Unsettling Dialogue (part 3)

We have been wrong to believe that competition invariably results in the triumph of the best.

Divided, body and soul, man and woman, producer and consumer, nature and technology, city and country are thrown into competition with one another. And none of these competitions is ever resolved in the triumph of one competitor, but only in the exhaustion of both.

For our healing we have on our side one great force: the power of Creation, 

with good care, with kindly use, to heal itself.

-Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

What if I told you that the most important Biblical concept outside of: Love God, Love each other, is that we ought to live within boundaries; would you believe me?  I know it sounds heretical to various sorts of people; people who believe that God is like a super-blessing machine that just wants to give you everything you ever wanted; also people who believe that God wants us to keep on filling the earth and subduing it, and even people who believe that God is cheering us on past every obstacle we face in the world.  What if I told you that God is a big fan of limits and boundaries and absolutely a fan of the word "enough?" And it's not because God is a big cosmic killjoy either, it's because God knows, better than any of us ever will, how Creation works.

In the past week certain clergy from around the country have been protesting what the GOP is calling "Tax Reform" with the tag #2000verses, which of course means 2000 verses of Scripture.  What the 2000 verses refer to are verses from Genesis to Revelation that exhort us to care for the poor.  There is a remarkable amount of material that is founded on a simple idea that was put out in the laws of Leviticus 19: 9-10:

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest.  You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes from your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien; I am the Lord your God.

This section of Leviticus has lots of fun rules in it, some of which we absolutely disregard, and some of which we like to hold on to in a highly selective manner, but the thing about how you treat others that is defined here rises up out of the random commandments about types of cloth, haircuts and tattoos and gets enshrined in the words of the Psalms, the Prophets and Jesus the Christ.  What is being reflected in the Law is the Creation concept of margins.  Margins are the "solution" that Berry offers up to many of the woes that afflict us, and I have to say I rather strongly agree.  Giving yourself and your neighbors room to breath, and some cushion from calamity.  Living within a set of boundaries where you are not constantly "up against it," isn't that what many of us would define as happiness?
Most of us live our lives in search of that goal, to have enough, to have a home, and a certain number of material things, to have a job that gives us access to those material things but also allows us some "free time." This is not a modern materialist invention, but rather the goal of human endeavor from the beginning of time, even back in the early days of hunter gatherer human society, before books, and even before agriculture, humans took time to paint things in caves and carve things into rocks, these were not necessary endeavors, they were "marginal" activities, things done in the extra space and time life provided.
Tribal societies, where life could be decidedly brutish and short, developed traditions of storytelling that were as important to their identity as passing on practical knowledge about how to hunt and make tools. I think it is fair to say that a fulfilling human life must be about more than just survival.  Margins provide us with that capability, and in a complete understanding of the Scriptures you will notice that margins are supposed to be for everyone, not just the lucky few.  Whether it is the legal codes about gleanings, or prophecies of woe to those who allow their greed to afflict the world, or Jesus telling Martha that Mary did the right thing by just sitting and listening instead of being busily efficient, margins are a big deal in the Word.
If your theology doesn't deal with margins and if your ethical practice idolizes efficiency over compassion, you are not living according to the Word.  Notice too, that these laws were not just challenges for individuals, they were codified into a set of practices that were meant to shape a community.  The prophets are pretty clear that the king was supposed to play by these rules as well as the common shepherds, thus when we shape our societies, it would behoove us to consider margins, not maximum efficiency.
This is a fatal flaw in unmitigated capitalism.  As Wendell says, this endless competition leaves us all exhausted eventually.  We have wisdom that tells us this is not a good thing and it goes back a very long way, but even more recently in the very Constitution that so many who rabidly endorse capitalism practically treat as holy canon, we find the following at the very top of the page:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.

You can read that and focus on liberty that allows you to look out for number one if you want, but I think the framers of that document, flawed though they may have been, had a higher goal in mind: Commonweal, it's an old word, but it's a word that I think we need to come around to once again.  This is about more than just tax reform, but it is reflected in the self-admitted goal of the direction the GOP has been moving us: market driven, lean government, less taxes, less regulations and ultimately fewer margins, survival of the fittest, the ultimate dream of capitalism, and a brutal way of being a human society.
Friedrich Nietzsche, not exactly a man known for his sunny sentimentality even recognizes that human life needs to rise above this sort of nihilism:

Imagine being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power, how could you live according to this indifference? Living, is that not precisely wanting to be different? 

Margins are human way of dealing with nature's wastefulness and her indifference. We use margins, in our spiritual lives, in our communities and in our use of the natural world in order to be healthy.  We need margins so that we have some shock absorption when we run into a limit. In the story of the Garden of Eden, God prescribes a limit for Adam and Eve, which they promptly violate.  It was only one limit and they could not live within it, which sets up a rather epic scale for this whole debate.  There were no marginal trees in Eden, only good and evil, and we proved ourselves incapable of dealing with that sort of hard boundary.
If we do not leave ourselves margins we will always be cast out of the garden. Margins have always been a good idea for promoting commonweal. They provide for people on the margins for sure, but they also insulate us all from the precarious uncertainty and indifference of nature.  We are all better off with margins than without them.