NOVEMBER 6, SUNDAY

CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM

Something that has always unsettled me is that I live in a competitive capitalist culture with personal liberal socialist values. I feel like a hypocrite, I am a hypocrite, preaching one thing and living another, so this is another one of my endless attempts to figure this out for myself, to deal with my own inner tension.

It unsettles me that my liberal church, that preaches sharing with caring for everyone and particularly those who have neither the resources or the ability to live the American dream, depends upon the competitive capitalist system to support its outreach. My church is composed of well to do educated, liberal and caring people with a very adequate standard of living who live well while many people around us in the Swannanoa Valley live lives stunted by low income and low education. My church is in danger of being a well to do social club which spends most of its income on itself and barely tithes, giving less than 10% of its income, to those in need although many church members commit much more both in their time and their money.

But the same unsettling fact is true of Warren Wilson College where I taught for 40 years. Warren Wilson requires community service for graduation, and expects much of the maintenance of the college to be provided by students rather than hired help who are at most colleges low paid with low education as well teaching most courses in a liberal, almost anti capitalist, perspective. And yet the college has always depended for its survival on the capitalist system, either from wealthy parents or super wealthy donors or the few alumni who become wealthy through the capitalist system. There seems to be a great tension, almost

I am quite aware that I have benefited by being a white, male, educated, traveled and often feeling entitled American who may not be considered rich or even well to do in America but in much of the world am both very wealthy and very lucky to be born where I was, not particularly deserving any of my good luck.

So there is a very unsettling tension here for me. But as I think about it I realize that both sides of this tension, capitalist production, even unsustainable production, and socialist caring for others and insisting on a sustainable but adequate standard of living for everyone which depends upon income redistribution are really closely bound together.

Trickle down sort of works but when it gets out of balance and the very rich are enormously wealthy with no way to spend all their money and those living with very little income or eduction have no way of living decently, something is wrong.

But having seen that socialist systems often have low production while concentrating on income redistribution I realize that the before you can redistribute you have to have high sustainable production. The capitalist system is what lets my church members live so well with enough income to share with others and it is what makes Warren Wilson College possible, both when it was a school for impoverished mountain children and now when it is a school for idealists who want to change the world.

There has to be balance of Republican capitalism and liberal Democratic social caring and insuring that every American lives decently and is educated. Neither side is right and the other wrong and our polarization in which we demean each other, would be healthier if we realized that we are both right and that we need both more production, especially at a time when the production can focus on green and sustainable products that help us to live more simply and to be a strong country everyone must be able to live decently. There is a built in tension between capitalism and socialism, that it seems to me now, we will have to learn to live with.

And, of course, this applies to the world beyond the United States. Every job that was shifted to poorer parts of the world where people were willing to do good work for much less money was actually a form of income redistribution which greatly improved the quality of life for many people in low income countries. Globalization, a flat world, has improved the quality of life of low income countries and lowered the cost of living for those with a job in higher income countries.

But it has also dislocated the lives of many Americans who lost jobs including many people in the Swannanoa Valley and has dislocated the social values in low income countries as well as high income countries because technological change, the computer, had dislocated everything and have often been as much of a threat to people who can’t make the shift to this new culture as a boon.

But we are not going to put the computer and technological change back in the bottle. It is here and we have to somehow find a way to live with it. Being Luddite and attacking technology won’t work. Humans are the most adaptive species on earth and adaptation is what has made our species dominant. We have to find ways to adapt to this new disruptive technology and changing values in a way that lets us feel good about our identity and the identity of others.

For me this will likely come with slow change as we old ones die off and the more adaptive young replace us. But slow change in values and a rapidly changing technology don’t fit well together so the road to transition will be rocky. Maybe we just have to relax a little and accept each other a little more and wait and see what happens.