Who Will Help Us Cross The Desert?

 (I belong to the Quebec Group on Contextual Theology. Over the past year we have focused on the economic crisis and have now published two reflections. This is the first. )


(2009)The current crisis has global dimensions: people without work, a food and environmental crisis, deterioration of public health in numerous countries, destabilization of the middle class, the dumping of millions of human beings into abject poverty. These catastrophes reveal the weakness of the colossus with feet of clay, the emptiness of an empire that pretends it is invincible, definitive like the “end of history.” Its collapse puts up for question not only the way our economic and financial systems function, but also its cultural and moral basis. We can speak of a crisis of civilization.

This empire has no doubt not completely given up the ghost. We search to set it free, to loosen the bonds of our more or less conscious collaboration. What liberation can we expect? By what paths? Who will help us cross the desert?

The crisis we are speaking of

Every day, the headlines carry news of a catastrophic economy. Here are a few examples. Black January for American employment: almost 600,000 positions have been eliminated and it continues. GM demands 30 billion dollars to avoid bankruptcy… The OEDC foresees an unemployment approaching double digits for all the member countries except Japan between now and the end of 2010. Since January, indirectly through various financial “tools” of the Feds, or directly by the Treasury, the American State has loaned 3,000 billion to the private sector in addition to offering a guarantee of 5,700 billion in certain investments. By comparison, the 700 billion agreed on for saving the AIG and others look like… confetti! In Quebec, there are 2,561 consumers who declared bankruptcy in January. In its turn, the Quebec Deposit and Investment Bank has ended the financial year 2008 with a loss of 40 billion dollars, that is to say, a negative return of more than 25%... In Japan the electronic industry loses billions, the stars in the sector were forced to let millions of employees go… The economy is in a shambles…. Is it possible for ordinary folk to understand something?

The neoliberal economy has already been undermined by important unbalances notably by the social inequities it has provoked. Nevertheless it is in the financial markets that the first manifestations of the current crisis appeared. At this point they are relatively well-known. Let’s run briefly through the mechanisms without entering into an analysis of all the causes of the skid underway. At the beginning of the millennium, when the U.S. government had intentionally lowered interest rates, the housing market took off. The financial institutions set in motion risky housing credits. The overly indebted households weren’t able to pay their housing loans; the houses had to be repossessed and the market collapsed. The banks who held the derivatives on these mortgages suddenly found themselves with « rotten » shares, virtually without value (for example, commercial papers attached to shares—CPAS). In addition, the financial institutions having loaned or sold such products suddenly stopped having confidence in one another. This incertitude about their real situation was added to the crisis of liquidity that they already experienced because of a disproportionate ratio between their own funds, serving as guarantee, and the mass of their derivatives and loans in circulation.

To add even more to the unraveling, the directors of these institutions continued to receive generous benefits even as they assured themselves of golden parachutes in the event they were removed from their positions after their announced counter-performance. Just on Wall Street, the directors gave themselves the astronomical sum of 18 billion dollars in benefits in just this past year. These activities reveal, in a condensed way, the principal way neoliberal capitalism has come to fuel itself: a limitless and arrogant greed sure of its impunity. At the same time, and in consequence of the crisis of liquidity, the bankruptcy of certain financial institutions followed. Above all there was a generalized tightening of credit to businesses. Thus the marked drop in economic growth and an accelerated rise in the unemployment rate. In a domino effect, this crisis has extended from the United States to Canada and other continents that are affected to various degrees by the phenomenon and its consequences as also by their own economic and financial imbalances.

Some testimonies and situations in our own milieu

Every day the current debacle causes alarming human distress everywhere at the same time that it can reveal the creativity that carries us into the future.

One member of our group related an experience he had: “A man about 50 years old came into the small office of a community organization. He was aggressive and complained of not having access to social welfare. He obviously thought he was in a government office.” Our companion explained to him that his organization tried to help people. Gently he said, “Are you perhaps hungry?” The poor man collapsed into tears. When a sandwich was offered to him, he ate greedily like someone who had not had anything to eat for a long time. And yet, this man had worked as a truck driver for many years and then had lost his job.

Here’s another situation, one that is quite typical. A woman called a help line. Her landlord had just told her that he intended to raise her monthly rent by $15. More than 50% of her income was already taken by the rental of her little room. With less than $600 a month to live on, she couldn’t feed herself with what was left.

These are some of the concrete faces of the ravages of an economy more interested in the accumulation of capital by a small number of persons than in satisfying the basic needs of people who have only a small buying power. Besides, in a situation with that kind of distress, there are no lack of initiatives that carry meaning and that illustrate the possibility of another sort of economic and social dynamic oriented around solidarity and sharing.

By way of example, here are two other real-life experiences. Someone in our group accompanied a woman who had been left alone with seven children. Due to a social welfare payment that was too small, the family lived shut up in a hovel while waiting for a public housing unit that was never available. The mother became discouraged and struggled against the wish to throw herself off her balcony. Her friend convinced her to buy a house. This crazy project actually happened mainly because of the support of a mutual-help fund and popular loan managed by the local credit union.

Or again, in a self-help group gathering people caught in poverty, isolation or with intellectual challenges, there is a practice of a way of being together that centres on welcoming difference, sharing resources and responsibilities, resistance to the dominant consumer values of society. This experience allows broken and humiliated people to rise up, to participate in the construction of solidarity and to learn to face their increasingly dramatic lack of means in a way that is different from the barbarity of a pitiless “save yourself if you can.”

Examples like this of concrete alternatives can be found in abundance in various sorts of groups. If, as we are told over and over, the formal economy is in crisis, we see and know, for example, that a micro-economy on a human and social scale is possible and already exists. Collectively, we do have the means. It is a source of hope for the excluded, impoverished or marginalized populations. It is already the seed of an alternative on the economic level, just as a whole range of other initiatives in various domains offer a panoply of paths for preparing a world that is different. It is from this sort of experience that we begin our current reflection.

Two visions of the economy

In the economic sphere, two worlds, two value systems exist side by side. On the one hand, there is a market economy centred on competition, profit and a consumer culture. This system has a minority of winners and a majority of losers because it rests fundamentally on social inequalities and allows money to be reproduced indefinitely in order to satisfy the appetite and greed of those who are well-off. According to Claude Béland, ex-president of the Desjardin Mouvement, “for the first time in the history of humanity, more riches are created by speculation alone than through the production of goods and services.” Throughout the world, under this regime, the 5 percent among the richest in the population monopolize a third of all income. Further, according to Mr. Béland, this “economic system contradicts and poses an obstacle to the movement of humanity toward a world that is more just and egalitarian.” (Manuscript notes on the financial crisis)

And yet the etymology of the word “economy” (oikos-nomos) goes in another direction. This term points to the “house” and to “rules” that regulate management in view of the common good and for the happiness of all those who inhabit the home. The inhabitants of a real house do not aspire to be rich but to possess enough to live together well. Each person finds his or her rightful place, well-being, security, in convivial relations. We could say that “the gross national product” has as its function the “gross internal happiness.” Could the world become such a “house?”

A human approach of sharing and solidarity has, in many places, provided space for an alternative economy, often more or less informal, as in the various kinds of cooperatives. It rests on a relationship between money and material goods based on the needs of life and the rights that life commands. It rests on openness to sharing and social solidarity, on respect for the environment and his resources, incarnated for example in the practice of voluntary simplicity. The common good takes priority over individual interest. No one is enriched at the expense of the others. The economic actor is, so to speak, on a human scale: it is men and women, citizens, workers, those who place their potential for creativity at the service of the community. Remunerated work is one of those contributions.

In this sort of economic model, the current crisis would not have occurred. The reality of conflict in an economy that is globalized and built around finances functions quite differently and leads to all sorts of other results. We are witnesses of this.

What are the paths for a way out of the crisis?

Various ways out of the crisis are currently being explored. The bankruptcy of the free market to assure by itself a lasting development places in clear evidence the need to regulate better the economic and financial exchanges. To this end, the necessary role of the State comes to the fore, to counter a vision of a market capable of regulating itself without any constraint. The temptation to turn to the private sector to take charge of various public services in the areas of education or health, for example, is more and more discredited. The support of the State for these services, and even its role of overseing them are proven to be clearly indispensible.

Certain urgent measures, notably through investment in hospital, school or highway infrastructures, can be necessary in the short term in order to create employment even as it responds to real necessities. To the extent that public funds are used to serve the common good, it is possible to subscribe to initiatives that aim at temporarily reducing the risks of a catastrophe. Once again such measures need to be inscribed within the framework of a long-term vision, like the stages in a path of more radical transformation of the economic and democratic mechanisms at all levels.

And yet we should not be fooled. Most of the current plans for restarting the economy, whether in our country or elsewhere, through new forms of regulations (like the Europeans) or new investments (like the Americans), aim essentially to re-establish consumer confidence in order to recreate the conditions for the accumulation of capital. At best, they can contribute to save a certain number of jobs and maintain a certain level of public assistance. The objectives of the redistribution of riches, of long-term development and of respect for human dignity are not going to come about through the economic policies or the ordering of our collective life. Human life continues to be subjected to the taking of benefits and to economically harmful growth.

It would therefore be illusory to focus blindly on these kinds of efforts to get out of the crisis. They carry little risk of efficiently transforming society in the long term and in the sense that we have set out. For the moment, the global alternative lacks political support within the institutional setting. Who then will carry this project? According to François Houtard, “the new historic actor that carries the alternative projects is today plural. They are the workers, the peasants without land, the indigenous people, women who are the first victims of privatization. They are the poor of the cities, the ecological activists, the immigrants, the intellectuals committed to social movements. Their awareness as collective actor is beginning to emerge.” (Speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations, October 31, 2008). Rather than count on a new Moses to get us through the calamities of the current crisis and to help us come into a renewed world, we believe that the alternative is already underway through a maze of networks that carry it, among us and across the world. The network of community organizations in Quebec is unique in its breath and diversity, for example in the form of cooperatives as a tool for the democratization of economic life and its applications in the domain of finance, production, consumption and housing. It can also be seen in the field of social economy whose activities flow from collective entrepreneurship that aims to serve the community and defend the primacy of the person and of work above and beyond the value of profit. In Quebec, 6,254 such companies turn over 4.3 billion dollars every year. It surfaces also in the defence of human rights, in movements of associations without corporate structures, in self-help and solidarity groups. It is also evident in the movement of voluntary simplicity that goes against the current of unrestrained consumerism and whose adepts choose to have what is “sufficient” rather than trying to accumulate; to enjoy free time rather than bank accounts, and who do so in an ecological perspective. Finally, there are the various forms of community experience and of egalitarian practice, engagement for the integrity of creation and human dignity, the non-violent battle for justice and peace, the dialogue between cultures and religions… and so on. These are all examples that illustrate the path of common sense and equality. The best changes for coming out of the crisis that have concrete consequences at short and medium long-term for “ordinary people” can be found on this side of the balance. These initiatives are characterized at the same time by a large dose of creativity and by sustaining values that are situated at the antipodes of those that neoliberal capitalism is promoting as it totters before our eyes because of its inhumanity. They offer ways of facing the challenges posed by various dimensions of the crisis, without, for all that, replacing the need for structural transformations that remain necessary in the overall picture.


What hope is there in the long term?

The defenders of realpolitik constantly try to promote a suspicion that these hopes are illusory, to underline how fragile they are in face of the enormity of the machine that grinds up people and of the insensitivity of those who control its levers. It is true that, in spite of the extent and dynamism of the alternative movement, a radical and sustainable modification of the rules of the game at the level of the great economic and political systems is not yet foreseeable. To wait for its realization in the short term would inevitably engender illusion and disillusion. Even in the long term, it will always remain impossible to fully realize the just society we hope for, whatever may be the importance of the advances that can sometimes be brought about. A gulf inevitably separates all specific historical realization from the fully human society that the Gospels propose to our hope.

The mobilizing role of utopia nevertheless remains. It is indispensable in order to avoid that the discouraging reality of “what is” ends up taking on the stature of absolute by killing the desire for this “other world that is possible” to which we can unceasingly approach by the path of our hope and our collective creativity. In this respect, the slowness of the political and institutional transformations does not prevent us from seeing in the most modest achievements the real anticipation of a new world. Besides, historically, there is no great realization of humanity that has not first been dreamed of and pulled out of fatality by “local” prophetic or counter-current experiences. Thus, the social politics of the twentieth century were anticipated by the ideas and initiatives of the solidarity movement of the nineteenth century.

Every form of alternative in movement does actually make more possible and already present a human life worthy of the name, in the style of the prophetic figures and groups of the Bible. Think of the “Remnant of Israel,” that little community of the poor who remained faithful to hope in the midst of the discouragement and idolatry of Israel; or again the people humiliated in their exile in Babylon, but who refused to let themselves be contaminated by the spirit of the empire, to whom Second Isaiah revealed the identity of the “Servant” and his mission to become “light of the nations” (Is 42,6). These prophetic figures incarnate, in their courageous resistance and their humble fidelity, the hidden grandeur and the future of humanity. Could they not be recognized in the characteristics of all these groups who hold up the hope that digs in, contrary to and against all the powers of destruction and domination, to believe and to work at the humanization of our world? Conscious of bearing a power of transformation stronger than the violence of injustice and contempt, they exercise a function of awakening and recall that kick-starts humanity on the path of its true fulfilment in the sense of a certain capacity for justice and solidarity, of respect for creation and for the dignity of every person, of service and of the gift of self in gratuity. Like a leaven, these artisans of life maintain the creative energy that renews our wounded world little by little. They help to set us free from the empire by their refusal to submit to it. They can serve as guides for us to travel across the desert of violence, injustice and lack of awareness.

A reflection to strive toward

This strength of life at work in the world calls each of us, men and women, into question. As important as they may be, our commitments to social transformation remain sterile if our mentalities, our deep attitudes, our vision of the world, in short, the common culture, are not also transformed in order to become more permeable to human meaning, to what Paul Ricoeur calls “the intuition of self in the other.” It is definitely a kind of unconditional cult of instrumental rationality, the will to power and advantage at any price, the neglect of the sacred character of the human that is placed on the pillory. The reflection needs to continue in particular regarding this cultural and moral dimension of a “way out of the crisis” that will be at the level of what is considered more and more as the end of the world as we know it.



Who Will Help Us Cross the Desert?    (2009)

The current crisis has global dimensions: people without work, a food and environmental crisis, deterioration of public health in numerous countries, destabilization of the middle class, the dumping of millions of human beings into abject poverty. These catastrophes reveal the weakness of the colossus with feet of clay, the emptiness of an empire that pretends it is invincible, definitive like the “end of history.” Its collapse puts up for question not only the way our economic and financial systems function, but also its cultural and moral basis. We can speak of a crisis of civilization.

This empire has no doubt not completely given up the ghost. We search to set it free, to loosen the bonds of our more or less conscious collaboration. What liberation can we expect? By what paths? Who will help us cross the desert?

The crisis we are speaking of

Every day, the headlines carry news of a catastrophic economy. Here are a few examples. Black January for American employment: almost 600,000 positions have been eliminated and it continues. GM demands 30 billion dollars to avoid bankruptcy… The OEDC foresees an unemployment approaching double digits for all the member countries except Japan between now and the end of 2010. Since January, indirectly through various financial “tools” of the Feds, or directly by the Treasury, the American State has loaned 3,000 billion to the private sector in addition to offering a guarantee of 5,700 billion in certain investments. By comparison, the 700 billion agreed on for saving the AIG and others look like… confetti! In Quebec, there are 2,561 consumers who declared bankruptcy in January. In its turn, the Quebec Deposit and Investment Bank has ended the financial year 2008 with a loss of 40 billion dollars, that is to say, a negative return of more than 25%... In Japan the electronic industry loses billions, the stars in the sector were forced to let millions of employees go… The economy is in a shambles…. Is it possible for ordinary folk to understand something?

The neoliberal economy has already been undermined by important unbalances notably by the social inequities it has provoked. Nevertheless it is in the financial markets that the first manifestations of the current crisis appeared. At this point they are relatively well-known. Let’s run briefly through the mechanisms without entering into an analysis of all the causes of the skid underway. At the beginning of the millennium, when the U.S. government had intentionally lowered interest rates, the housing market took off. The financial institutions set in motion risky housing credits. The overly indebted households weren’t able to pay their housing loans; the houses had to be repossessed and the market collapsed. The banks who held the derivatives on these mortgages suddenly found themselves with « rotten » shares, virtually without value (for example, commercial papers attached to shares—CPAS). In addition, the financial institutions having loaned or sold such products suddenly stopped having confidence in one another. This incertitude about their real situation was added to the crisis of liquidity that they already experienced because of a disproportionate ratio between their own funds, serving as guarantee, and the mass of their derivatives and loans in circulation.

To add even more to the unraveling, the directors of these institutions continued to receive generous benefits even as they assured themselves of golden parachutes in the event they were removed from their positions after their announced counter-performance. Just on Wall Street, the directors gave themselves the astronomical sum of 18 billion dollars in benefits in just this past year. These activities reveal, in a condensed way, the principal way neoliberal capitalism has come to fuel itself: a limitless and arrogant greed sure of its impunity. At the same time, and in consequence of the crisis of liquidity, the bankruptcy of certain financial institutions followed. Above all there was a generalized tightening of credit to businesses. Thus the marked drop in economic growth and an accelerated rise in the unemployment rate. In a domino effect, this crisis has extended from the United States to Canada and other continents that are affected to various degrees by the phenomenon and its consequences as also by their own economic and financial imbalances.

Some testimonies and situations in our own milieu

Every day the current debacle causes alarming human distress everywhere at the same time that it can reveal the creativity that carries us into the future.

One member of our group related an experience he had: “A man about 50 years old came into the small office of a community organization. He was aggressive and complained of not having access to social welfare. He obviously thought he was in a government office.” Our companion explained to him that his organization tried to help people. Gently he said, “Are you perhaps hungry?” The poor man collapsed into tears. When a sandwich was offered to him, he ate greedily like someone who had not had anything to eat for a long time. And yet, this man had worked as a truck driver for many years and then had lost his job.

Here’s another situation, one that is quite typical. A woman called a help line. Her landlord had just told her that he intended to raise her monthly rent by $15. More than 50% of her income was already taken by the rental of her little room. With less than $600 a month to live on, she couldn’t feed herself with what was left.

These are some of the concrete faces of the ravages of an economy more interested in the accumulation of capital by a small number of persons than in satisfying the basic needs of people who have only a small buying power. Besides, in a situation with that kind of distress, there are no lack of initiatives that carry meaning and that illustrate the possibility of another sort of economic and social dynamic oriented around solidarity and sharing.

By way of example, here are two other real-life experiences. Someone in our group accompanied a woman who had been left alone with seven children. Due to a social welfare payment that was too small, the family lived shut up in a hovel while waiting for a public housing unit that was never available. The mother became discouraged and struggled against the wish to throw herself off her balcony. Her friend convinced her to buy a house. This crazy project actually happened mainly because of the support of a mutual-help fund and popular loan managed by the local credit union.

Or again, in a self-help group gathering people caught in poverty, isolation or with intellectual challenges, there is a practice of a way of being together that centres on welcoming difference, sharing resources and responsibilities, resistance to the dominant consumer values of society. This experience allows broken and humiliated people to rise up, to participate in the construction of solidarity and to learn to face their increasingly dramatic lack of means in a way that is different from the barbarity of a pitiless “save yourself if you can.”

Examples like this of concrete alternatives can be found in abundance in various sorts of groups. If, as we are told over and over, the formal economy is in crisis, we see and know, for example, that a micro-economy on a human and social scale is possible and already exists. Collectively, we do have the means. It is a source of hope for the excluded, impoverished or marginalized populations. It is already the seed of an alternative on the economic level, just as a whole range of other initiatives in various domains offer a panoply of paths for preparing a world that is different. It is from this sort of experience that we begin our current reflection.

Two visions of the economy

In the economic sphere, two worlds, two value systems exist side by side. On the one hand, there is a market economy centred on competition, profit and a consumer culture. This system has a minority of winners and a majority of losers because it rests fundamentally on social inequalities and allows money to be reproduced indefinitely in order to satisfy the appetite and greed of those who are well-off. According to Claude Béland, ex-president of the Desjardin Mouvement, “for the first time in the history of humanity, more riches are created by speculation alone than through the production of goods and services.” Throughout the world, under this regime, the 5 percent among the richest in the population monopolize a third of all income. Further, according to Mr. Béland, this “economic system contradicts and poses an obstacle to the movement of humanity toward a world that is more just and egalitarian.” (Manuscript notes on the financial crisis)

And yet the etymology of the word “economy” (oikos-nomos) goes in another direction. This term points to the “house” and to “rules” that regulate management in view of the common good and for the happiness of all those who inhabit the home. The inhabitants of a real house do not aspire to be rich but to possess enough to live together well. Each person finds his or her rightful place, well-being, security, in convivial relations. We could say that “the gross national product” has as its function the “gross internal happiness.” Could the world become such a “house?”

A human approach of sharing and solidarity has, in many places, provided space for an alternative economy, often more or less informal, as in the various kinds of cooperatives. It rests on a relationship between money and material goods based on the needs of life and the rights that life commands. It rests on openness to sharing and social solidarity, on respect for the environment and his resources, incarnated for example in the practice of voluntary simplicity. The common good takes priority over individual interest. No one is enriched at the expense of the others. The economic actor is, so to speak, on a human scale: it is men and women, citizens, workers, those who place their potential for creativity at the service of the community. Remunerated work is one of those contributions.

In this sort of economic model, the current crisis would not have occurred. The reality of conflict in an economy that is globalized and built around finances functions quite differently and leads to all sorts of other results. We are witnesses of this.

What are the paths for a way out of the crisis?

Various ways out of the crisis are currently being explored. The bankruptcy of the free market to assure by itself a lasting development places in clear evidence the need to regulate better the economic and financial exchanges. To this end, the necessary role of the State comes to the fore, to counter a vision of a market capable of regulating itself without any constraint. The temptation to turn to the private sector to take charge of various public services in the areas of education or health, for example, is more and more discredited. The support of the State for these services, and even its role of overseing them are proven to be clearly indispensible.

Certain urgent measures, notably through investment in hospital, school or highway infrastructures, can be necessary in the short term in order to create employment even as it responds to real necessities. To the extent that public funds are used to serve the common good, it is possible to subscribe to initiatives that aim at temporarily reducing the risks of a catastrophe. Once again such measures need to be inscribed within the framework of a long-term vision, like the stages in a path of more radical transformation of the economic and democratic mechanisms at all levels.

And yet we should not be fooled. Most of the current plans for restarting the economy, whether in our country or elsewhere, through new forms of regulations (like the Europeans) or new investments (like the Americans), aim essentially to re-establish consumer confidence in order to recreate the conditions for the accumulation of capital. At best, they can contribute to save a certain number of jobs and maintain a certain level of public assistance. The objectives of the redistribution of riches, of long-term development and of respect for human dignity are not going to come about through the economic policies or the ordering of our collective life. Human life continues to be subjected to the taking of benefits and to economically harmful growth.

It would therefore be illusory to focus blindly on these kinds of efforts to get out of the crisis. They carry little risk of efficiently transforming society in the long term and in the sense that we have set out. For the moment, the global alternative lacks political support within the institutional setting. Who then will carry this project? According to François Houtard, “the new historic actor that carries the alternative projects is today plural. They are the workers, the peasants without land, the indigenous people, women who are the first victims of privatization. They are the poor of the cities, the ecological activists, the immigrants, the intellectuals committed to social movements. Their awareness as collective actor is beginning to emerge.” (Speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations, October 31, 2008). Rather than count on a new Moses to get us through the calamities of the current crisis and to help us come into a renewed world, we believe that the alternative is already underway through a maze of networks that carry it, among us and across the world. The network of community organizations in Quebec is unique in its breath and diversity, for example in the form of cooperatives as a tool for the democratization of economic life and its applications in the domain of finance, production, consumption and housing. It can also be seen in the field of social economy whose activities flow from collective entrepreneurship that aims to serve the community and defend the primacy of the person and of work above and beyond the value of profit. In Quebec, 6,254 such companies turn over 4.3 billion dollars every year. It surfaces also in the defence of human rights, in movements of associations without corporate structures, in self-help and solidarity groups. It is also evident in the movement of voluntary simplicity that goes against the current of unrestrained consumerism and whose adepts choose to have what is “sufficient” rather than trying to accumulate; to enjoy free time rather than bank accounts, and who do so in an ecological perspective. Finally, there are the various forms of community experience and of egalitarian practice, engagement for the integrity of creation and human dignity, the non-violent battle for justice and peace, the dialogue between cultures and religions… and so on. These are all examples that illustrate the path of common sense and equality. The best changes for coming out of the crisis that have concrete consequences at short and medium long-term for “ordinary people” can be found on this side of the balance. These initiatives are characterized at the same time by a large dose of creativity and by sustaining values that are situated at the antipodes of those that neoliberal capitalism is promoting as it totters before our eyes because of its inhumanity. They offer ways of facing the challenges posed by various dimensions of the crisis, without, for all that, replacing the need for structural transformations that remain necessary in the overall picture.


What hope is there in the long term?

The defenders of realpolitik constantly try to promote a suspicion that these hopes are illusory, to underline how fragile they are in face of the enormity of the machine that grinds up people and of the insensitivity of those who control its levers. It is true that, in spite of the extent and dynamism of the alternative movement, a radical and sustainable modification of the rules of the game at the level of the great economic and political systems is not yet foreseeable. To wait for its realization in the short term would inevitably engender illusion and disillusion. Even in the long term, it will always remain impossible to fully realize the just society we hope for, whatever may be the importance of the advances that can sometimes be brought about. A gulf inevitably separates all specific historical realization from the fully human society that the Gospels propose to our hope.

The mobilizing role of utopia nevertheless remains. It is indispensable in order to avoid that the discouraging reality of “what is” ends up taking on the stature of absolute by killing the desire for this “other world that is possible” to which we can unceasingly approach by the path of our hope and our collective creativity. In this respect, the slowness of the political and institutional transformations does not prevent us from seeing in the most modest achievements the real anticipation of a new world. Besides, historically, there is no great realization of humanity that has not first been dreamed of and pulled out of fatality by “local” prophetic or counter-current experiences. Thus, the social politics of the twentieth century were anticipated by the ideas and initiatives of the solidarity movement of the nineteenth century.

Every form of alternative in movement does actually make more possible and already present a human life worthy of the name, in the style of the prophetic figures and groups of the Bible. Think of the “Remnant of Israel,” that little community of the poor who remained faithful to hope in the midst of the discouragement and idolatry of Israel; or again the people humiliated in their exile in Babylon, but who refused to let themselves be contaminated by the spirit of the empire, to whom Second Isaiah revealed the identity of the “Servant” and his mission to become “light of the nations” (Is 42,6). These prophetic figures incarnate, in their courageous resistance and their humble fidelity, the hidden grandeur and the future of humanity. Could they not be recognized in the characteristics of all these groups who hold up the hope that digs in, contrary to and against all the powers of destruction and domination, to believe and to work at the humanization of our world? Conscious of bearing a power of transformation stronger than the violence of injustice and contempt, they exercise a function of awakening and recall that kick-starts humanity on the path of its true fulfilment in the sense of a certain capacity for justice and solidarity, of respect for creation and for the dignity of every person, of service and of the gift of self in gratuity. Like a leaven, these artisans of life maintain the creative energy that renews our wounded world little by little. They help to set us free from the empire by their refusal to submit to it. They can serve as guides for us to travel across the desert of violence, injustice and lack of awareness.

A reflection to strive toward

This strength of life at work in the world calls each of us, men and women, into question. As important as they may be, our commitments to social transformation remain sterile if our mentalities, our deep attitudes, our vision of the world, in short, the common culture, are not also transformed in order to become more permeable to human meaning, to what Paul Ricoeur calls “the intuition of self in the other.” It is definitely a kind of unconditional cult of instrumental rationality, the will to power and advantage at any price, the neglect of the sacred character of the human that is placed on the pillory. The reflection needs to continue in particular regarding this cultural and moral dimension of a “way out of the crisis” that will be at the level of what is considered more and more as the end of the world as we know it.