (possibly on the basis that even God is learning through the evolution of
time, such as Abraham’s haggling with God might suggest);[60]
it also affirms the importance of people understanding their place in human
history. From this it derives a special concern to “contextualise” biblical
material in contemporary people’s everyday lives. Thus the “Mothers of the
Disappeared,” whose children were killed by the Argentinean junta, are
portrayed in the art of Nobel Peace Prize winner, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, as
being the same as the women who were powerless to do anything but bring their
powerful presences to the foot of Jesus’ cross. The English physician tortured
by the Chilean junta, Sheila Cassidy, has called this the “spirituality of the
foot of the cross” - something very pertinent to those who have worked in circumstances
of despair.[61]
Similarly, images of Egypt and the Exodus have been used in contemporary land
rights struggles in Africa and, as I shall later show, in Scotland. And the
legend of Noah’s ark has been used in North American schools to aid reflection
on the importance of conserving biodiversity by consuming less.
Liberation theology finds further expression in feminist
theologies, which as Scotland’s Damphne Hampson suggests, are predicated simply
on the presumption of the intrinsic equality of women and men.[62]
Genesis 1:27 says that humankind was created both male and female “in the image
of God.” This leads an American, Rosemary Radford Reuther, to suggest that any
theology that oppresses women should be prophetically denounced because it is blasphemous.[63]
Still another dimension of liberation theology central to
the healing of nations is interfaith work. The sympathetic study of Islam,
Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, the Jewish faith and those animistic, shamanistic
and pagan practices that are grounded in love call into question previous
European presumptions of the imperative to advance Christian hegemony. We must
question whether the God of all nations works only through one religion, or
even one church within a particular religion. Paul, after all, drew on the
authority of pre-Christian “pagan” poets in his preaching to the Athenians
(Acts 17:28). John Hick has therefore called for a “complementary pluralism”[A30]
whereby the deity in differing traditions can be understood as differing personae or masks of the one underlying
spiritual reality.[64]
This allows, at the very least, for dialogue between faiths. Going deeper, it
invites consideration of mutual respect and even reverence. Islam provides a
good example of this because it contains such strong foundations with which to
rebuke the intoleration that some Moslems express. For example, according to
the Hadith,[A31]
the oral tradition of Islam, the Prophet Muhammed (peace be upon him) allowed
visiting Christians to use his mosque for their worship.[65]
Surah V:48 of the Koran states that the Koran confirms rather than overturns
“whatever Scripture was before it, and is a watcher over it.” Religious
diversity was in fact created by God, it continues, because “If Allah had
willed he would have made you one nation. But He did not do so, that he may try
you in what has come to you. (He hath made you as you are.) So vie one with
another in good works.” It is true that, as in most world religions, there is a
tension in Islam that seeks to bring all under the “sphere of Islam.” Any
monotheistic religion must logically have some such goal. But as Akbar, the
great Mogul emperor of India (1542-1605) showed, this can be expressed simply
by creating a culture that affirms interfaith toleration, mutual learning and profound
respect.[66] As the
Scots philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, neatly puts it in his discussion of
contesting discourses[A32],
“Only those whose tradition allows for the possibility of its hegemony being
put in question can have rational warrant for asserting such a hegemony.”[67]
In other words, only religions that can embrace universal diversity have
legitimacy in making universal claims. Since love is clearly a prerequisite for
the continuous forgiveness that toleration in practice requires, it implies
that only religions that predicate love - such as Hinduism, Islam and
Judeo-Christianity at their best - are empowered potentially to underwrite the
sovereign basis of pluralist nations.
One example of an attempt at forging common religious
bonds to uphold dignified nationhood was in September 1992 when the Serbian
Orthodox Patriarch Pavle of Belgrade, the spiritual leader of 12 million
Serbian Orthodox Christians worldwide, joined with Cardinal Franjo Kuharic, the
Roman Catholic Primate of Croatia, in appealing for an end to violence and
ethnic cleansing. They jointly condemned the “blasphemous destruction of all
prayer and holy places, Christian and Muslim.”[68]
Another example is that in 1991 at an interfaith service of national
reconciliation and forgiveness following the Gulf War, the mainstream churches
of Scotland permitted Moslem worshippers to conduct their evening prayers in
front of the altar of Edinburgh’s St Giles Cathedral whilst Christians in the
congregation watched on in respectful silence.
It is true that at a surface level, devoid of mystical
insight, such representations as Christ, Allah, Krishna and the Goddess might
seem mutually exclusive. This, however, is only the case if we take the
blasphemous stand of trying to limit and pin down the characteristics of God.
The truth is that God surpasseth human understanding. We should remember that
when Moses asked God for identification in front of the burning bush, God
replied simply, “I am that I am” (Exodus 3:14). Virtually any spiritual
tradition could concur with that, so where is the problem with co-operation if
we strip away the idolatrous human will to power?
Liberation theology is not confined only to Christianity.
In the Jewish faith Marc Ellis has developed a theology for living with Palestinian
neighbours. In Hinduism, liberation finds expression through the work of
radical activists like Swami Agnivesh, who campaigns ceaselessly against child
bonded labour, and Vandana Shiva, a former nuclear physicist who champions the
cause of India’s farmers against technocratic neocolonialism. In Buddhism, an
example is Thailand’s or Siam’s[A33]
Sulak Sivarasksa. His International
Network of Engaged Buddhists campaigns in the cause of “global healing”
with tribal peoples and the poor on environmental issues related to “structural
violence, social development and spiritual transformation.”[69]
It was owing to time spent working in Buddhist Burma that the great English
alternative economist, E. F. Schumacher, urged consideration of Buddhist
economics in his Small is Beautiful. “The
study of Buddhist economics could be recommended even to those who believe that
economic growth is more important than any spiritual or religious values,” he
wrote. “For it is not a question of choosing between ‘modern growth’ and ‘traditional
stagnation’. It is a question of finding the right path of development, the
Middle Way between materialist heedlessness and traditionalist immobility, in
short, of finding ‘Right Livelihood’.”[70]
Set increasingly in this wider global context whereby
people of spirituality reflect on where the history of the world is at,
Christian liberation theologians have derived powerful critiques of the
“theologies of domination” deriving from colonialism. Gutierrez speaks of
history having “been written with a white hand.” It seeks to “to wipe out their victim's memory of the
struggle, so as to be able to snatch from them one of their sources of energy
and will in history: a source of rebellion.”[71]
In short, the emergence of liberation theology as a
prophetic theology is described by Leonardo Boff of Brazil as nothing less than
“the rediscovery of theology.” In proclaiming “Jesus as liberator,” he
considers that:
The church of the poor has
discovered the Holy Spirit as a force of cohesion in the community, as enthusiasm
and happiness in work, as courage to face the powerful, as consolation for the
many who despair because of poverty, as the intelligence which appears in the
commentaries of the people of God on the words of the gospel, extracting new
meanings which bring the message of Jesus up to date in the contexts in which
they live and suffer.[72]
This has led millions to reconsider their unwitting
collusion with Nietzsche’s premature pronouncement of the death of God. “I have
set before you life and death, blessings an curses,” said God as revealed to
the Hebrew people in Deuteronomy 30:19. “Choose life so that you and your
descendants may live.”
Liberation theology is about following that choice. So far
we have been studying its application to people and nationhood. Let us now
address its focus in relationship to land - the very soil upon which nations
rest and by which their peoples are nourished.
Russia’s
policy-makers have been challenged by the need to undertake a complex set of
changes to both property rights and the structure of the economy itself.
Unfortunately, this task has been addressed without sufficient consideration
for the cultural consequences: the material economy has been the overriding
concern. Not only has this been self-defeating, it has also been unnecessary,
for the cultural traditions of Russia could have and might yet strengthen
perestroika by helping to identify criteria for redefining property rights,
including those processes that would accelerate positive changes in
productivity.
For
example, President Yeltsin and the Duma - the lower house in parliament - have
fought a running battle over the Land Code and the Tax Code for seven years.
These two codes have presented policy-makers with the most difficult doctrinal
and political challenges. This is not surprising since they are the secular
bridges between individuals and society, between the public and private
sectors, and between society and its natural habitat. Western economists affirm
that, if the objective is to build an efficient market system, the income from
land - economic rent - needs to be treated as public revenue. Adam Smith made
this explicit in The Wealth of Nations,[73]
and the principle was affirmed by Nobel prize economists when they and their
colleagues addressed an open letter to Mikhail Gorbachev during perestroika.
These economists urged the Soviet President to retain land in public ownership,
and to raise government revenue by charging market rents for the use of land.[74]
This recommendation was based on the argument for efficiency. The principle was
recently endorsed by Russian academicians and their colleagues from the West.[75]
But we know from history that the efficiency argument is not sufficient to
mobilise democratic support into the kind of critical mass that makes it
possible to implement the policy. Even democratic governments have been
thwarted. That is what happened when the Liberal government in Britain pushed
through the Finance Act in 1910 to begin the process of returning rent to the
community. The law was not implemented because of the power of the aristocracy
to exercise their influence behind the scenes.[76]
With
respect to land rights, the lesson from history is that the best teachings of
the social sciences need to be complemented with a wisdom that reaches beyond
the particular and the self-interest; an understanding that can pervade the
population as part of the vision of what their nation represents. Might we
achieve this depth of understanding by retrieving theological traditions? In
the light of liberation theologies, do the prophets of the Bible and the
teachings of Jesus tell us anything about land economics that is important for
Russia today? And can their vision help democratically to mobilise the
population?
Quoted
in the English journal, Land and Liberty,
Dr Dmitry Lvov has said:
The land question is
not only a question of how to provide sustainable revenue for the state budget.
It is a problem of how to preserve Russia as a sustainable independent
geopolitical unit... The solution to this problem will to a considerable extent
depend upon whether Russian citizens become aware of their connection with this
integral public whole, not only from the state and political point of view but,
what is more important, as an integral territorial, economic, cultural,
historic and spiritual space.[77]
Of all spiritual spaces the Judeo-Christian tradition is
the most deeply rooted in Russia’s past. With occasional reference to Islam as
Russia’s second most widely practised religion, let us now explore this.
When, as we have seen, Ivan III in 1486 asserted that “our
sovereignty we hold from God,” he was taking a position that may have been
politically opportune, but was strictly scriptural. In considering whether that
position retains any value 500 years later and in doing so particularly from
the viewpoint of economic efficiency, I will subdivide a scriptural overview of
the land question as follows: 1) creation, 2) providence, 3) covenant, 4) Fall,
and 5) redemption.
The authoritative Anchor
Bible Dictionary states, “The land theme is so ubiquitous that it may have greater
claim to be the central motif in the Old Testament than any other, including
‘covenant.’”[78]
The Biblical position is that God created the land and
promises to sustain its life-support systems “for as long as the Earth endures”
(Genesis 8:22).[79] The
rainbow is the symbol of that ecological covenant (Genesis 9:12-17). “God saw
everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31).
Sovereignty over the land resides with God. Land provides
the gift of “rest” from warfare and wandering. God says that a people “that do
err in their heart” because “they have not known my ways” are a people who
“should not enter into my rest” (Psalms 95). This refers to the land as both
God’s rest and our divinely-appointed resting place. It deeply implies that the
human attitude towards the land should be one of profound respect - reverence.
Time and time again in Scripture we see that the gift of
land is the reward for justice. As Isaiah puts it, “Whoever takes refuge in me
shall possess the land” (57:13). Holding on to the land is therefore contingent
upon living in accordance with principles of justice and faithfulness.
In social organisation God is concerned with the
“allotment” of land - that is to say, with its division, normally equitable,
according to lots (Ezekiel 47:21-23). The land is provided by God as an
inalienable “inheritance,” but always this is contingent upon recognising God
as the ultimate landowner. “The land shall not be sold for ever,” says God in
Leviticus 25:23, “for the land is mine.” The status of all human beings is that
of being merely “strangers and sojourners with me.”
The Judeo-Christian religion is an “historical religion”
in that God’s revelation, or humankind’s understanding of it, evolves through
time. For example, in Exodus 22:29 God appears to require sacrifice of the
firstborn child as Abraham offered to do with the infant Isaac (Genesis 22).
However, later on, in Jeremiah 7:31, God protests that “to burn their sons and
their daughters in the fire [was something] which I did not command, nor did it
come into my mind.” Similarly, God’s later objections to animal blood
sacrifices are made on the grounds of wanting justice as a sign of
faithfulness, and refuting the human arrogance that causes people to think that
they can possess the fruits of creation outwith the context that God gives.
Thus in Psalms 50:9-11:
I will not accept a bull from your
house, or goats from your folds. For every wild animal of the forest is mine,
the cattle on a thousand hills. I know all the birds of the air, and all that
moves in the field is mine.
God’s theocracy, however, does give rights to land users.
In Genesis 27:28 the potential abundance of this is signified by reference to
the “fatness of the land”. The intimacy of this bond extends to a level that is
visceral as indicated, for example, where Isaac remarks that the very “smell of
my son is as the smell of a field which the Lord hath blessed” (Genesis 27:27).
Humankind is mandated to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth” (Genesis
1:28), but there is no mandate to overfill
it!
Much has been made of Genesis giving humankind “dominion”
over the creatures (1:28).[80]
However, this must be balanced or set in context with Genesis 2:15, whereby
Adam was put in the garden of Eden “to till it, and to keep[A34]
it.” Modern scholarship, according to the Anchor Bible Dictionary, considers
that a literal and perhaps better translation of these words would be, “to
serve and watch over.”[81]
This gives a sense of stewardship: of co-evolution rather than domination.
The anchoring of Old Testament land theology in New
Testament Christian ethics is found pre-eminently in Luke 4:19. Here Christ
launches his mission statement in the temple after his return from the forty
days in the wilderness. His proclamation of compassion and justice for the
poor, sick and oppressed ends with his announcing the arrival of “the
acceptable year of the Lord.” This refers to the Old Testament’s “Jubilee” land
ethic, whereby the soil was rested in every seventh year or “Sabbath of years,”
debts within the community were cancelled and bonded labourers and slaves were
released - women and men being treated equally - and compensated in recognition
of “services worth the wages of hired labourers.” In every fiftieth year (following
a sabbath of sabbaths, seven times seven) land that might have been temporarily
traded was to be returned to the original inhabitants, thus enforcing the
stipulation that it should not be alienated in perpetuity and thereby
preventing gross inequalities of wealth distribution (Exodus 23:10, Leviticus
25, Deuteronomy 15:1-18). Northcott points out that:
The Sabbath of the land has
ecological value, particularly for the kind of land the Hebrews were farming,
which was fragile. Overtilling and overcropping by livestock resulted in soil
erosion and eventual desertification, of the kind observed and condemned by the
prophets as the consequence of the abuse of land by rich landowners.[82]
God’s wish to see the land respected as if it is a
sentient being needing rest is so strongly expressed that desolation of the
land is portrayed as the consequence, or “punishment,” for human iniquity. This
desolation, however, is ultimately for the good of the land itself. Thus
Leviticus 26:32-35:
I will devastate the land, so that
your enemies who come to settle in it shall be appalled at it. And you I will
scatter among the nations... Then the land shall enjoy its sabbath years as
long as it lies desolate... It shall have the rest it did not have on your
sabbaths when you were living on it.
The Creation, then, must be upheld. It is sustained by
divine grace - the ongoing goodness of God’s being - and by a human attitude of
reverence towards all that God has set in place. God has blessed human
settlement upon the land (Genesis 12:1-3). But that blessing is conditional
upon looking, firstly, to God before any human economic construct in order to
satisfy fundamental human needs. Jesus therefore says in Matthew 6:24-29:
You cannot serve God and wealth...
Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns,
and yet your heavenly Father feeds them... Consider the lilies of the field,
how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all
his glory was not clothed like one of these.
The economic principle in play here is that material
wealth can only allocate resources that human beings have been deemed scarce. God objects to such an economics
because God, firstly, sees no scarcity of the basic necessities required to
lead the abundance of a spiritual life on earth. And secondly, whilst God wants
people to experience these necessities richly - as “fatness” from the land - he
is, nonetheless, angered by forms of wealth that distort distribution and so
produce the opposite of justice - which is violence. After all, what good is
gold in a time of famine? It does not make any extra food. It serves only to
redistribute resources away from some and towards others in ways that might not
accord with a society’s optimal requirements for health. As Ezekiel 7:19 puts
it, “Their silver and gold cannot save them on the day of the wrath of the
Lord. They shall not satisfy their hunger or fill their stomachs with it.”
Accordingly, “They shall fling their silver into the streets, their gold shall
be treated as unclean.”
At the expense of being highly technical in the next few
paragraphs, but to bring this discussion within the reference frame of trained
economists, it should be noted that these considerations concern the economic
principle of the diminishing marginal
utility of wealth. This suggests that the more a person has, the more they
need to acquire in order to add an incremental unit of wellbeing. An additional
gold coin may be very useful if you only have ten, but it might make minimal
difference if you already have a hundred. Concentration of wealth therefore
makes for inefficient property rights. Efficient property rights, by contrast,
redistribute wealth.[83]
Each unit of utility removed from the rich adds many additional units of
utility to the poor. The loss of $1,000 through taxation of a rich person might
only give ten poor people $100 each, but the benefit they each gain might far
outweigh the rich person’s pain. We may call this the inverse diminishing marginal utility of wealth. Such a principle is
the economics behind the idea of Jubilee. It does not reject the use of
capital, entrepreneurship and markets for the purpose of exchange. It does,
however, reject forms of capitalism that would idolise capital to make it more
important than human relationships, thereby militating against principles of
fair trade that are rooted in justice.
God rejects exploitative economics because it violates the
economics of providence - nature’s “rate of return” from the creation. That
rate of return, incidentally, operates on a basis of simple rather than
compound interest. If you do not take the opportunity to pick your apples, you
will not harvest a compoundly heavier yield in successive years! Providence
operates in the present moment; not through deferred gratification except in so
far as adherence to the sacrament of the present moment - planting in its
season, harvesting in its season, and so on - secures the assurance of future
blessing (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8). We can see, then, that providence pertains to an
ecological economics which puts the Creation first and money second. A
financial economics does things the other way round and therefore is prone to
suffering periodic collapses. Nothing illustrates this better than the
exponential mathematics of what some economic advisors ludicrously laud as
“sustained growth.” Had Judas Iscariot invested his thirty pieces of silver at
just a few percentage points compound
interest, repayable by weight in silver today, the amount of silver
required to honour the debt would be equivalent to the weight of the earth.
Periodic crash is therefore intrinsic to exponential growth. As such, any
economic system predicated upon it such as the current western advanced
capitalist system is intrinsically unstable. Alternatives, particularly Islamic
economics, which replaces usury with the shared ownership of profits, merits
further attention:[84]
had the Islamic approach been used the Third World sovereign debt problem would
never have reached the crisis proportions that it did.
Theologically, I see this as part of the reason why most
world religions express reservations or injunctions concerning usury.[85]
Usury - interest on money in excess of any rate of inflation - implies a
discount rate. This is used in the discounted cash flow methods of investment
appraisal that are now prevalent in the west, specifically Net Present Value
(NPV) and Internal Rate of Return (IRR).[86]
However, looked at in terms of intergenerational equity - equity or value that
is passed on to future generations - discounting steals the children’s future.[87]
It degrades the perceived future value of benefits to society by imposing a
worldview predicated on the selfishness of the present generation. It therefore
justifies the destruction of nature’s future providential capacity, for
example, by accepting permanent biodiversity loss if the present-day pay-off is
high enough in relation to a “contingent valuation” spuriously placed by
economists on natural capital. It similarly justifies short-term applications
of human labour like, for example, in the construction of buildings that last
for only a few decades on the basis that their long-term utility discounts down
to negligible present value.[88]
Inasmuch as there may be divergences of principle and
effect between financial economics and ecological economics, so we see
economics revealed in both its “fallen” state and its “higher” God-given
vocation. The one - financial economics as advanced capitalism practices it -
is the flawed economics of men based, as Adam Smith acknowledged, on the
dynamics of self-interest; the other, based on faithfulness expressed through
social and ecological justice, is God’s providence. This - God’s provide-ance
(Deuteronomy 8) - is expressed through the land and its surroundings of water,
atmosphere and universe. The one approach relies upon the “invisible hand” of
the marketplace; the other upon the divine hand of God.
The ordinary context within which providence happens is
land. This gives it an importance that is both economic and spiritual. At a
level that is embodied in the very marrow of our bones, land is the setting in
which we become who we most deeply are. As such, a sense of place goes on to
engender belonging, identity and values. This happens because, according to
Scripture, the creation serves to reveal the majesty of God and thereby
sustains us in physical and spiritual life. As Psalms 104:30 has it, “When you
send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the
ground.” God is a presence, the same Psalm maintains, of whom “the wind [is]
your messengers, fire and flame your ministers.” The creatures therefore all
look to God “to give them their food in due season ... when you open your hand,
they are filled with good things” (104:27-28).
Similarly, in the book of Job, God is metaphorically
depicted as if a woman from whose body the creation unfolds. This is consistent
with Biblical wisdom literature that depicts Woman Wisdom - Sophia - as a
presence “that pervades and penetrates all things. For she is a breath of the
power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty” (Wisdom of
Solomon, 7:24-25).[89]
Thus, it is from God’s “womb” that the sea burst out and ice issues forth (Job
38:8, 29). God set out the foundations of the earth and “laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for
joy” (38:6-7). It is God’s “spreading of the clouds, the thunderings of his
pavilion” (36:29), that brings rain to the desert “to make the ground put forth
grass” (38:27). It is God who hunts prey for the lions and the ravens
(38:39-41). It is God who has “let the wild ass go free” (39:5) and made “the
wild ox willing to serve you ... and bring your grain to your threshing floor”
(39:9-12).
God, then, is both transcendent - beyond the created world
- and, through Wisdom - which is effectively synonymous with the Holy Spirit -
immanent or present at its deepest inner core; incarnate in the living Christ
(John 1:1-9; Luke 7:35, etc.). As Orthodox Christian worship recognises rather
more fully than do western traditions, incarnation implies that the “body of
Christ” is at the very core of the creation: it is not peripheral to it or
transcendent from it. We must, however, be clear that God is not nature itself
- that would be pantheism which would
idolatrously limit God by not recognising unmanifest transcendence beyond all
manifest reality. As Jeremiah (2:27) says, that would be like those “who say to
a tree, ‘You are my father,’ and to a stone, ‘You gave me birth [but] have
turned their backs [on God].” Rather, God is panentheistic - which is to say, present in nature as well as
beyond it. God is both active in time (and therefore human history) and in the pleroma - the eternal, which is outwith
space and time. But the creation, which is to say, the land and all that
belongs to and surrounds the land, is the objectively manifest context in which
God’s goodness is apparent.
This position is shared by all major world faiths and
therefore ought to be a point around which unity can be found in religiously
pluralistic nations. For example, the Tao
te Ching likens the Tao to the “nameless uncarved granite block,” that
contains the potential to be carved into anything but which, in its unworked
state, is beyond them all. It is the selfless source of life in freedom for all
creatures. “It gives them life yet claims no possession; It benefits them yet
exacts no gratitude; It is the steward yet exercises no authority. Such is
called the mysterious virtue” (chapters XXXVII & LI). The Koran says that Allah “has appointed the earth to be a cradle
for you ... and has sent down water from the sky wherewith [to] bring forth
diverse kinds of vegetation. Eat and pasture your cattle; surely in this are
signs for men embued with understanding” (XX:53). In the Hindu Bhagavad Gita Lord Krishna says,
“Through my nature I bring forth all creation, and this rolls round in the
circles of time. But I am not bound by this vast work of creation. I am and I
watch the drama of works... But the fools of the world know not me when they
see me in my own human body. They know not my Spirit supreme, the infinite God
of this all”(9:8-11).
In all these faiths the name of God and the nature of
their historical revelation varies, but the underlying spiritual message
affirming divine providence is similar: God’s presence sustains what humankind
sees, but God’s nature surpasseth[A35]
all understanding. It follows from this that if any of the peoples of the earth
deprived of full and right relationship with the land, they are also be
deprived full and right relationship with God. As such, land rights are of
fundamental theological consequence.
It is with this insight that we can understand the
enormous psychological energy that is let loose when nationalism, spirituality
and land are brought into common focus. As the Scots theologian, Ian Fraser,
who is a senior consultant to the World Council of Churches says, “Probably the
biggest theological issue in the world is people’s title to land which is
theirs. It has to do with their identity and destiny in God’s sight and man’s.”[90]
It is such theology that has led the American political right to allege that
the Russian Orthodox Church conspired with the Kremlin to infiltrate the World
Council of Churches by using liberation theology for “interpreting the Bible
selectively to support radicalism.”[91]
But as we have seen, Jesus used the Bible selectively to redeem a fallen
theology. He did so in accordance with his revolutionary gospel of radical
love. That is the “good news” of the gospel (Luke 7:22; 1 John 4:8). Marxism is
incidental[A36]
though not necessarily irrelevant to this; indeed, it is interesting to
consider Marx in the context of his Jewish family background and the influence
that a Hebrew prophetic theology of justice might consciously or unconsciously
had upon him. That consideration, however, goes beyond the scope of my present
purpose.
The word, “covenant,” is used in several different ways in
the Bible to express contractual aspects of the human relationship with God. In
a less legalistic sense, however, “covenant” means the bonds of friendship with
God which comprise the spiritual underpinning of all community. God offers humankind a “covenant of life.” Life itself
is the consequence of choosing to live in threefold right relationship - with
God, nature and community. Let us take each of these in turn.
Firstly, right relationship with God means having no other “gods” - no other ultimate concerns -
before God (Exodus 20:1-7). God wants the people to have neither lesser gods as
their idols or to please “him” with sacrifices, because what he seeks is justice
and the homecoming of the poor (Isaiah 46, Amos 5:21-24). Idolatry is wrong
because it misleads about the nature of God and therefore presents a false
understanding of reality. This is not to say that some other concern -
nationhood, a sporting team, a political party or money, for example - is
unimportant. It simply means that if it is put before God - before the implications of life as love made visible -
then it becomes an idol. If that happens, if it happens with, say, money, then
the worship of God is replaced by the worship of Mammon - Jesus’ Aramaic word
for money personified (Matthew 6:24).
We see an example of money idolatry very clearly in
Ezekiel 28. It is a fascinating chapter because it is about the Garden of Eden.
However, it conflicts with the Genesis version in ways that clearly invite us
to think of the Garden of Eden story as myth. This is exciting because
fundamentalists who insist that the Bible must be read literally miss much of
its point. Myth, properly understood, is far more powerful than fact because it
operates poetically on the soul at the level of spiritual transformation.
Ezekiel in this particular passage depicts a Garden of Eden in which humankind
was surrounded by ever conceivable form of wealth. But, he says, “in the abundance
of your trade you were filled with violence, and you sinned; so I cast you as a
profane thing from the mountain of God” (28:16). Tellingly, God goes on to
explain the precise mechanism of humankind’s Fall in ways that make this
theological principle psychologically convincing. He says: “I brought out fire from within you; it consumed you, and I
turned you to ashes on the earth” (28:18). In other words, the Fall from grace
was self-inflicted. The “fire” was contained within. The wicked burn from their
own avarice. This is actually an optimistic situation: it shows that we can
influence our own happiness. God makes this very clear in Ezekiel 18:31-32:
Cast away from you all the
transgressions that you have committed against me, and get yourselves a new heart
and a new spirit! ... For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the
Lord God. Turn, then, and live.
Secondly, right relationship with nature entails recognition that “The earth belongs unto the Lord
and all that it contains” (Psalms 24:1).[92]
It means understanding God’s providential immanence in the creation and
therefore treating it with profound respect, which is to say, reverence. Not only is this implied by
God’s ownership, presence in and blessing of the creation, but we also see it
in specific contexts such as God expecting shoes to be removed when standing on
“holy ground” (Exodus 3:5; Joshua 5:15). Another example is in Exodus 20:22-26
where God objects to the sacred use of gold and silver, and asks that alters be
made simply of earth. “But if you make for me an alter of stone,” he adds, “do
not build it out of hewn stones; for if you use a chisel upon it you profane
it.” In other words, notwithstanding what Solomon later did to build his
elaborate temple, there is evidence to suggest that even the natural integrity
of stones was to be respected and not profaned with iron.
Mahatma Gandhi captured the spirit of providence in his
recognition that “The earth contains enough for everybody’s need, but not for
everybody’s greed.” Need graciously acknowledges providence but greed destroys
the principles by which it works. As a consequence of the existential fear
provoked by not trusting to God, and the greed that this is a symptom of, war,
famine and pestilence set in (Jeremiah 27:8), leading to desolation and ecocide[A37].
“O land, land, land, hear the word of the Lord!” cries Jeremiah (22:29), as he
bemoans the loss of nature’s biodiversity: “How long will the land mourn, and
the grass of every field wither? For the wickedness[A38]
of those who live in it/ the animals and
the birds are swept away” (12:4). Isaiah similarly warns of ecocide in saying
that “The remnant of the trees of his forest will be so few that a child can
write them down” (10:19), and later in 24:4-5:
The earth dries up and withers,
the whole world withers and grows sick; the earth’s high places sicken, and
earth itself is desecrated by the feet of those who live in it, because they
have broken the laws, disobeyed the statutes and violated the eternal covenant.
Finally and thirdly, right relationship with human community - society - entails
recognition of what Quakers call “that of god in everyone” (cf. John 1:1-10).
God’s purpose is that we as individuals should develop spiritually in
communities because we are all
interconnected. Going it alone is not an option: even the spiritual hermit is
connected to the rest of the world by prayer. Jesus said that the nature of
reality is like us all being branches on the same vine of life (John 15:1-17).
Connected to his divinity in this way we “are gods” (John 10:34; Psalms 82:6);
or as 2 Peter 1:4 puts it, we, “may become participants in the divine nature”
(the Rev. Prof. Donald Macleod of Edinburgh’s Free Church College remarks on
this as “a passage which so astonished John Calvin that he commented, ‘it is,
so to speak, a kind of deification’” (Macleod 1998, p. 198).
Waking up to this deeper self, according to spiritual
teachers like Anthony de Mello SJ, requires the practice of presence - mindful attention to the full
abundance of life’s providential experience.[93]
The Buddhist Dhammapada (82) says,
“Even as a lake that is pure and peaceful and deep, so becomes the soul of the
wise man when he hears the words of Dhamma
[God’s way].” Like a lake that reflects everything around it, spiritual
presence, then, is about becoming fully aware of the ‘sacrament of the present
moment’ as we walk, breath, eat the fruits of nature’s providence; likewise as
we share our human nature in community with others and with that community of the
Earth with which we comprise a human
ecology. Such mindfulness implies much more than any abstract, heady
obedience to commands on tablets of stone. It means coming alive to the deeper
life of the fact that we are divinely interconnected, like islands appearing
above the sea. Like the finger nails on a hand we look as if we are separate;
but as we learn to love - as we follow down the fingers towards the hand - our
closeness increases. Only from the viewpoint of the hand itself - that is, from
within god-consciousness, the bedrock of love - do we truly see what it means
to be “children” of God (John 10:31-38). From such a vantage point it becomes
obvious that whatever we do to one another we actually do to our deepest
selves. As Paul often said, we are “members one of another” (e.g. Ephesians
4:25). He saw this as the meaning of being “the church” in the “body of Christ”
(Romans 12:4-5; 1 Corinthians). Understood in this way “church” is not a
building or even an institution, but the name given to the community of those
who develop mindful awareness. “Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of
the night?” asked Isaiah (21:11-12). “The watchman said, The morning cometh,
and also the night: if ye will enquire, enquire ye: return, come.”
What we are in our deepest selves, then, is, by the grace
of God, our greatest wealth and our community. Putting it in the other way
round as attributed to Jesus in the apocryphal but authoritative Gospel of Thomas (3:13-15), “If you do
not Know yourselves then you are in poverty, and you are the poverty.”[94]
This makes mutual reverence based upon knowledge of the deep self the
foundation rock of community. It makes love the mortar that builds upon it.
At a social level such understanding of covenant as
expressing the interconnection of all things urges us to place the spiritual at
the centre of concern, motivation and methodology for “development,” whether it is “community development,” “sustainable
development,” “world development,” “economic development,” “child development” or any other kind. This
may at first seem audacious. But perhaps not so when we look at what the word
“development” actually means.
“Development” is an abused word which, in western society,
has come to be virtually synonymous with sustained (as distinct from
sustainable) economic growth. However, the etymology derives from de- (to undo)
and the Old French, “voloper” - to envelop or fold up, as in our English word,
“envelope.” To develop is therefore “to unfold, unroll to unfurl.” The
biological application, as in “foetal development,” accurately captures correct
usage. Here the foetus develops in right
relationship with its environment of the womb and the wider world that the
parents move in. We can see from this that too little development implies stunted
growth - a condition of the poor; development in the wrong place means
deformity - inequitable wealth distribution; and development without limits is
a cancer that extracts life from the rest of the body or the planet.
Properly used, then, “development” means, as in the
dictionary definition, “a gradual unfolding; a fuller working out of the
details of anything; growth from within.”[95]
Community development should therefore be about enabling a community to become
more fully itself.[96] Development ought therefore be spirituality
expressed socially. Such is the intent of God’s covenant with humankind.
Such is the reason why it is appropriate for a country like Russia to ask
whether, in entering into covenants or contracts with the IMF, World Bank or
private entrepreneurs, it is in danger of replacing state-espoused atheism with
idolatry before Mammon, Moloch or the Golden Calf.
From a theological point of view, much of the answer to
that question can be determined by whether or not these bodies show respect the
relationship between the Russian people and their land as a source of God’s
providence. If contracts are entered into which alienate the common people from
such providence, then the spirituality of nationhood will have entered further
into a state which, theologically, is known as “Fall” or sinfulness.
When the Russian Orthodox Church uses icons we presume
that it is not engaging in idolatry. At its best, which is doubtless not all the
time, it understands that inspired art can present spiritual truth to the soul
in ways that are more real than words. Likewise, a proper understanding of myth
as archetypal story speaks to truths that are deeper than literal
interpretation alone can convey. As I have already suggested, it is in this
mythological sense that we might best understand the story of Adam and Eve and
their “Fall” from Eden, resulting of the displacement of humankind from an
ecological paradise into the wasteland (Genesis 3). It is to the theology of
Fall that we must look if we are, from a Biblical point of view, to understand
the origins of the nations, their relationship to land and ethnicity, and the
principles of their governance.
“Fall,” which is alienation from friendship with God,
results from an innate condition of all human beings sometimes called “original
sin.” We must not allow the sadomasochistic applications that some
fundamentalist evangelicals make of this concept allow us to overlook its deep
psychological insights into the human condition and its profoundly liberating
and optimistic implications. Spiritually, human beings must be free to choose
or reject the ways of God - to do good and evil - if their love of God is to be
free love. For God to stop atrocities
from happening in the world would require constant intervention either in the
laws of nature, or in the freedom of the human soul. Whilst the evidence of
both parapsychology[97]
and of faith suggests that this may sometimes happen, if applied as a normal
occurrence in daily life it would arguably inhibit spiritual evolution.
Suffering, which was expressed in its fullest form in the crucifixion, is
therefore inevitable. Humankind is fallen, but God’s entreaty is that we do not
have to remain in that condition unredeemed.
The Fall can be seen in the Bible to have progressively
deeper consequences for the triple-unity of God-nature-community. Genesis 10:8
records that Nimrod, who was descended from Noah, “was the first on earth to
become a mighty warrior.” The people of his fearsome imperial kingdom, Babel,
chose to consolidate their power through urbanisation. They said, “Come, let us
build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us
make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face
of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4). In breaking up the superpower by dividing
their language, God again, according to Genesis 11:9, “scattered them abroad
over the face of all the earth,” so that “from these the nations spread abroad
on the earth after the flood” (Genesis 10:32).
Genesis 47 describes the origins of feudalism,
landlessness and hence slavery in the ancient near east where Joseph buys all
the land for Pharaoh in exchange for seed during the famine. Later Yahweh, the Israelites’
tribal understanding of God, denounces imperialism, frees the slaves and gives
them a home of “promised land,” a “good land” that was “flowing with milk and
honey” (Deuteronomy 8:7-10; Numbers 11, etc.). But the people prefer to be
ruled over by the militarised patriarchy rather than having God as their king.
In Deuteronomy 17:14-20 God therefore reluctantly allows them to have a king,
but only with considerable restrictions set in place to prevent him “from
exalting himself above other members of the community.” God’s concern was that
a human king would seek to acquire disproportionate wealth and send people back
to bonded labour or slavery in Egypt in order to buy horses - the prerequisite
of military capacity. Again, in 1 Samuel 8, the people reject God as their king
in spite of God’s warning that a human king would:
... take your sons and appoint
them to his chariots and to be his horsemen ... and some to plough his ground
and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war ... He will take your daughters to be perfumers
and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields ... and give them to
his courtiers. He will take one tenth of your grain [and other produce] and you
shall be his slaves.
Only in the face of such self-destructive faithlessness
from a people who insisted that their political organisation should “be like
other nations” did God, with the greatest reluctance, tell Samuel: “Listen to
their voice and set a king over them” (1 Samuel 8:22). From an Old Testament point
of view, then, autocratic and human structures of governance are invariably
compromised. It is in this sense that the nations, like individuals, can
theologically be understood as “fallen.” Amongst the most prominent signs of
this according to the 1 Samuel passage just quoted are warmongering, the
degradation of women’s social position to menial service roles and the fashion
industry, and the abuse of landed power. These represent the exploitation of
men, the exploitation of women, and pivoting them both, exploitation of the
land. Let us see how the New Testament reaffirms each of these concerns.
On warmongering, Jesus, the “Prince of Peace,” repudiated
the domination system’s violence in ways that run far deeper than are generally
realised. Thus Walter Wink surmises of the enigmatic Book of Revelation that,
“Never has a more withering political and economic criticism of [the structural
violence of] empire been penned. The author sees with clairvoyant exactitude
the bestiality of Rome, and behind it to the satanic spirit undergirding it
[although] he fails to relate this revelation to other aspects of androcracy[A39].”[98]
We might note in passing that a similar apocalyptic vision of Rome, symbolised as
an eagle with three subsidiary wings rising to prominence, is given in 3(2)
Esdras 11 - a text that is canonical only in the Slavonic Bible.[99]
On women, Jesus both taught and allowed them to touch him,
even though this would have rendered him ritually unclean within the social
constructs of his time. Luke’s gospel is particularly strong in drawing out
Jesus’ relationship to women. In 7:36-50 a woman tenderly kisses his feet, and
in 10:38-42 he insists on Mary’s right to receive teaching against Martha’s protestations.
It is true, as Daphne Hampson points out, that in the parables of Mark’s gospel
all eighteen main characters are men and the other synoptic gospels do little
better,[100] but we
have to set this in cultural context. It is worth remembering that in the story
of the Syrophoenician woman of Mark 7:24-30 we are left with an impression that
the woman, through her humour, actually teaches Jesus something about the need
to include marginalised groups in his mission.
With regard to land, in Luke 4 the devil places before
Jesus three temptations - elemental power - power to distort the laws of
nature; landed or social power - the power to exploit people’s lives through
the control of place; and spiritual power - the power to abuse the forces of
God. In response to the second temptation, Jesus replies, “Get thee behind me,
Satan.” That is to say, in the second temptation of Christ, Jesus refused to
become a worldly king or landlord. We have already seen how Luke 4:19 endorses
the Jubilee land ethic, and in the next section we shall see how Jesus
incorporates the principle of holy places.
In addressing those who take for selfish ends the power in
the land, both Old and New Testaments are usually totally uncompromising.
Justice is the non-negotiable contractual condition of the land covenant, thus
God in Amos (8:4) hails the miscreant landlord: “Hear this, O ye that swallow
up the needy, even to make the poor of the land to fail.”
“Woe to them,” God continues in Micah 2:1-2:
Woe to them that devise iniquity,
and work evil upon their beds! When the morning is light, they practice it,
because it is in the power of their hand. And they covet fields, and take them
by violence; and houses, and take them away: so they oppress a man and his
house, even a man and his heritage.
The reason for God’s warning of “woe” is clear. As Micah
puts it, “Therefore thus saith the Lord; Behold, against this family do I
devise an evil, from which ye shall not remove your necks; neither shall ye go
haughtily: for this time is evil” (2:3).
Isaiah likewise repeatedly condemns the abuse of landed
power. “Ah, you,” he says (5:8), “who join house to house, who add field to
field, until there is room for no one but you, and you are left to life alone
in the midst of the land!” and he looks towards an era where the poor
(65:21-23):
Shall build houses and inhabit
them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and
another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a
tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of
their hands. They shall not labour in vain.
As for the oppressors, Isaiah warns that (5:9): “The Lord
of hosts has sworn in my hearing: Surely many houses shall be desolate, large
and beautiful houses, without inhabitant.”
Isaiah (49:8) recognises that a people’s relationship with
the land is a right established by divine covenant. It seeks: “to establish the
land, to apportion the desolate heritages.” Repeated in these texts is the
warning that points to the gravity with which God views those who thwart this
intention: “There is no peace, saith the Lord, unto the wicked” (48:22). The
end point of the process of Fall is described by Proverbs in terms that
reaffirm that the wicked bring doom upon themselves (1:18-19):
... they lie in wait - to kill
themselves! and set an ambush - for their own lives! Such is the end of all who
are greedy for gain; it takes away the life of its possessors.
Although human suffering is self-inflicted, God constantly
comes alive through remnants of the human “stock” or taproot to restore the
surface of the earth and heal the nations. As the Scots poet Edwin Muir puts
it, “Yet still from Eden springs the root/ As clean as on the starting day.”[101]
God’s ultimate concern for humankind is redemption - salvation - a word that in
English shares the same etymology as “salve” meaning “to heal.”
The prophets keep on testifying because of God’s
insistence that redemption is possible, and as Moses said in Numbers 11:29,
“would that all God’s people were prophets.” Life may be a living hell, but it
doesn’t have to be like that. Thus, God through Jeremiah (29:11-13) promises,
“to give you a future with hope ... if you seek me with all your heart.” “Learn
to do good,” counsels Isaiah (1:17): “seek justice, rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan, plead for the widow,” and then (2:4):
They shall beat their swords into
ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up
sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
There will be a return from diaspora: “I will bring you
back to the place from which I sent you into exile,” as Jeremiah puts it
(29:10-14). Likewise in Ezekiel 28:25-26: “Then they shall settle on their own
soil... and they shall build houses... They shall live in safety, when I
execute judgements upon all their neighbours who have treated them with
contempt.”
It is noteworthy that Ezekiel’s vision is deeply
ecological in very practical ways. God will personally
set to work reconstituting the nation that re-establishes right-relationship.
Uninhabited towns will be rebuilt and the land, that was once desolate, “will
become like the garden of Eden... Then the nations that are left all around you
shall know that I, the Lord, have rebuilt the ruined places, and replanted that
which was desolated: I, the Lord, have spoken, and I will do it” (Ezekiel
36:33-36).
Land use for a redeemed people is contingent upon
faithfulness to God. Thus, in Deuteronomy 10 the Israelites were given the
“Promised Land” as “chosen people,” but it was on the understanding that they
would love and serve God “with all your heart and with all your soul ... for
your own wellbeing”; this being a God “who is not partial and takes no bribe,
who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers,
providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you
were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
Sovereignty, then, is God-given but it must be understood
in God’s terms. Thus Jeremiah quotes God as saying (27:4-5): “It is I who by my
great power and my outstretched arm have made the earth, with the people and
animals that are on the earth, and I give it to whomever I please.” However,
the implications for ethnicity are startling. Because, as we have seen in
Leviticus 25, we are all no more than tenants unto God, we belong to a place -
we find our resting place, our “Promised Land” or “holy land” - only inasmuch
as it pleases God. That pleasing is contingent upon worshipping God and the
core of such worship is the advancement of social and ecological justice or
right-relationship.
There is, however, a difficulty with “Promised Land”
theology that is so great as to place the whole ethical value of the Bible in
jeopardy. In the early books of the Bible as the Israelites resettled their
Promised Land, God is depicted as countenancing ethnic cleansing to a most
brutal degree. Many examples are given of what some translations call the “holocaust”
or “curse of destruction” being wrought by the Israelites against earlier
inhabitants. For example, Joshua commits genocide in the name of the Lord
against the inhabitants of Jericho (Joshua 6). In Numbers 31, Moses does
likewise against the Midianites. Only thirty-two thousand virgin women were
spared. These, God said, the Israelites were permitted to “keep alive for
yourselves,” apart from a percentage set apart for “the Lord’s tribute” - a
seeming reference to either human sacrifice or temple prostitution. Judges 21
depicts the Israelites putting to the sword all the inhabitants of
Jabesh-gilead apart from “four hundred young virgins who had never slept with a
man,” in order that they might rectify the Benjaminites’ deficit of wives. The
theocratic framework by which much of this was permitted is clearly laid down
in Deuteronomy 20-25.
How, then, presuming that we are repulsed by such conduct,
can we give the Bible any credence? It is here that liberation theology’s
insistence that the Bible depicts the historical
evolution of revelation becomes vital for liberating theology itself. The
late prophets take a very different position from the early ones, and by the
time we get to Jesus the ethos is absolutely reversed. Jesus taught opposition
to the domination system of what he saw as Satanic power through non-violence;
not “just war.” In choosing the cross rather than waging war at the point of
Peter’s sword (Luke 22), Jesus chose to die for the sake of love but not to kill for it. He told Peter to
put away the sword that had been symbolically brought out to fulfil prophesy,
saying “No more of this!” (Luke 22:51). His theology announced a power of love
that was greater than the love of power. Here and in many other respects he
stood for a revelation of God relative to which that of the earlier prophets
had been merely a fragmentary prelude. Perhaps it takes an evolutionary
timespan for humankind to learn about God. Perhaps after two thousand years,
Christianity is only just beginning.
The Christian understanding of the place of land in
redemption goes deeper than any merely territorial considerations. Jesus
replaces a static notion of “holy places” or “holy land” with an understanding
of incarnation in which concepts of space are incorporated into the “Body of
Christ.”[102] We see
this very clearly in John, where, for example, it is He, not Jacob’s well, that
is the source of life-giving water (4:7-15); He, not the Pool of Bethesda, that
offers healing (5:2-9). Subject to God’s election[A40],
then, the whole of the creation is thereby rendered holy on account of the
synonymy of life and incarnation (John 1:1-9, cf. Proverbs 8:22-36). As Paul
saw it, redemption implies a reversal of the Fall. It has profound implications
for both the human and non-human world because creation as a whole has suffered
under the burden of human sin. Accordingly, he wrote in Romans 8:20-22:
Yet there was this hope: that
creation itself would one day be set free from its slavery to decay, and share
the glorious freedom of the children of God. For we know that up to the present
time all of creation groans with pain like the pain of childbirth.
The conditions for realising this setting-free are an
opening of the human heart to providence as the meaning of love in all its
passions. Right-relationship with the earth and one-another is a relationship
of eros. This must not be restricted
to its narrow sexual sense, but be understood afresh as embodied love - a very
practical, flesh-and-blood love that flows from and dances with God’s works of
providence. This is the implication of “incarnation.” This is what invites an
attitude of reverence towards all things. This is what repudiates naked
capitalist exploitation such as Marx saw resulting in alienation, and the black
American feminist writer, Audre Lorde, saw as pornographic relationship.
“Pornography,” says Lorde, “emphasises sensation without
feeling.”[103] It
leads to the situation described by the prophet Haggai (1:5-6) where the people
eat but are not filled, and drink but do not become merry. Such is consumerism
in a world driven by the hollow rattle of a marketing man’s advertising jingles[A41].
But through re-connection with soul in the human heart that starts to feel
again, there is an alternative. In using the word erotic to signify the integration of sensation with feeling; body
with soul; Lorde concludes:
But when we begin to live from
within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing
that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then
we begin to be responsible to our selves in the deepest sense. For as we begin
to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being
satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so
often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against
oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within. In
touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those
other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation,
despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.
And how interesting it is that in her book from which the
above is drawn, the first essay is Notes
from a Trip to Russia, written in 1976. Here Lorde remarks that even when
rushing, the people of Moscow, “lack the desperation of New York. One thing
that characterized all of these people was a pleasantness in their faces, a
willingness to smile, at least at me, a stranger. It was a strange contrast to
the grimness of the weather.”[104]
Redemption means a way of life that has heart. This does
not mean that we perpetrate no violence. Rather, it means that the violence we
inevitably perpetrate simply by being alive is encased in forgiveness - in deep
acceptance of both self and others. As Gandhi pointed out, “All live entails
violence; our duty is to minimise the violence we personally exert.” This calls
us to live as modestly, mindfully, and so as kindly as we are able to. It calls
us to take what we require in a spirit of gratitude and to give similarly. As
the English mystic William Blake reminds us, providence does not grudge the
necessary inevitable: “The cut worm forgives the plough.”[105]
The New Testament closes by prophesying the “healing of
the Nations” (Revelation 22:1-2) that were first torn apart at Nimrod’s Babel.
The Book of Revelation portrays this healing as being effected by leaves from
the “tree of life” of Ezekiel 47, which in turn derives from Genesis 2. As
such, the Book of Revelation, for all that it is a problematic work, neatly
brings to a conclusion the human ecology of the Bible. That conclusion has
startling and revolutionary implications for the question of ethnicity - the
question of who rightly belongs to the land in a world undergoing redemption.
In Ezekiel the vision of healing is followed immediately by discussion of the
importance of land rights for foreigners. God declares that the second
generation of the “strangers” or “alien” “who sojourn among you” should have
their full share of land inheritance and thus be treated “as Israelites”
(Ezekiel 47:21-23). In other words, God deals with the incomer-versus-insider
ethnicity question very simply, in accordance with his own sovereignty over the
land. He reminds, in effect, that we are all outsiders. The only rights we have
to land are God given, predicated on justice. God therefore wants the land to
be shared with all whose intentions
of residence run deeper than might be covered by the normal decencies of
hospitality - that is, the second generation onwards. Providence will thereby
be denied to no-one. Ezekiel and various other prophets therefore refute any
racist’s charter. The right to be present on the land is held, pre-eminently,
by the poor, the widow, the orphan and the refugee - alongside the right of the
great and the good who might have a legal claim to heritage. We are talking
here soil and soul; not Nazi “blood and soil.” We are talking about deep
understandings of fostership that are captured in such Scottish Gaelic proverbs
as, “The bonds of milk (i.e. nurture) are stronger than the bonds of blood
(i.e. lineage),” and “Blood counts for twentifold; fostership a hundredfold.”
Here we see specific cultural expression of the
Judeo-Christian land ethic. In a world that is divided by ethnic strife, such
principles offer to overturn that dismal wasteland where, as the prophet Joel
puts it, “joy withers away among the people” (1:12). Here, then, we find a
Scottish expression of that higher spiritual vocation to which all nations are
called. Such is the spirit symbolised by Saint Andrew. And in this particular
instance it comes from a people who, as we have seen, mythologically trace
their roots to a Scythian cultural dawn shared with the tribes of southern
Russia.
Andelson & Dawsey acknowledge that “liberation
theology is not mere theorizing but arises out of actual experience of
oppression.”[106] In the
course of my own work I have often encountered objections from landlords and
sometimes from within the churches. These should be acknowledged.
·
I have encountered landowners taking offence at
the presumption that “you cannot be rich and be a Christian.” This presumption,
however, is an over-simplification. Zacchaeus, who is rich, finds salvation
though he offers only half of his possessions to the poor but promises honesty
(Luke 19:1-10). Others, who were poor, failed Christ - like nine out of the ten
lepers in Luke 17:11-19. When Jesus said that for a rich man to enter Heaven
was like a camel passing through the “eye of a needle,” it should be remembered
that the “needle” in question was not a sewing needle, but a very narrow type
of gate through which it was hard, but not impossible, for a camel to pass
(Mark 10:25). Yes, Jesus was concerned about wealth, but he was more concerned
about the attitudes that underlay it.
·
I have had landowners say that land reform is
theft, like Ahab and Jezebel in the case of Naboth’s vineyard (1 Kings 21).
However, this story is about the abuse of kingly power. Ahab was a peasant
holding on to his God-given share of land heritage, not a rich landowner with
many times one family’s heritage. The Bible approvingly shows actual land
reform taking place where Nehemiah (5:1-13) successfully demands that the
powerful restore to the poor, “this very day, their fields, their vineyards,
their olive orchards, and their houses.” Again, Jeremiah (1:18-19) fortifies
the common people against “the people of the land” as he calls the rich
“country set” of his time. “They will fight against you; but they shall not
prevail against you, for I am with you, says the Lord, to deliver you.”
·
I have had a landlord’s lawyer in an eviction
case argue against a defence I had helped to prepare under Scots feudal law. He
told Stirling Sheriff Court that Jesus’ Parable of the Wicked Tenants
demonstrates support for the principle of landlordism (Mark 12:1-12, etc.).[107]
However, a parable is a teaching aid intended as metaphor. In this case it is
based upon Isaiah 5:1-7. The “landlord” in question is God and the “vineyard,”
Israel. As we have seen from the wider scriptural context, one of God’s
principal grievance with the “tenants” - the Israelites - was that they used
landed power to oppress the poor. It is therefore disingenuous to suggest that
Jesus approved of landed power because he used it to tell a story.
·
I have heard landowners at a conference saying
that land reform is “Sodom and Gomorrah in reverse - God said he would spare Sodom
if Abraham could find just ten righteous men. Land reform threatens to damage
private property rights because of the misdeeds of a handful of bad landlords.”
This overlooks the fact that neither theology nor land reform proposals in
Scotland threaten the person who uses power as a service to the community. In
Genesis 47 Joseph took on the role of a feudal lord to help the people in
desperate need. Similarly, landlords (and there are some) who use their wealth
for the common good, within socially legitimised structures of power, arguably
provide a service. However, if there are ten or more “righteous men,” it is
incumbent upon them to support reforms without which even they must be
discredited. The landlord may speak of his “sacred rights of property” but the
theological position is that property rights are actually sacred only to God.
Scotland provides a case study of land history which is unusual
because a system that is legally feudal has survived right to the end of the
twentieth century. As Russia could be seen as being in danger of submitting to
neo-feudalism, there may be insights to be gained from its situation.
Modern Scotland is a nation that came into union with
England and Wales under the provisions firstly, of the 1603 Union of the Crowns
and then the 1707 Treaty of Union that created Great Britain. The axis of power
thereafter shifted to Westminster in London, leaving the common people feeling
that the merchants and landowners who made up the original undemocratic
Scottish Parliament had betrayed them. The grip of a feudal land tenure system,
first set in place in the 11th century, was consolidated by men of property and
native Scots culture and languages were subjected to a process of Anglicisation
carried out overtly through such measures as the 1609 Statutes of Iona, the
1616 Education Act and the 1747 Acts of Proscription.
The land tenure system in Scotland at the end of the twentieth
century comprises a legal theory that places God at the apex of the pyramid of
feudal power. The Crown, feudal superiors, vassals and tenants form a widening
triangle underneath. According to Lord Stair, the so-called “Father of Scots
Law” in his seminal 1681 Institutions of
the Law of Scotland, it is not just in land law but in all Scots law, that
Scotland has traditionally looked to the law of Moses as “the prime positive
law of God” (1.1.9), albeit modified where, for example, “Christ did expressly
abrogate that law” (1.1.9), but in an overall framework which to Stair was such
as to “make the absolute sovereign divine law” (1.1.1). It has to be said that
efforts by the current writer to test these principles in court have been
pushed aside by the judiciary on procedural grounds that have, so far,
prevented proper consideration.[108]
An eminent authority, Professor Gretton of Edinburgh
University, shows that Scots feudalism has its legal roots in generic European
feudal laws, many of which can be traced to the 12th century Lombardy text, The Books of the Feus. Accordingly, in
his entry on feudalism in The Laws of
Scotland, Gretton surmises:
In feudalism landownership and
sovereignty coincided, so that the Crown’s sovereignty over Scotland and its dominium eminens[A42], its ultimate tenurial superiority[A43],
were the same thing, were identical concepts... We still have a relic of this
[in Scotland] in the rule that the Crown cannot dispone[A44]
but only fue[A45],
for to dispone would, in the feudal scheme of things, be to alienate not only
land but also sovereignty... Freedom of alienation is an anti-feudal
conception... The dominium eminens or
ultimate superiority of the Crown is allodial [i.e. absolute ownership],
because not held of a higher lord, except God... The term “tenure” strictly
implies feudality... The Crown has no feudal superior, except God alone... The
Crown held Scotland as the vassal of God, and in prayer the act of holding the
hands together was adopted from the feudal ceremony of homage, the immixtio manuum, so that the worshipper
was binding himself as the vassal of God... Feudalism involves the absolute
denial that land can be owned. Indeed, the very concept of a real right can
hardly be said to exist under feudalism. Land rights are personal, not real.
Land is not owned, but held in tenure, and tenure means a personal relationship
with other people, the superior and the oversuperior, with the vassals and
tenants. For the same reason land cannot, in the pure feudal conception, be
sold or bequeathed. The power of sale and bequest goes close to the heart of
ownership, but no one can sell or bequeath what he does not own, and no one
could own the land... Only in one country in the world does feudalism survive
in any real sense, albeit attenuated to an extreme degree. That country is
Scotland.[109]
Whilst feudalism has clearly served as a corrupt mechanism
for concentrating land into the hands of a few, two points in its favour should
be noted as being worthy of consideration for retention. One is the principle
that God ultimately owns the land. In law, this could be seen as inferring
implied terms of contract as to how the land should subsequently be used. The
second follows from this, namely, that no single person can ultimately “own”
the land. A leasehold rather than a freehold basis is therefore predicated. In
practice, leases may be and probably should be perpetual, heritable and
saleable, thereby giving the tenant security and flexibility, as with Scotland’s
crofting agriculture system. However, if some principle of subordination to the
common good, or God, is enshrined at least in legal theory then a basis is
established whereby excesses of private ownership can legitimately be curbed if
the community wishes through its democratic processes.
Research by my co-worker, Andy Wightman, shows that today
a mere 1,000 owners hold nearly two-thirds of the land in Scotland.[110]
This represents one fiftieth of one percent of the Scottish population. These
individuals and corporations comprise a highly concentrated and well-connected
constellation of power. Usually they are people from either the business or
aristocratic social classes. They have often been to the same elite private
schools and operate the levers of commercial and military power in British
society. Most are either English or highly Anglicised Scots, though some are
American, continental European or Arab. There are no restrictions on the
foreign ownership of Scottish land - the market is completely “free.”
Because land is owned by such a small number of landlords,
considerable influence is wielded over communities to which they are not
democratically accountable. The “free” market in land is, in fact, an oligarchy
and a plutocracy. Depending on the nature of legal agreements, owners sometimes
can and do evict tenants as a means of social control or to increase property
values. Owners may also tax communities through the charging of rent, impose
planning approval fees even for minor house alterations, impose without
consultation dramatic changes on the local environment such as mining, logging
and blanket afforestation of non-native species, control local business
activity to eliminate competition, and force public utilities to pay huge sums
of money for the laying of cables, roads and pipelines. The situation in
England is similar to that of Scotland except that there the legal structures
are not technically known by the medieval name of “feudalism.”
Two million hectares of Scottish land representing one
third of the privately-owned land is today managed primarily for blood sports
such as deer stalking, grouse shooting and salmon fishing.[111]
The classic Highland sporting estate comprises some 3,000 - 12,000 hectares. Where
recreational killing is a primary land use few people live on the land. Those
that do comprise a sycophantic and deeply conservative collection of servants
who have usually internally adapted to being in a patron-client relationship
with their rich masters. Estates are usually run for tax purposes as
“businesses,” meaning that sporting and other recreational entertainment for
friends, family and business acquaintances can perhaps be charged as an expense
for tax purposes. Under the Conservative government, even local taxation on
sporting estates was abolished.
Sir John Stirling-Maxwell, Chairman of the 1919
Departmental Committee on Deer Forests described sporting estates as a form of
land use in terms that are still applicable today:
It may be true, I believe it often
is, that a deer forest employs more people than the same area under sheep. It
certainly brings in a larger rent [and] may therefore claim to be economically
sound... It provides a healthy existence for a small group of people, but it
produces nothing except a small quantity of venison, for which there is no
demand. It causes money to change hands. A pack of cards can do that.[112]
In the Scottish Highlands most sporting estates were
created by the “Clearances” of the 18th and 19th centuries. These, echoing the
Scottish lowland and English land “enclosure” or privatisation measures that
preceded them, involved some half-a-million peasants being cleared off their
ancestral land by direct force or economic pressure exerted by pushing up
rents. Karl Marx documents this process in his 1853 article, The Duchess of Sutherland and Slavery.[113]
A previously self-sufficient indigenous people with a rich artistic and
spiritual culture were dispatched into wage-labour in the factories of newly-industrialised
cities or onto emigrant ships to the countries of North America and
Australasia. There they displaced other native peoples. The oppressed thereby
became oppressor. Ethnic cleansing in one part of the world perpetuated itself
in another. Its cause, as with so much ethnic strife today, was abuse of the
power in the land. As Marx said, the Clearances were a “real usurpation”
enacted by “the forcible transformation of clan [community] property into
private property ... in a sense hostile to the people.”
The legacy of this history is that both rural and urban
Scottish communities are often damaged, disempowered and apathetic. Asked the
reason why, many contemporary Scots will reply, “It all goes back to Culloden”
- reference to the last battle on mainland British soil in 1746. Here, in the
aftermath of the 1707 Treaty of Union, forces of the British state brutally
suppressed an uprising by Scottish Highlanders. These attempted to resist the
suppression of their traditional culture, language, religious expression and
communal patterns of land tenure by subscribing to the ill-conceived 1745
Jacobite uprising ineptly led by Prince Charles Edward Stuart, otherwise known
as “Bonnie [A46]Prince
Charlie.”
In the poetry of such bards as Robert Burns we see how,
after this suppression, the traditional leadership were too psychologically
maimed to relate normally to human community and to the beauty of nature. Their
men were slaughtered, women raped, houses burned and where they persevered with
resistance, their lands were confiscated. Strathallan’s
Lament, written by Burns in 1787 depicts a people for whom “Ruin’s wheel
has driven over us.” Yes, the imperial opportunities of British Empire and
capitalist enterprise were now opened up to them, but as Burns put it, “The
wide world is all before us/ But a world without a friend.”[114]
The process of alienation of a people from their cultural soul had started, and
the starting point was deracination [A47]from
the land itself.
Whilst the Scottish people have always voted predominantly
for political parties to the left of centre, the political weight of England,
which outnumbers Scotland 10:1 in terms of population, imposed upon Scots a
long period of right-wing rule commencing with Margaret Thatcher’s 1979
government. The 1997 general elections ended this era. Indeed, the Conservative
party in Scotland lost every one of their seats. Under intense pressure from
the Scottish National Party the Labour government of Tony Blair then followed
through its manifesto pledge to grant devolved power for a restored Scots
parliament. Only foreign affairs, defence and macroeconomics were treated as
“reserved powers” to be retained at Westminster. It is within this framework
that land reform became not just a possibility, but a priority for modern
Scotland.
By the late 1980’s analysis of psychohistory[A48]
had led some of us in Scotland to believe that land tenure had to be addressed
if our culture was to be saved, community spirit restored and the ecology of a
landscape that had been reduced to a “wet desert” regenerated through better
management. Many of us who sowed the seeds of land reform were people who had
worked in countries of the South. We had encountered liberation movements there
and been involved in the development of new tools of participative rural
appraisal, local democracy, liberation theology and conscientisation pedagogy.[115]
We had seen these applied to environmental protection, urban projects and land
use conflicts. And we had started to ask questions about our own cultural
disempowerment back home in what was supposed to be a “developed” advanced
capitalist western country.
Many of us felt that “development” as promoted by western
agencies had become a race-track whereby the poor, who cannot run fast enough,
are trampled by those coming up from behind. We saw that globalisation’s ethic
of competition led to mindless waste of human and natural resources. We saw the
rot of meaningless lives manifesting itself in drug abuse, crime, pornographic
marketing, habitual alcohol, nicotine and tranquilliser use, corruption and
other indicators of ailment in both communities and ecosystems. We heard the
international calls for “sustainable development” that found a partial focus in
1992 at Rio, and we resolved to do something, starting with the ground on which
we stood.
It was clear to us that worldwide the debate over land
tenure has tended to polarise into two extremes.
·
Collectivisation presumes that all land belongs
to the state, which exerts centralised, planned control over its use. However,
this has been seen to fail because it tends to negate the responsibility and
entrepreneurship that individual endeavour can bring to the use of resources.
It also often lacks the sensitivity necessary to manage land in locally
appropriate ways for optimal local and national benefit.
·
Privatisation presumes that land is a
free-market commodity. This subjects land use to the whims of those whose sole qualification
may be nothing more than their wealth. If, as in Scotland, the priority of the
rich is recreational killing not for food but for “sport,” vast areas of the
national resource can fall into idle hands. Even where efficient economic use
is made of the land as with prime farming or forestry terrain, the benefits and
power of control are vested in land capitalists whose primary interest is
return on their own investment.
It was clear to those of us who studied indigenous
peoples’ patterns of land tenure, including our own, that there is also a third
way. This presumes that land belongs ultimately neither to state machinery nor
to individuals - it belongs to the community
that lives or works there.
Amongst indigenous peoples such tenure structure is often
usufructural. Usufruct - a word which, tellingly, is hardly known in the west -
is a system of land tenure where the community agrees overlapping rights of
usage. These might be minimal, like the right of a particular family to fish
for a particular species in a particular place, or they might be extensive,
like the right of a clan group or village to have the comprehensive use of a
particular zone. The critical point in most indigenous systems is that these
rights are vested in and controlled by the community.
Any rents or tithes deriving from them are, directly or indirectly, fed back to
the benefit of the common good. The parasitical class of landowners is thereby
cut out although in some systems, other forms of local elites do develop.
However, the lessons of cultural anthropology are that human beings can
organise in hugely diverse ways, and that some of these can lead to greater
common dignity and better ecological practice than others.
In Scotland we call the evolving third-way approach built around
principles of sustainable social and ecological development community land ownership. The principle
is that land is held in a corporate legal structure known as a “trust” which is
non-profitmaking. Trustees are elected periodically by the community. These may
include representatives of outside interests, but the trust should not be
dominated by them. Residents of the community thereby become tenants (or in
some cases, feudal freeholders) unto themselves. Their own trust is their
“landlord” - though the use of such a word, of course, becomes inappropriate
except as a legal relic. Residents can be given secure leases that are
heritable. This allows land to remain within families or to be passed on
broadly as families might wish. However, because it is a lease and not a
freehold, the democratically accountable trust retains influence particularly
over community infrastructure. The trust’s power to allocate tenancies can be
used to prevent the consolidation of land in the hands of too few people. If
land is being abused or unused for too long, then the trust, at least under
Scotland’s present “crofting” agriculture laws can, through a
government-mediated tribunal (the Crofters Commission), terminate the tenancy.
The most important feature of community ownership is that
all rents from the land are paid to the trust. The level of these are set by
the community itself to be sufficient for running the trust, maintaining local
infrastructure and paying whatever wider government taxes might fall due to
support regional and national infrastructure and democratic structures.
Under this system, rents can therefore be understood as
being equivalent to local land-value
taxation. The system can readily be designed so that no individual can
profit except inasmuch as it is in the
interests of the wider community for them to do so. As such, community land
ownership potentially combines the best of socialism with enough democratically
accountable freedom for individual, family and small-business entrepreneurship
to create wealth. It arguably squares the circle[A49]
between communism and capitalism. This is why it might be of special interest
to a Russia in the process of economic transition.
The evidence in Scotland so far now that there have been
about ten community buy-outs of private landowners is that such a system works.
Of course, it means that community building skills have to be learned. In
particular, skills must be held in cultural empowerment, ecology, agriculture,
forestry and fisheries, financial management, business procedure and community
dynamics including conflict recognition and management. But these are all
skills that people who aspire to being healthy want to acquire and can procure
training in. They are life-giving skills. That is the power of community ownership.
It allows people to create an authentic human ecology of wholesome relationship
between their social and natural environments. By recreating an authentic
relationship with place, they stimulate the creative cycle of belonging,
identity and values that derive from having roots. The more closely the
distribution of community falls along the lines of a natural “bioregion” such
as a watershed, mountain range or island, the more readily a community unit and
its land can be defined and the more consistently principles of holistic
resource management can be practised.[116]
There is a very real sense in which power emanates through
community from the land. Indeed, this almost palpable energy, or “manna” as the
peoples of the South Pacific might call it, is probably one of the
unacknowledged reasons why private owners often feel that without a “seat” in
the land psychologically they are nobody. It is my experience that many of
those who want to own disproportionate levels of wealth are people who, as
children, were not loved for themselves but only for what they had and how well
they performed in competition with others. The psychopathologies of this “to
have is to be” syndrome as Erich Fromm called it are now well understood.[117]
However, the political implications require to be more widely appreciated.[118]
The sense of presence of place that land provides, like rent, rightly belongs
to the community as a whole. It contributes to the building of civic pride and
therefore has ultimate implications for sovereignty. Sovereign power is most
legitimately expressed when there is a harmony between place, peoples and
political structures. Scotland’s new Parliament with its flagship legislation
for land reform and the abolition of feudalism demonstrates this well. To be
fair, the Westminster parliament must be acknowledged for yielding up some of
its power so gracefully so that these reforms could easily be enacted. Perhaps
in such ways that we see Great Britain living up to God-given vocation rather
than wallowing in bygone supposed glories of empire.
To date most Scottish communities that have taken control
of their land have done so necessarily within market mechanisms. They have had
to raise money and in open competition with other bidders buy back what was
long ago clan-community land. However, often the fact that a community has
become empowered in itself discourages competing bidders. This causes a fall in
market value - what we call “market spoiling.” In other cases, however,
communities have been outbid and so private ownership continues against their
wishes. The land reform legislation before the Scottish Parliament in the 1999
White Paper is modest. It mainly proposes a) rights of responsible access to
land and b) for rural communities to register a buy-out interest when land
comes on the market and to have pre-emptive rights of purchase through a
legally constituted trust within six months at a price set by a government
valuer.
Whilst modest, these measures nevertheless represent a
shift in the axis of power from a position where the landowner had total
autonomy to one where speculative investment can now be seriously compromised
by the community. The landlords’ lobby group, the Scottish Landowners’
Federation, protests that it will result in a fall in land values.
The Scottish Executive (the new Parliament’s
administration) has promised further legislation. It intends to make transition
to community ownership a right that does not have to await the landlord’s intention
to sell in designated crofting areas, these being of special ecological and
cultural importance. Other work is proceeding to abolish the feudal system
thereby preventing landlords from being able to impose “feudal burdens” that
can hold tenants to ransom if they wish permission to make changes to property
and land use. It is being suggested to the Scottish Executive that in
abolishing feudalism, the principle that God ultimately owns the land should be
left in place because it has symbolic importance.
Many Scottish land reform campaigners are disappointed
that current proposed legislation makes no provision for land value taxation.
Pressure will grow for this as a later stage. Not only could it provide a pool
of revenue with which to finance community buy-outs within the market system;
it would also, when capitalised into land values, reduce land prices, thereby
making buy-outs less expensive. This, of course, is why the landed power lobby
would oppose it stridently.
So far communities that have exercised buy-outs have been
careful to structure their communal business activities separately from the
trust that owns the land. This protects the land in the event of business
bankruptcy by preventing it from being used as collateral in raising loans. It
reflects the Naboth’s Vineyard principle that the land must not be treated as
alienable (1 Kings 21).
The government administration’s underlying philosophy on
land reform can best be discerned from the January 1999 Green Paper - a
discussion document that preceded the firm legislative proposals now in the
White Paper. In terms resonant with Agenda 21 of the Rio Summit, this states
that:
The objective for land reform is
to remove the land-based barriers to the sustainable development of rural
communities. Sustainable development is not something that can be readily
defined in the abstract; but in practice it will consist of development which
is planned with appropriate regard for local communities, local employment and
the environment. It therefore needs an integrated approach which takes account
of social and economic as well as environmental aspects. To achieve this there
needs to be increased diversity in
the way land is owned and used ... and increased community involvement ... so that local people are not excluded
from decisions which affect their lives and the lives of their communities.
In his introduction to the Green Paper, Lord Sewel, who
was minister for Agriculture, the Environment and Fisheries, said:
The Government’s approach to land
reform has been to focus on the future, not the past. We need to sweep away
outdated land laws which have no place in modern society. We need to put in
place new and innovative means of properly securing the public interest in land
use and land ownership. We need to secure greater local involvement and local
accountability... But it is crucial that we regard land reform not as a
once-for-all issue but as an ongoing process. The Parliament will be able to
test how this early legislation works and how it effects change. They will then
have the opportunity to revisit and refine their initial achievement [to]
generate a longer-term agenda for further legislation.[119]
There are many reasons why land reform in Scotland has
generated sufficient energy to produce reform proposals in a political climate
that does not otherwise favour intervention in market processes. These reasons,
as I have indicated, are economic in that they relate to resource use
efficiency. They are psychological in that they influence peoples’ sense of
belonging, identity and values. But at a deeper level yet, they are spiritual. Spiritual influence is
necessarily subtle. Sometimes it works with a public face, such as when the
churches have supported calls for land reform. But more often it has effect in
the private lives and underlying thought of key individuals, at levels that are
both conscious and, doubtless, unconscious. The role played by prayer, for
example, is not something that can ever be fully understood or quantified.
In the case studies that follow drawn from personal direct
experience, I shall try to hint at the place of spirituality in some practical
campaigns that have had an impact upon wider political agendas.
The Isle of Eigg Trust was the first of Scotland’s modern
land trusts, though it took as its model the 1924 Stornoway Trust based on
landed gifted by Viscount Leverhulme. A small group of us established it with virtually
no financial resources, but once registered the trust had a psychological
impact in “spoiling” market interest in what the owner himself had described as
“a collector’s item.”[120]
The 3,000 hectare island was used as a playground by its millionaire proprietor.
Residents unhappy with his regime were fearful of speaking out to the media: at
one stage, after they had done so, some were issued eviction notices to leave
their homes. However, over a period of nearly seven years islanders’ confidence
grew. They reconstituted the original trust as the Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust in partnership with the local
authority, Highland Council, and the Scottish Wildlife Trust. The trust’s
presence and increasingly wide network of political and media support showed that
it was possible to challenge landed power.
Having refused to sell to the community in order to fulfil
a court order to make a divorce settlement, the owner finally sold on to
another private individual - a German who, it turned out, had fraudulently presented
both his identity and financial position. When he went bankrupt, Eigg was
placed back on the market through Farhad Vladi of the international property
investment company, Vladi Private Islands.
Vladi told the press that “Scottish islands are the Van Goghs on the
international island market, masterpieces of mother nature.” “There is a sense
of romance in buying islands,” he said candidly. “It is the ultimate purchase
you can make, a complete miniature world of which you can be king.”
To the Eigg islanders he was “an oily[A50]
character who gave us all the creeps.[A51]”
Their resolve to acquire the island for the common good was heightened.
Liberation theology played an implicit methodological role. Practical
principles drawn from it comprised re-membering
the historical constructs that had led to oppression, re-visioning how life could alternatively be with community
empowerment, and re-claiming the
island by acquiring the necessary skills in fundraising, politics, campaigning
and community building.
Particular emphasis was placed by the trust on developing
vision. Initially this was all it had because there was no money. Tom Forsyth,
a founding trustee of the original trust, often quoted Psalms 127:1: “Except
the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.”[121]
Liberation theology also played a role of helping to legitimise the process for
some of the residents, particularly older indigenous ones, who had perhaps not
previously felt comfortable in challenging authority and were uncertain about
how far they could trust the trust. For example, parallels were drawn between
the Eigg freedom bid and the return from Exodus.[122]
People would pray together in their church for “the right thing to happen.” And
an indigenous woman who is something of a spiritual anchor on the island has
encouraged reflection on such scripture passages as Haggai 1, where God says
that unless the requirements of the temple (i.e. the spiritual realm) are put
first, the people will continue to be dissatisfied because “the heavens above
you have withheld the dew, and the earth has withheld its produce.”
In 1997 Eigg was bought by the community after a massive
fundraising campaign for £1.6 million. In the first year, members of three
indigenous families were able to move back to the island and be given farm
land, thereby increasing the indigenous population by 30%. The trust has
successfully balanced expenditure with rental incomes. The creation of new
infrastructure, such as the building of a visitor centre with shop and
restaurant, housing improvements, opening a hostel, fencing wildlife and
farming areas, native forest regeneration and rebuilding the pier has created
an era of unprecedented full employment. Other communities have now followed
the example of Eigg: indeed, that of Assynt achieved its objective before Eigg
did and so provided much encouragement and practical advice during the buy-out
campaign. Whilst the islanders recognise that they still have much to learn
about holding responsibility and working together in accountable, participative
ways, there is now a whole new atmosphere of confidence and achievement about
the island.
In 1991 a Scottish businessman announced that he had
purchased the mineral rights to a mountain on the remote north-west Scottish
Isle of Harris. Furthermore, he had struck a deal with Redland Aggregates to
turn it into a coastal “superquarry” to provide roadstone to the English and
European markets. Initially the local community were favourably persuaded by
his plans. Jobs were needed and people were unaware that at ten million tons
per annum, the quarry would be fifty times bigger than existing large quarries
in Britain. It would change the island’s way of life and destroy the mountain
in what is a designated National Scenic Area.
A campaign of environmental and community education was
launched. This had many components and contributors, but a spiritual face was
shown in the government public inquiry when theological evidence was
orchestrated by myself, the Rev. Prof. Donald MacLeod of the Free Church
College, and Mi’Kmaq Warrior Chief Sulian Stone Eagle Herney, who was fighting
off a similar superquarry proposal on his home territory in Nova Scotia,
Canada.[123]
Professor MacLeod said:
Theologically, the primary
function of the creation is to serve as a revelation of God. To spoil the
creation is to disable it from performing this function... There is an intimate
link between man and the soil... Although such facts should not be used to
endorse naked territorialism they do raise the consideration that rape of the
environment is rape of the community itself... Man’s relationship with his
environment has been disrupted by the Fall. One primary symptom of this is that
he is always tempted to allow economic considerations to override ecological
ones... Capitalism offers to help [the Isle of Harris] in characteristic
fashion: it will relieve unemployment provided the people surrender
guardianship of the land (thus violating their own deepest instincts).
My testimony suggested that the human relationship towards
nature requires reverence:
To be reverent means to be
concerned with the integrity of a thing or person; to value it for itself; to
work with it symbiotically,[A52]
in celebration of its being ... and not with a graceless spirit of mere
utility. [This quarry] would be theologically justified only if it can be
undertaken reverentially; if it can be felt as part of the movement of love. It
would mean enquiring whether government have considered reappraising national
transportation policy to minimise the need for further motorway construction...
It would mean recycling used rock otherwise dumped in landfill sites. If new
quarries really are needed ... reverence would entail assessing whether they
are best located in National Scenic Areas, or at sites already despoiled by
industrial activity.
Chief Stone Eagle said:
It is my firm belief, that we, of
this generation have no hope of solving the environmental deterioration that is
ongoing as we speak. However, I also have firm convictions that we of this
generation, may be able to slow down the destruction of our Mother Earth enough
so that the next generation that will be replacing our leaders will find the
solutions and the cure for Mother Earth. If we fail to do so Mother Earth will
cleanse herself of the offending organism that is killing her. This is our
teachings.
The theological testimony brought massive international
media attention to the quarry issue. It caused people to think about the issues
at a level that was not just economic, but ontological.[A53]
A ballot conducted after the public inquiry showed that local people had turned
68% against the quarry. They are now exploring holistic resource management.
The local authority reversed their previous support for the scheme. Redland
have now been bought out by Lafarge. They are no longer controlled from within
Britain but from France. The report of what was the longest-running public
inquiry ever held in Scotland has only just been completed (summer 1999). It
speaks of economic benefits at the cost of environmental devastation. The
Scottish Parliament is shortly to decide whether or not to allow planning
permission to proceed.
Young unemployed people in Glasgow were in despair at the
meaninglessness of their lives. Looking at archaeological artefacts where they
lived in Govan, they realised that their home area had once been a sacred
gathering place and seat of tribal democracy. They started to explore their
identity, and found that their ethnic origins were very mixed. However, all
felt drawn to recovering certain lost but positive features of the original
Gaelic culture of Glasgow.
This posed a problem: how could a recovered indigenous
local identity be reconciled with ethnic diversity that, in the case of their
group, included members who originated from England, Egypt and even Russia?
Their research revealed that in 9th century Scotland,
Viking invasions had caused a massive influx of new blood. In Gaelic the Gaels
are the heartland[A54]
people, whilst strangers are called the “Gall.” The 9th century people of mixed
blood had therefore become known as the “Gall-Gael.” Ironically, the principle
Gall-Gael area is now the Outer Hebrides - the island chain that includes
Harris - and yet this happens to be the strongest remnant area for the Gaelic
language and culture.
How, then, had the Hebrideans managed to reconcile such an
impact upon their culture? How had they gone from being perceived as ethnically
mixed to becoming the stronghold of Gaelic or Celtic values? Much of the answer
lies in geographical remoteness, but an important dimension also rests in the
great emphasis that Gaelic culture places on fostership. The “GalGael Trust,”
as the Glasgow group called their organisation, therefore based its organising
principle around the notion that a person
belongs inasmuch as they are willing to cherish, and be cherished, by a place
and its peoples.[124]
This allows for identity to be advanced in inclusive ways. It equates belonging
with taking responsibility for place, interchanging gifts and values with those
of place. As such, the problems of relating belonging to racial ethnicity are
mitigated. All can share where all are willing to listen, and to share.
The GalGael learn traditional skills working with wood and
stone. This builds confidence, competence and cultural awareness. Because many
of the greenwood building skills have been lost from Scotland but were
originally a British-wide indigenous tradition, they are being imported back
from England - a delightful twist at a time when cultural tension exists
between Scotland and England. This gives concrete meaning to GalGael principles
of cultural sharing.
In January 1999, when a gale blew down many trees in
Glasgow, they got military help to gather the trunks and hire a portable
sawmill to mill timber. With this and assisted by a retired shipwright and
folklorist, John MacAulay from Harris, they have built a traditional longhouse
and a 3 metre model traditional Hebridean longship. The hope is next to build a
full scale ship. The longhouse is symbolically important to the GalGael.
Amongst native American peoples, in Greenland, Iceland, and in parts of Europe
including Scotland and England, the longhouse was where tribal peoples gathered
to conduct politics and make law. In learning practical cultural skills (which
are also potentially marketable), the GalGael are therefore also concerned to
encourage participative politics whereby people like them, who have often been
marginalised by mainstream political processes, reclaim control of their own
destinies. Because this gives life it excites people. Accordingly, after a slow
start considerable local political support and funding is starting to come
their way. The project’s inspirational leader, Colin MacLeod, has no particular
religious affiliation and yet he describes the ideal of rebuilding meaningful
community as being about recognising “the unity of work and worship.”
The People & Parliament project started when a small
group of citizens came together with common passion to deepen and broaden the debate
in Scotland about who we are, what we care about and how we think the new
Parliament should work. The project was convened by Canon Kenyon Wright, chair
of the executive of the Scottish Constitutional Convention, the body which
steered the consensual political process that led to the setting up of
Scotland’s new Parliament. Canon Wright maintains that he learned about
liberation theology from Indians whilst working in India. Several other members
of the steering committee were also theologically informed. One came from a
Muslim family background.
The first stage in the process was to circulate a simple
leaflet widely across Scotland. Some 30,000 were printed. This encouraged
ordinary people to get together in neighbourhoods, schools, workplaces, churches
and interest groups. After a warm up question in which each person was invited
to share with other group members one experience of what living in Scotland
means for them, they were asked, collectively, to complete three paragraphs
beginning:
1.
WE ARE A PEOPLE WHO...
Identities
2.
BY THE YEAR 2020 WE WOULD LIKE TO SEE A SCOTLAND
IN WHICH...
Vision
3.
WE THEREFORE EXPECT OUR PARLIAMENT TO WORK WITH
THE PEOPLE IN WAYS WHICH...
Relationship with Parliament
Over 450 groups met to discuss these questions. Local conferences
were held and attended by Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs). Results
were analysed to select indicative
statements - ones that made a clear impact. These were sorted according to
type. Drawing from both Jesuit and Quaker principles of spiritual discernment,
effort was made to search for the taproot of groups’ feelings rather than
getting tangled in the mass of grassroots data. Reports were produced and sent
to participants and MSPs to help them better understand the values, aspirations
and expectations of the nation.[125]
There is evidence that this had a direct effect on the nature of national
political debate. Many participants remarked that the process helped them
understand themselves, Scotland and participative democracy more deeply. There
was wonderful diversity in the responses, but key themes which emerged
consistently and passionately were:
·
Great pride in and a strong sense of
identification with the Scottish environment. People called for land reform and
sustainable development in both rural areas and cities.
·
People expressed a strong sense of belonging,
wishing their communities to be inclusive, supportive and nurturing, where
“children are celebrated, not ignored,” and “the generation coming behind us
has something to look forward to in their old age.”
·
There was recognition of shortcomings and a lack
of confidence in Scottish people. Many saw the reality of conscious and
unconscious racism and called for a Scottishness based on civic, not ethnic
identity.
·
People disliked trends in modern society that
fragment society and break up community, leading to poverty and stigmatisation
of those with, for example, mental illness.
·
Many were passionate about health services and
the education system as a way for individuals to realise their potential and
build “a broad economy based on a diversity of skills.”
·
People expressed considerable disillusionment
with power politics. They wanted accessibility and accountability, with
meaningful local ability to engage participatively. A group of primary school
children looked towards a Parliament that “does not take away our freedoms, but
adds to our lives.” A group of people living in urban poverty urged politicians
to remember that “All power is a service.”
·
Practical ideas for a more effective politics included:
MSPs “listening to us first and foremost” rather than always toeing the party
line, citizenship education, devolution of power to local levels wherever
possible, parliamentary committees meeting in the regions, use of electronic
communications and voting technology, training MSPs in techniques of listening
and participation, and crèche facilities at political gatherings and in the
Parliament.
In this text I have tried to show how sovereign power comes
to a nation through the land and its people, from God. The land is God’s own
land and should therefore be treated with reverence. The reconstitution of a
nation, such as Russia or Scotland, may be assisted by drawing with integrity
(but not with manipulative intent) upon spiritual roots. This requires faith in
the movement of the Spirit and a willingness to be of service in that work of
God.
Experience in Scotland leads people like me to believe
that the taproot of spiritual values in a nation is often still alive even
where secularism has destroyed surface growth. That taproot is a source of both
values and energy onto which new ways forward for a people can be grafted. In
this, Scotland’s and Russia’s special connection with St Andrew indicates the special
bond such as has made the writing of a text like this a relatively easy matter.
We have seen how community land ownership may represent a
third way between the polar opposites of collectivisation and privatisation of
the land. In this it represents the principle of proportionality, whereby the essence of right relationship in a
human ecology is to balance contesting social potentialities in accordance with
what best resonates with a sense of justice. Justice can mean many things to
different people, but the overwhelming scriptural understanding is that it
means putting first the needs of those in society, and that in nature, where
the needs are greatest. Private wealth creation is acceptable, indeed,
necessary, but only inasmuch as it serves this over-riding objective that is
predicated on love. Large-scale private landownership is therefore to be
challenged because it is not proportional to the legitimate needs of others: it
militates against God’s providence. I now wish to draw three principal conclusions
that follow from this.
The work of spiritual regeneration is not primarily our
work; it is the work of God that may be carried out through us. We must not
therefore be overly-confident that we always know what we are doing, or that
what we are doing is always right. We must give space both to God and other
people to find their ways forward. Christianity is a dynamic religion. The Holy
Spirit moves as a living force (John 16:4-15), the Sophia-like feminine face of
God. Accordingly, we must strive constantly to deepen the spiritual power of
discernment by which the taproot of our own and national values might be sifted
through to ascertain their highest vocation. Beauty is the touchstone of
discernment. Tradition too is important, but it must not be allowed to block
the ongoing revelation of the Spirit. We should remember that even in Islam,
which considers the Koran to be the final revelation of God, there are signs of
a liberation theology that liberates theology from moribund strictures. Let me
quote on this the influential Iranian philosopher, Abdolkarim Sorush, because
his words can be applied to many of our traditions. Quoted in Le Monde Diplomatique, he says:
We must stop deluding ourselves by
claiming that Islam gives us teachings that meet all the needs of a modern
society, such as democracy and human rights... The religion of the Prophet lays
down the duties of a believer, whereas democracy guarantees the rights of the
citizen. It is up to us Third World intellectuals to make them compatible...
[It is achieved] quite simply by trying to imagine what stances the Prophet
would take if he returned to earth today. He would know how to make the
distinction between the fundamental principles of the Koran, which are very
few, and the host of individual judgements that related, 14 centuries ago, to a
society very different from ours.[126]
I know very little about the Russian Orthodox Church. But
I do know that if it is like our churches in the west; if it is like every
other institution; it will have both its “fallen” persona to live with and its
higher, God-given vocation to live up to. I therefore wish it well. The role it
might yet have to play in helping the Russian peoples to discern their personal
and national vocations before God could be of very great importance for the
whole world. It is not for nothing that in this paper I have emphasised Sophia
as the feminine face of the divine. In my experience this is central to
spiritual renewal. Perhaps this is a fact of which the Russian Orthodox Church
is already well aware. I do hope so.
The Mir space lab has been a high-altitude symbol of
co-operation. But on earth too, we need patterns and examples of community with
one another and the land. The Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust is one such example.
Another is the Russian mir of a bygone era. Of this, Pipes’ Russia under the Old Regime says:
The basic social unit of the ancient
Slavs was a tribal community, estimated to have consisted of some fifty or
sixty people, all related by blood and working as a team. In time, the
communities based on blood relationship dissolved, giving way to a type of
communal organization based on joint ownership of arable and meadow, called in
Russian MIR or OBSHCHINA...
Economic factors seem also to have
affected its evolution to the extent that there exists a demonstrable
connection between the availability of land and communal tenure: where land is
scarce, the communal form of tenure tends to prevail, but where it is abundant
it is replaced by household or even family tenure. Whatever the merits of the
case, in the imperial period the vast majority of the Russian peasants held
their land communally; in the central provinces the commune was virtually
universal. The arable was divided into sections corresponding to the quality of
the soil and distance from the village. Each household had the right to claim
in every such section one or more strips corresponding to the number of its
adult members... The principal purpose of this arrangement was to enable every
peasant to pay his share of rents and taxes. Since households grew or
diminished over time, every so often (e.g. at nine-, twelve-, or fifteen-year
intervals) the commune took its own census, on the basis of which it carried
out a ‘back[A55]
repartition’ resulting in a re-allotment of the strips. The system was meant to
guarantee every peasant an equitable share of the land, and every household
enough land to support itself and to meet its responsibilities to the landlord
and state.[127]
In other words, here was a system that embodied the Old
Testament Jubilee provisions that Christ proclaimed as “the acceptable year of the
Lord.” We should note in particular that the means of financing public spending
was geofiscal - that is, it was taxation based upon use of the earth.
Community ownership of land can be expected to have a
fundamentally different impact on ecology than those forms of ownership that
are centralised either around a multinational corporation or state political
apparatus. It is a natural aspiration of people in community to want to leave
the soil for their children in at least as good heart as they found it.
Accordingly, if the social structures of land ownership are structured to
express right relationship, ecological aspects of relationship will have a
greater chance of being responsibly maintained. Evidence of this is already
merging in communities like Eigg, where the conservation of native flora and
fauna is given a very high priority. It is seen as a core part of the island’s
identity.
Patterns of agriculture, forestry and fisheries management
that optimalise economic linkages and multipliers over the long term for
community benefit tend also to optimalise the conservation of biodiversity.
This is because biodiversity is necessary for the healthy maintenance of
ecosystems including, of course, soil quality. Accordingly, forms of land use
that work as closely as possible with natural ecosystems, such as organic
farming and forestry based upon native species, merit careful consideration. So
also does fair trade, both through local trading systems and in international
relations that aim to outlaw exploitation. Allan Savory’s work, Holistic Resource Management, is one
example of a text that illustrates the integration of economic, social and
biological factors. He writes in a Zimbabwean context, but the ideas have
widespread relevance elsewhere.[128]
The over-arching goal of economic efficiency through holistic resource
management is to achieve a high quality
of life. This is not necessarily the same as standard of living in the western, money-measured sense. It means
much more than that. As His Late Majesty King Jigme Singye Wangchuck of Bhutan
expressed his country’s objectives for national development, “Gross National
Happiness is more important than Gross National Product.”[129]
Learning to relate to one another and the environment in a
holistic way - one that respects the balance or proportionality and the
interconnection of all things - requires full integration of the capacities of
the head with which to think rationally, the heart with which to feel values,
and the hand with which to act and manage efficiently. The educational
implications of this are profound, but exciting. For example, in a paper
elsewhere about national science policy I have suggested that:
In the curriculum, such holistic
science might involve studying, for example, how the biochemistry of an
approach like organic farming equates with local biodiversity; how biodiversity
equates with the optimal balance of arable and livestock ... with animal
welfare ... with micro and possibly macro climatic effects of land use ... with
the natural control of pests and diseases in plants and animals ... with
ecological restoration, including the computer modelling thereof for differing
eco-niches ... with linkages and multipliers in the local economy ... with the
inspiration of artistic creativity through the landscape created ... with using
all the senses and treasuring their pleasures ... with the spiritual ability to
see anew why food and its production is blessed ... and with the strengthening
of human community through people moving more into ‘right relationship’ with
one another and nature.[130][A56]
Now let us look further at the economic frameworks that
might support this and be supported by it.
Ecclesiastes 5:9 in the Authorised or “King James” English
translation of the Bible is rather different from modern translations. It says,
“The profit of the earth is for all.” It goes on to maintain that nobody is
above depending upon nature’s divinely ordained providence because even, “the
king himself is served by the field.”
This expression about the “profit of the earth” was used
as the motto of the nineteenth century Highland
Land Law Reform Association which campaigned, successfully, for the
survival of crofting tenure - Scotland’s closest equivalent to the mir. Because
alternative translations of the passage are so disappointingly different there
may be a problem in using it as a “scripture proof” for economic systems that
share land rental in the community. That, however, is not a problem. In Capital and the Kingdom the English
theologian, Timothy Gorringe, points out that the whole context of Biblical
economics allows for the deepest radical understanding of wealth distribution.
He says:
[In the Old Testament] strictly
speaking there is no such thing as charity, the rich helping the poor. The
Hebrew word translated “almsgiving” is in fact tsedequah, “justice” (Proverbs 10:2; Deuteronomy 4:24; cf. Matthew
6:1-2). Justice is restoring to the poor what is theirs. But secondly, the
Deuteronomists and others who worked on programmes for reconstruction
emphasised the need of the Jubilee law, by which alienated property was
restored to it original owners, so doing away with poverty altogether.[131]
Andelson & Dawsey in their review of “liberation
theology for a post-Marxist world” see the work of the American economist,
Henry George, as “updating the Mosaic model.”[132]
Professor Andelson surmises:
He was not merely a philosopher
and sage; he was a seer, a forerunner, a prophet; a teacher sent from God. And
we can say of him as the Scriptures say: “There was a man sent of God whose
name was John.” And I believe I mock not those Scriptures when I say: There was
a man sent from God whose name was Henry George![133]
The economics and fiscal implications of George’s geofiscal
“land value taxation” are explored for depth in, for example, Tideman’s Land and Taxation,[134]
and in a Russian context in Lvov’s, The
Road to the 21st Century: Strategic Problems & Prospects of the Russian
Economy.[135] The principle is that rent, which
should reflect the social value of land given to it by the community, should
benefit the common purse. It should be a principal, if not the principal,
source of public finance. In the west this rental value is largely squandered
on the profligate lifestyles of the idle rich who live off the unearned income
of tenants’ labour. But as Lvov says:
In Russia the land has not yet
been divided between private owners. It is important to use this unique
situation and solve the problem of property rights for land not in the
interests of a very small group of people but in the interests of society. We
cannot use western countries as an example... [We need] a system of land use
which combines economic efficiency with social justice.[136]
As Scotland’s crofting system shows, when leases are
granted by a community trust, leasehold rather than freehold systems can be
adequate to guarantee secure possession and the ability to transfer usufructual
rights, provided that users of the land pay rents to the community for the benefits
they receive in occupying and using sites.
Perhaps it is time for Russia to re-invent the mir.
Perhaps Russia and Scotland can learn from one another’s experience.
Even the prophets, as I have already suggested, had their flaws
before God, and perhaps before their fellow humankind too. Andelson &
Dawsey make the following powerful reflection on Moses.
Our last picture of Moses, before
he dies in Moab, finds him on Pisgah looking down across the Jordan, seeing -
but not being able to enter - the place that he had struggled for so long to
reach.
In part, Moses’ exclusion, as
already noted, was the consequence of the “evil report of the land” (Numbers
14). But the full reason he was barred from the land relates to his own response
to the doubts about God’s promise. Moses, as leader of the community, was held
responsible for its lack of faith (Numbers 14:11, 26-38). God’s accusation to
Moses was, “You did not believe me, to sanctify me in the eyes of the people of
Israel” (Numbers 20:12).
Rooted in this accusation is a
relevant question that presses upon civilization at the brink of the
twenty-first century, a question that speaks to the rights of all people to
land in Latin America and virtually every continent: Do we really believe that
the earth is the Lord’s? If so, how are we responsible for making this a sacred
principle - for sanctifying God - in the eyes of the people?[137]
Therein lies the challenge to both Russia’s people and
leadership today. It applies equally to Scotland, England, and the rest of the
world. “Do we really believe?” “How are we responsible?” And can we find the
courage to persevere in searching, like Elijah, for that Remnant of 7,000
like-minded souls ... even though we might be convinced that we’re the only one
left; even though we think we cannot survive persecution for much longer?
Jesus instructed us not to call one another by servile
titles, but to call each other “Friends” (John 15:15). It is for this reason
that my own spiritual denomination, the Quakers, are officially called The Religious Society of Friends. I
believe that in Russian culture “friend” translates as “comrade.” Well,
Comrades, we have seen what happens to both capitalism and communism without
spirituality. We have seen how far power of any political colour falls from
grace if it loses sight of God-given higher vocation. We have seen how this
turns the land to desert; how it steals the smile from the children’s’ faces
and leaves them with no future.
How about we refuse to accept this any longer? How about
we start the change with ourselves, now, as the sacrament of this present
moment? How about we have a revolution?
Foreword, Introduction &
Afterword
These are inserted at the end of the text
here for convenience, as they have already been posted on the website page that
preceded this one. They are included here so that this file alone can preserve
the document complete.
Foreword to Land, Power & National Identity
In May 1999 I attended a bizarre hearing in Stirling
Sheriff Court to write a report for the journal, Land and Liberty. Alastair McIntosh was helping to defend
low-income evicted tenants - the “Carbeth Hutters” – on the grounds that God
theoretically owns the land under Scots feudal law, therefore it should be used
for community benefit. As a consultant on land reform to the Natural Resources
Committee of the Russian parliament - the Duma - and as co-chair of the Duma
Parliamentary Hearings on Land
Policy in 1999, I was struck by the relevance of
Alastair’s insights to Russia.
I drew the matter to the attention of Dr Dmitry
Lvov, Academician-Secretary of the Department of Economics at the Russian
Academy of Sciences. Lvov is one of Russia’s most respected economists. He had
come to acknowledge that the integration of land, spirituality and community
empowerment was a precondition for re-building national identity. In
recognition of this, he was helping to launch a new movement called Science & Religion. He urged me to
invite Alastair to prepare a document for discussion by senior academic,
religious and political figures.[i][ii]
Within two weeks (to meet a tight translator’s
deadline), Alastair had produced Land,
Power and National Identity – a text which, he says, “is not polished, but
represents ‘doing theology’ in the real world.” In February 2000 I accompanied
him to seminars at Lvov’s office at the Academy of Sciences, in the Holy
Trinity Sergyev Monastery, and at the Duma with Sergei Glasyev, a Deputy who
chairs the powerful parliamentary Economics Committee.
The response was overwhelmingly positive. Dr Sergei
Shirokov, a leading Orthodox theologian, and Professor Eduard Afanaslev, dean
of economics at the Russian Orthodox University both called it “divine
providence.” Dr Mikhail Gelvanovsky, director of the National Institute for
Development, said: “Man alone cannot save this country, but with God's help
maybe we can.”
Dr Tatiana Roskoshnaya, Executive Director of the
Land & Public Welfare
Foundation, St Petersburg, spoke for many in concluding:
“This text penetrates deeply into the Biblical economic principle that ‘The
profit of the Earth is for all.’ As such, it draws on the wealth of our own
spiritual traditions. It suggests a third way between communism and capitalism
- one where land ownership and the benefits from rent are vested substantially
in the community.”
I can but concur and add my voice in warm commendation.
Fred Harrison
Centre for Land Policy
Studies, London
Introduction
(The following is adapted as a general introduction for Healing
Nationhood but it was originally drafted for Land, Power & National
Identity).
This
is a unique collection of writings on liberation theology and social activism
as applied, broadly, to nation-building. The main piece of work, published here
in English for the first time, was instigated by some of Russia’s most senior
economists and theologians. Other articles range from the address that launched
land reform on the Isle of Eigg to essays in national newspapers and work
commissioned by the United Nations Environment Programme. Common to all is the
question of how we can create a three-way sense of community – with place and
nature, with one another in society, and with those aspects of inner life that
we might relate to in terms of “God.”
As an executive of the World Council of Churches I was
responsible for one of the five programmes decided on at the Uppsala Assembly
in 1968, Participation in Change. I
directed my work to the grassroots, starting in Asia, living, eating, sleeping
in the homes of the poor to find how they were coping with the vast changes of
our century. There I made vivid contact with small Christian communities –
“born from below,” not fashioned “from above.” I concluded that the most
commanding theological issue worldwide concerned the ownership and use of land.
For me, theology is the faith-basis for changing history
in the direction of the Kingdom of God. Scholarship can be done behind desks
and within walls. Not theology. Theology demands engagement, in which
scholarship forms an ingredient.
Theology that underpins the fight for justice has a
compelling quality which abstract theology of the past has lacked. For the
celebration of the first anniversary of the success of the revolution in
Nicaragua, I stayed with Xabier Gorostiaga in the Jesuit centre in Managua.
Fidel Castro had come to participate. He sent a messenger to ask Xabier to
provide a list of theological books he should be reading. Xabier did so. Next
day the messenger was back. Fidel had already read all these. What else should
he be reading?
It is in this kind of company that I would place Alastair
McIntosh. He has the qualities of a liberation theologian. He does careful
research – his use of the Bible is particularly sensitive. He is engaged where
it matters – with rural land use, with the urban poor and in advancing
democratic process.
This text is about the “healing of the nations”; this text
is a landmark.
Rev. Dr. Ian M. Fraser
Afterword - a
View from Islam
by Dr Bashir Maan
Dr Bashir Maan is a
distinguished British Muslim of Pakistani origin. He is the Scottish
Representative on the Executive of the Muslim Council of Great Britain and
Spokesperson for the Glasgow Islamic Centre. For 8 years he was Chairman of the
Glasgow Central Mosque Committee. As an elected city councillor, he chairs the
Strathclyde Joint Police Board -
Britain’s second-largest police force. Since 1991 he has worked
informally with Alastair McIntosh on Islam-Christian relations. In this
Afterword he briefly sets land economics in an Islamic context.
********
It is a cause of both hope and pleasure to me that in
presenting a Christian appraisal of “Land, Power and National Identity,” Alastair
McIntosh has shown respect for all faiths that understand love to be central to
the nature of God.
Christianity and Islam have a lot in common and yet they
have been locked in hostility to each other for over a milennium. Indeed, Islam
is the continuation of Judaism and Christianity. The Qur’an contains a vast
number of events, stories and injunctions from the New and Old Testaments.
To cite just one example to emphasise this close
relationship, the Qur’an says, “Say: we believe in God almighty and that which
is revealed to us and that which was revealed to Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac
and Jacob and the tribes, and that given to Moses and Jesus and to all other
Prophets from their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them, and to
Him we submit (Surah 3:84).
The time has come when these two largest religions of the
world should forget the past and join hands to work for the preservation and
freedom of practice of their respective faiths and for the good of God’s
creation at large, otherwise they are both in danger of being engulfed by the
fast-rising tide of secularism and materialism.
The Islamic economic position is very akin to the Biblical
one. It puts great emphasis on the distribution of wealth in a way that is fair
as well as practical and productive. According to the Qur’an, land and wealth
in all its forms is a thing created by Allah and is His property. The right of
ownership over something that accrues to a person is delegated to him by Allah.
A person, therefore, has the right to own land and
property and to produce more wealth with it, but contrary to the capitalistic
and materialistic economic system, Islamic economics requires that this wealth
must be shared also by others: that is, by the poor and the needy, the sick and
disabled, the orphans and widows, the destitute and all other creatures of this
earth.
With such common humane ideals Islam and Christianity can
give hope to the impoverished and deprived amongst humanity. I therefore
commend this work by Alastair McIntosh. It suggests that the points around
which people of faith can unite may be closer to the will of God than those
issues which, too often, have been used to divide us.
Dr
Bashir Maan
Glasgow Islamic Centre.
About the
Author
Alastair McIntosh holds science and management degrees
from the universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh. He has published numerous
scholarly papers in journals of finance, anthropology, religion, politics, law,
psychology, environment, cultural studies and poetry. He has published books on
marketing and public relations, and has recently completed Soil and Soul, a work on community empowerment, land reform and
cultural psychotherapy. He lectured in human ecology for nearly seven years at
the University of Edinburgh until the university closed down the Centre for
Human Ecology in the midst of controversy about his work as a founding trustee
of the Isle of Eigg Trust and challenging corporate power. In an editorial
defending his work, New Scientist
(4-5-96), described the Centre for Human Ecology as upholding “a tradition of
fearless inquiry.”
Due to the pioneering efforts of its emeritus director, Dr
Ulrich Loening, many of the CHE’s visiting fellows have been from Russia
including, for example, Professor Vladimir Kolontai of the Russian Academy of
Sciences who came to study the origins and impacts of market economies.
Alastair’s teaching now takes place mainly through public lectures to such
bodies as the Edinburgh International Festival, the Schumacher Society (of
which he is an honorary fellow), the Centre for Human Ecology itself (which has
been reconstituted independently with degree-awarding accreditation from the
Open University), and the Joint Services Command & Staff College for senior
military officers -where he speaks once a year on the political power of
non-violence. He has worked for four years in Papua New Guinea in education,
micro-hydro electric power and sustainable tropical forestry. A Quaker,
Alastair is a trustee of community organisations such as the GalGael Trust,
theological adviser to the Carbeth Hutters Trust, and a steering committee
member of People & Parliament. He
has two children by a first marriage and lives with his partner, Vérène
Nicolas, in Kinghorn, Scotland, from where he makes regular visits to his home
Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.
Acknowledgements
Work that has contributed to this paper has been made
possible by generous assistance from the Joseph
Rowntree Charitable Trust, the Christendom
Trust, the Russell Trust and the Konrad Zweig Trust. For diverse inputs
the writer additionally warmly acknowledges Chris Ballance, Tess Darwin,
Christine Davis, Tom Forsyth, Rev. Dr Ian Fraser, Frank Gillingham, Professor
Timothy Gorringe, Samantha Graham, Professor George Gretton, Fred Harrison, Sir
Kenneth Jupp, Professor Vladimir Kolontai, Feja Mira Lesniewska, Dr Steven
Mackie, Vérène Nicolas, Dr Michael Northcott, Professor Richard Roberts, Jane
Rosegrant, Helen Steven, Ninian Crichton Stuart and Andy Wightman.
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[1] Scottish Executive 1999, 6.
[2] Proverbs 29:18, King James translation.
[3] John 10:10.
[4] In Dunn (ed.) 1992, 49-51. I have adapted a number of the following quotations from MacDiarmid from the Scots tongue.
[5] In Bold 1990, 495.
[6] A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle lines 2638-40, in Dunn (ed.) 1992.
[7] In Bold 1990, 420.
[8] In Bold 1990, 316-7.
[9] A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle lines 2526-9, in Dunn (ed.) 1992.
[10] On a Raised Beach in Dunn (ed.) 1992, 61-63, my emphasis.
[11] Dìreadh II, in Bold 1990, 405.
[12] In Bold 1990, 442.
[13] A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, in Dunn (ed.) 1992, line 482.
[14] A Moment in Eternity, in Greive 1983, 40; cf. Ephesians 5:14.
[15] A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (Farewell to Dostoevski), in Dunn (ed.) 1992, 46.
[16] First Hymn, in Dunn (ed.) 1992, 49-51.
[17] 1984, 1986 & 1992, Fortress Press, USA.
[18] Wink 1998.
[19] 1611 King James authorised translation..
[20] Wink 1986, 95-96 (in his chapter entitled “The Angels of the Nations.”), referring to Buber’s “The Gods of the Nations and God.”
[21] Wink 1992, 10.
[22] cf. Plato’s Phaedrus; also Symposium and Phaedo, Plato 1961.
[23] Bloomfield & Dunn 1989, 7, 20, my emphasis.
[24] HarperCollins Study Bible, maps 8 & 10.
[25] MacDonald 1990.
[26] Turnbull 1997, 78-79.
[27] MacAlister (ed.) 1938.
[28] John 1:35-42.
[29] Declaration of Arbroath, trans. Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh, HMSO.
[30] Weber 1976; McIntosh 1999a.
[31] Tom Forsyth, pers. com..
[32] Eliade 1989.
[33] Charques 1962, 20-21.
[34] Charques 1962, 40.
[35] Cited in Bradstock 1997, 26.
[36] Daniel 10. See Wink 1986, 1998.
[37] Ezekiel 47:1-12.
[38] Ezekiel 36:33-36.
[39] Matthew 6:10; Luke 17:20-21.
[40] Matthew 11:19; Luke 7:35; Galatians 3:28.
[41] This is not canonical in the Latin vulgate Bible but I believe it is in the Slavonic and Greek versions.
[42] Charques 1962, 23.
[43] I am given to understand that these issues may be explored in the work of such Russian theologians as Vlidimir Lorsky and Sergi Bulgakov.
[44] Johnston & Sampson 1994, vii-viii.
[45] Storr (ed.) 1983, 400.
[46] Storr (ed.) 1983, 402.
[47] Storr (ed.) 1983, 403
[48] Storr (ed.) 1983, 391, 379, 380.
[49] Storr (ed.) 1983, 380, 383, 360.
[50] Argyll 1997, 2.
[51] Pahnke, Walter & Richards, William, Implications of LSD and Experimental Mysticism, in Tart (ed.) 1969, 409-439.
[52] Andelson & Dawsey 1992, 4-5, cf. Freire 1972.
[53] Linden 1997, 12-13.
[54] Wooster, Henry, Faith at the Ramparts: The Philippine Catholic Church and the 1986 Revolution, in Johnston & Samuel 1994, 153-176.
[55] Freire 1972, 21-22.
[56] Freire 1972, 24-25.
[57] Gutierrez 1988, xxxvii.
[58] King James Version.
[59] Guttierez 1983, 1988.
[60] Genesis 18:16-33. See also outstanding discussion concerning God and Job in Jung 1984.
[61] Cassidy 1988.
[62] Hampson 1990; also Loades (ed.) 1990, Daly 1973.
[63] Reuther 1984.
[64] Hick 1983.
[65] Dr Bashir Maan of Glasgow Mosque advises me that reference to this is made in Ibn Kathir’s commentary on the Koran on Surah III, Ale Imran.
[66] For discussion of these points see Cox, Harvey, World Religions and Conflict Resolution in Johnston & Sampson (eds.), 266-282.
[67] MacIntyre 1988, 388.
[68] Johnston, Douglas, Looking Ahead: Toward a New Paradigm, in Johnston & Sampson (eds.) 1994, 316-337.
[69] Sivarasksa 1999.
[70] Schumacher 1974, 60.
[71] Gutierrez 1983, 20.
[72] In Boff & Elizondo (eds.) 139.
[73] Of the Rent of Land, Smith 1986, 247-367.
[74]
Noyes (ed.) 1991, 225-230. Of the 30 distinguished economists who signed the
letter, the three with Nobel prizes were Robert Solow, Franco Modigliani and
James Tobin. A fourth signatory, William Vickery, was to be awarded the Nobel
prize in 1996.
[75] See Lvov, Dmitry(ed.) (1999). The Road to the 21st Century: Strategic Problems & Prospects of the Russian Economy, Moscow, reviewed in Barron 1999.
[76] Harrison 1983, 182; Blundell in Tideman (ed.) 1994, 157-169.
[77] Ian Barron, summer 1999, 14, my emphasis.
[78] Janzen 1992.
[79] A translation used by the World Council of Churches.
[80] White 1967; cf. Linzey & Cohn-Sherbok 1997.
[81] Janzen 1992.
[82] Northcott 1996, 188.
[83] For discussion of efficiency of property rights in Christian history see Kingston 1992.
[84] See Choudhury & Malik 1992.
[85] Visser & McIntosh, 1998.
[86] For standard treatment see Bromwich 1976; for critiques within ecological economics see Daly & Cobb 1990.
[87] Loening 1991.
[88] Appendix to McIntosh 1995 - The Fallacy of the Presumption of Symmetrical Depreciation in the Substitutionality of Natural and Human-Made Capital.
[89] Note that this book is non-canonical in some traditions. If this is a problem, the reader is referred instead to the universally canonical Proverbs 8.
[90] Fraser 1992, 103.
[91] Harriss 1993.
[92] Scots Paraphrase version.
[93] de Mello 1992.
[94] This important text was found in a cave in Egypt in 1945, in Ross 1988, 34 (my emphasis).
[95] Oxford English Dictionary.
[96] For penetrating discussion of “vernacular values” in this respect see Illich 1991.
[97] See Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, London; the Parapsychology Association, USA, etc.
[98] Wink 1992, 99.
[99] 2 Esdras, as printed in the HarperCollins NRSV apocrypha (Meeks (ed.) 1993), is numbered as 3 Esdras in the Slavonic Bible. I ponder whether 11:25-28 might be the source of a Russian monk having said that three Romes (Reichs) would rise, but a fourth there would never be.
[100] Hampson 1990, 88.
[101] One Foot in Eden, in Dunn (ed.) 1992, 29-30.
[102] Janzen 1992.
[103] Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, Lorde 1984, 53-59.
[104] Lorde 1984, 16-17.
[105] Blake, William, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: 7.
[106] Andelson & Dawsey 1992, 62.
[107] The Carbeth Hutters in Stirling Sheriff Court - McIntosh 1999b.
[108] McIntosh 1999b.
[109] Gretton 1992, 60-61, 59, 54, 59.
[110] Wightman 1996.
[111] Wightman et al., at press.
[112] McDiarmid, J. M., 1926, The Deer Forests and How they are Bleeding Scotland White, Scottish Home Rule Association, Glasgow.
[113] The People’s Paper, No. 45, March 12 1853.
[114] Strathallan’s Lament in Mackay (ed) 1993, 287.
[115] See, for example, Hope, Timmel & Hodzi, 1995, from African experience.
[116] Savory 1988.
[117] E.g. Miller 1987.
[118] E.g. Samuels 1993 for Jungian perspective.
[119] Land Reform Policy Group, 1999.
[120] McIntosh 1992.
[121] King James Version.
[122] McIntosh 1992.
[123] McIntosh 1995.
[124] McIntosh 1997.
[125] People & Parliament 1999.
[126] Cited by Rouleau 1999.
[127] Pipes 1974, 17-18.
[128] Savory 1988.
[129] National Environmental Secretariat (Bhutan) 1992, 5.
[130] McIntosh 1996, 23, modified.
[131] Gorringe 1994, 117.
[132] Andelson & Dawsey 1992, 88.
[133] Andelson & Dawsey 1992, 122.
[134] Tideman (ed.) 1994.
[135] See Barron 1999.
[136] Cited in Barron, 1999.
[137] Andelson & Dawsey 1992, 26.
[A1] Non-profit community-run legal organisations.
[A2] Legislative proposals.
[A3] In the sense of rights to walk over the land.
[A4] Plural allows people to be a multiplicity of ethnic groups.
[A5] In the sense of wholeness, as well as honesty.
[A6] A bioregion is a geographical zone defined by the features that most give it life - such as a watershed area, a mountain, or an island.
[A7] Delegation of power as far as possible to the local level from the national.
[A8] Empowerment is power from within, as distinct from “power over” others.
[A9] As in a constellation of stars - an organising principle that pulls things together into pattern.
[A10] Vocation is from the word, vocal, meaning a calling - usually God-given.
[A11] yes.
[A12] Hold tenderly like a child.
[A13] Harsh laughing but here in a context of cruel, trivial talk.
[A14] Note that a critique is not a criticism, but a critical appraisal.
[A15] Sabotage by ecological activists.
[A16] I mean here the psyche extended into organisational and national concerns in the manner that Jung used the word.
[A17] Self-organising, emerging from its own properties.
[A18] X shaped.
[A19] Definitively, setting a new standard or paradigm of what it means to be atheistic.
[A20] Grassroots means “at the popular level of the common person,” but it is important, in the context I am using it, to retain the botanical sense of the metaphor to make the contrast with the underlying taproot.
[A21] Please modify sentence and substitute appropriate Russian equivalents as direct translation probably won’t work.
[A22] A theological term meaning that which pertains to the end outcome of all things on earth.
[A24] That which is left over of the original.
[A25] Argue, as in arguing over a price in a marketplace.
[A26] i.e. wage for both of them.
[A27] i.e. reflective, self-critical.
[A28] The presence of God in the world around us - here and now.
[A29] The less acceptable parts.
[A30] Pluralism is the view that different points of view can co-exist; complementariness sees these differences as contributing to a greater whole.
[A31] Oral tradition of Islam.
[A32] Points of view, especially world-views, that conflict and contest for attention.
[A33] Siam is the old name for Thailand, which Sulak considers preferable.
[A34] In the sense that one would “keep” a garden.
[A35] Goes beyond.
[A36] Parallel to in many respects, but not necessarily the same as.
[A37] The death of all things ecological.
[A38] Because of the wickedness.
[A39] Patriarchy.
[A40] Choice.
[A41] tuneful slogans.
[A42] I’m sorry, I don’t know what these Latin phrases in italics mean.
[A43] control over tenure - overlordship.
[A44] To sell freehold.
[A45] Lease within a framework of overlordship.
[A46] Good looking.
[A47] Uprooting.
[A48] Psychological history.
[A49] combines two things that are normally mutually exclusive.
[A50]dishonest
[A51]frightened us
[A52] In a way that is to mutual advantage.
[A53] To do with the nature of being.
[A54] The true, original.
[A55] Is that right? The email I took this from said “black”, which doesn’t seem right.
[A56] types of ecosystem.