By LeRoy Lawson
Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).
Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (New York: Hyperion, 2009).
Harvey Cox, The Future of Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2009).
Here”s the thing about reading: it”s addictive. Read a good book and it whets your appetite to read more on the subject, or by the author, or to satisfy your curiosity. This month”s column is mostly about that curiosity.
Bearing the Brunt
The Forgotten Man is a good example. In a recent column I reviewed David Wessel”s In Fed We Trust, his rather breathtaking narrative of the recent economic collapse and the role of Ben Bernanke”s Federal Reserve (along with the Treasury Department and other agencies) in preventing the meltdown of the world”s most robust economy. Wessel drew many parallels between the Great Depression and what he calls The Great Panic of our time.
Although I was born in the Depression (and feared for awhile I might go out in one), most of my knowledge of the 1930s consists of cursory readings of history and the anecdotes its survivors told me. Thanks to them, I still can”t leave food on my plate, not turn off the lights when I leave the room, or take taxis when cheaper train or bus transportation is available. And to pay big bucks to sleep a few hours in a hotel still strikes me as the height of profligacy.
Amity Shlaes”s “forgotten man” is the beleaguered wage earner (or would-be wage earner) who bore the brunt of the Depression. The typical history of the era focuses on the titans of government and Wall Street; Shlaes also cares about the unemployed 25 percent beneath the headlines, the little people in the bread lines.
You can”t read the book without thinking of the beating Wall Street has recently dealt Main Street””and why Main Street cannot get well without a strong Wall Street. Even more may be needed. Wessel reminds us America didn”t really recover its economic equilibrium until we geared up for World War II.
It”s a fascinating read. Don”t let me mislead: you will read about the titans. Franklin Roosevelt dominates the scene. He”s just not the whole story. I recommend Shlaes”s book to my Monday morning quarterbacking friends, the ones who have all the easy answers to today”s dilemmas. Reality seldom yields to bumper-sticker solutions. Not then, and not now.
Hooked on Free
When Chris Anderson”s Free: The Future of a Radical Price appeared, I rushed to read it. Curiosity again. I had earlier devoured his The Long Tail, which offers a new way to look at marketing. In that volume he explains how Amazon, Net-flix, and their ilk ushered in a new concept of selling more by selling less. That is, retailers found a niche in which they could sell (or rent) a large number of items in small quantities rather than large quantities of just a few items (box office blockbusters, publishing”s best sellers). Netflix, for example, carries a huge inventory of movies that will be rented by only a few people each year. That”s good enough. And Amazon does the same with books it sells, and that”s good enough, also. This, says Wired magazine”s editor in chief, is the future of business.
That book was provocative enough that I was curious to learn what he thinks about making money by selling “free.” I learned a lot. Now I understand why telephone companies give away their phones to sell you the service, and merchants offer free shipping when your bill is above a certain limit, and why the razor comes free when you buy the blades, and . . .
We”re hooked on free, that”s why. Not only that, but now the rising Web-addicted generation assumes free as their birthright. Why shouldn”t “pirated” music and CDs and DVDs be free? And where would we be without Google, which provides just about everything for free and in doing so wipes out newspapers, threatens libraries, sinks colleges (if it”s knowledge you want, why go to college when you can Google for it)? Want to see the world? Check with Google Earth to find your destination and with Google Maps to plan your route.
We senior citizens groan about how expensive things are today. But, writes Anderson, “Forty years ago, the principal nutritional problem in America was hunger; now it”s obesity, for which we have the Green Revolution to thank. Forty years ago, charity was dominated by clothing drives for the poor. Now you can get a T-shirt for less than the price of a cup of coffee, thanks to China and global sourcing. So too for toys, gadgets, and commodities of every sort. Even cocaine has pretty much never been cheaper (globalization works in mysterious ways).” And many, many things are free. Welcome to a cheaper new world.
What would our parents think?
Faith vs. Dogma
Harvey Cox has been shaking up religious circles for decades. The author of The Secular City (1965) ignited many an all-night seminary radiator (remember them?) session. There he argued that the church isn”t primarily an institution but is people of faith living in the secular city. God will not be confined to quarters prepared and maintained for him by the religious, he insisted. God lives in the secular as well as sacred realms. Thus the church should be a change agent, a host of revolutionaries acting in God”s name in the secular city. You can imagine the debates.
So I was naturally curious. What”s Cox”s latest “heresy”?
The Future of Faith, published in 2009 to coincide with Cox”s retirement as Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, is proof the veteran theologian hasn”t lost any of his fighting trim. In the beginning, he writes, Jesus was a threat to the Roman Empire, but by the fourth century the descendant church had lost its spiritual relevance. Cox bemoans Christianity”s degradation from a people of faith to an institutionalized religion “clotted into a catalog of beliefs administered by a clerical class.”
But he is not discouraged. In The Future of Faith he spells out his hope for today, convinced that today “faith is resurgent, while dogma (those clotted beliefs) is dying.” He believes “the spiritual, communal, and justice-seeking dimensions of Christianity are now its leading edge as the twenty-first century hurtles forward.” These changes are happening “with similar reformations in the other world religions” as well.
Changes such as these are evidence to Cox that fundamentalism is dying. Today”s headlines sure don”t support his argument. But I heard him out and, given his premises, he makes a pretty good case. I”m just not totally certain of his premises.
His take on the “emerging church” movement is another Cox insight I wasn”t prepared for. “It is nondenominational, decentralized, suspicious of many aspects of the institutional churches, and critical of the suffocating role dogmas have played in Christianity. Like that of the earliest Christians, it is a movement of the Spirit that focuses on following Jesus and striving to actualize the Reign of God.”
See? I told you Cox is good for an old-fashioned theological free-for-all. Too bad the radiators are gone.
What holds my attention is his constant returning to the first century to discover the essence of the Christian faith. What causes me some uneasiness is his lumping of Christianity into a broth with the other major world religions. I don”t always see the similarities he finds among them. But then, reading Cox usually causes me some discomfort.
I suspect a little discomfort is good for the soul.
LeRoy Lawson is international consultant for Christian Missionary Fellowship, a contributing editor to CHRISTIAN STANDARD, and a member of the Publishing Committee. His column appears here at least monthly.
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