Jenson on "right economy"

Since I’ve been on a bit of a Robert Jenson “kick” lately, and it seems germane to this morning’s topic, here’s an excerpt from his 1984 essay “Toward a Christian Theory of the Public” (I’m not sure how much of this Jenson still stands by, but it’s good food for thought anyway):

In the economy God rules us in the same way as he rules galaxies and amoebae: without our choice. We must eat, take shelter, and the like; and we are an economy insofar as we cannot manage these singly. God so arranges his creation that we cannot but deal with one another. Just so, communal moral choices become inevitable, and with them politics—and with politics prophecy.

I have room and ability for only a few somewhat scattered maxims about right economy—whereby it should be remembered that presenting and arguing such maxims is an act within the political public, not the economic public. The first is: if necessitating politics is God’s goal with the economy, maximum production in itself is not. Of course, since I must eat, I cannot but want to eat well. But not even the possibility of substituting “we” for “I” in the previous sentence can make the promotion of production the automatic right choice for every situation. In a right economy, the GNP would not be a norm.

The second maxim is like unto the first: an economy that produces such inequalities of wealth as to dispense some from and incapacitate others for communal moral deliberation is just so evil, counter to the economy’s godly function. “Safety nets” are nothing to the point; it is not poor citizens’ mere survival that is the polity’s responsibility, but their freedom for the polity. And every self-aware polity has appreciated the necessity of “sumptuary” laws. (Jenson, “Toward a Christian Theory of the Public,” in Essays in Theology of Culture, pp. 144-5)

For Jenson (in this essay at least), the essence of politics is communal moral deliberation. That is, when we gather to deliberate about what kind of community we should be. Economics is subordinate to politics in that its goal should be to equip us for this communal deliberation. Economic necessity is God’s way of forcing us to recognize our interdependence and our consequent need to come together and reason as a community. “Prophecy” refers to hearing the external moral word that calls us to something new. Thus, for Jenson, there can be no absolute “separation of church and state” because moral deliberation requires being open to hearing this word that stands “above” the community.

Jenson here sounds quite “Lasch-ian.” For Christopher Lasch, liberal politics and capitalist economics tended to corrode the civic virtue necessary for people to reason together about the public good. Such virtue requires a measure of independence in thought, which itself rests on economic independence. Liberalism, for Jenson and Lasch, seeks to eliminate this need for deliberation by creating a political “machinery” – a system or process – that will allow for the balancing of “interests” without requiring deliberation about the common good. (For a good discussion of Lasch’s views, see this interview.)

I have two reservations about Jenson’s views here. The first is that he seems a bit too sanguine about political control of the economy. For all the familiar reasons, subjecting economic life to the dictates of a political class can easily lead to corruption, inefficiency and outright oppression. However, in fairness to Jenson, he elsewhere says that a political corollary should be an increase in direct democracy, so that the people who are affected would be the ones making the decisions (and this, presumably, would require a significant measure of political decentralization to be feasible).

My second concern is that Jenson (and Lasch) is too dismissive of the value of liberal freedom – i.e. the preservation of sphere of private action where one is not subject to the community but is free to do as one chooses. Anti-liberal thinkers like to point out that liberal freedom leaves us free to choose, but doesn’t tell what we should choose. But this seems to miss the point. Just because something doesn’t give us everything we need doesn’t mean it’s of no value whatsoever. Something may be a necessary condition of living a good life, even if it’s not sufficient.