So, I led a
discussion on Sunday using the questions I listed in the last post as a general
outline. Lots of discussion. Many insightful ideas on what’s preventing us from
establishing Zion and what we can do to overcome these obstacles. I’ll share a
few thoughts here on the third through sixth questions, about dwelling in
righteousness and eliminating poverty.
First, though,
another thought about what prevents us from being of one heart and one mind.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle to unity is incomplete information (or just plain
bad information). If we had all knowledge, we would see things clearly and
would likely agree on everything. But the nature of mortality is ignorance
about most things. We also have lots of information that is simply inaccurate.
And then there’s the problem of people who want poor information, who only want
to confirm their prejudices and preconceptions. So, better information is one
key to creating greater unity.
But what about
righteousness? What prevents us from dwelling in righteousness? Well, the usual
suspects show up here. Temptation, sin, ignorance. I would also throw in bad
laws. The more important question, I believe, is, what can we do to become more
righteous? It’s pretty straightforward to make ourselves more righteous (not
easy, but straightforward). But how do we get other people to be more
righteous? How do parents get their children to be more righteous? Ah, that old
problem. Well, even our Heavenly Father didn’t have great success on that
count. We can list the usual ideas—teach correct principles, use love and
compassion rather than criticism—but these methods have only limited
effectiveness, because of that pesky thing called agency. This seems to be a
rather large obstacle to creating a true Zion society. I suppose you could just
kick everyone out who doesn’t fall in line, but in our modern society, where
the Church is embedded in a variety of social and economic systems, we can’t
create Zion isolated from the circumstances we find ourselves in. And as
societies, we can’t simply exclude half the population. Where would we send
them? Short of fleeing to some remote location where only the righteously
inclined will gather, this appears to be an impossible requirement. And as I
mentioned above, even Heavenly Father struggled with this. Which brings up the
question of how God will maintain order and peace in his eternal kingdoms in
the hereafter, particularly the telestial and terrestrial. Of course, that’s
well beyond the scope of this post.
So let’s move on
to the final characteristic of Zion: no poor. What are some of the causes of
poverty? I was surprised and pleased that in two different wards where I asked
this question, nobody mentioned laziness, which is a common explanation among
some conservatives. Yes, there are a few people who are poor because they are
lazy. But they are a minority, perhaps even a small minority. Other causes?
Physical illness, disability, age, mental illness, lack of decent-paying jobs,
lack of education or job-related skills, and even bad luck. Which reminds me of
an experience I once had.
Back in 1999,
Church magazines sent me to Quebec to write a story about the Montreal Homeless
Choir. A young dental technician from France, Pierre Anthian, had moved to
Montreal to get married. The engagement fell apart, but Pierre stayed. Because
his mother had taught him to serve the less fortunate, he found a local
homeless shelter/food kitchen and volunteered. But after a while he grew
frustrated. Giving out meals was a short-term fix, he knew, but it wasn’t doing
anything to create real change. So he cooked up an idea. He had been trained in
the conservatories of Paris and Pau, and this background led him to the idea of
forming a choir of homeless men. There was no requirement that the choir
members had to be able to carry a tune. He advertised, and a few men showed up
to practice. Then a few more. Eventually he had seventeen men who would follow
his simple rules.
When they were
ready, more or less, they went to the busiest Metro station in Montreal and
started singing. Soon a crowd gathered, and people started dropping money into
the hat Pierre had place in front of the choir. They became a news story. They
sang regularly in the subway, but they also started getting invitations to sing
at schools and businesses. They even performed at an NHL game. The money they
earned from these appearances they donated to the food kitchen. The money they
received in the subway station Pierre split among the seventeen singers. They
earned enough to be able to afford apartments and food. Pierre’s idea got
seventeen men off the street.
He told me one
day that most of these men were criminals. Because of their circumstances, they
had lived difficult lives. “Let’s just say thievery and attempted murder are
not the worst offenses on the list,” Pierre once told a reporter. “And they are
my friends.” He told me that the primary difference between himself and these
men was just bad luck. Sometimes that’s all it takes. One bad break, and your
life can spiral out of control. Pierre had given his life to serving these men.
He gave up his business making dentures and devoted his time to the choir. The
homeless shelter provided him a small living allowance so he could do this
work.1
But seventeen is
a drop in the bucket of floundering humanity. There are millions in America who
are living in poverty and who don’t have a Pierre Anthian to rescue them. So, how
do we eliminate poverty? One homeless choir at a time?
I think we
sometimes get the idea that if we just live the gospel, Zion will somehow
magically happen. Voila! No more poor. But I think this is naïve in the
extreme. In any society, there will always be people who are sick, disabled,
mentally ill, or poorly qualified for decent-paying work. There will always be
people who experience bad luck. And sometimes the economy will dip into
recession, which will tip millions of people into unemployment. To assume that
there is some sort of solution to these circumstances that does not involve
government is simply absurd. Most Mormons don’t even consider the notion that
the city of Enoch had a government. And it undoubtedly had laws prohibiting the
hoarding of wealth. Joseph Smith and Brigham Young tried to establish Zion in a
variety of ways. But they always implemented economic restrictions that
attempted to equalize wealth.
One of the causes
of poverty that is more systemic than individual is the concentration of
wealth. Today we are experiencing historic levels of economic inequality, and
despite what some conservatives like to claim, this is indeed a cause of
poverty, and it is unsustainable. All you have to do is plot the current trends
on a chart to see that where we are heading is socially destructive and
economically disastrous. But this problem is not unique to twenty-first-century
America.
In 1875, Brigham
Young and thirteen members of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve issued
a statement regarding the cooperative movement, particularly Zion’s Cooperative
Mercantile Institution, which the Church established to promote economic
equality and stand against the inroads of American capitalism that had come
with the railroad in 1869. It reads, in part:
The experience of mankind has shown
that the people of communities and nations among whom wealth is the most
equally distributed, enjoy the largest degree of liberty, are the least exposed
to tyranny and oppression and suffer the least from luxurious habits which
beget vice. . . . One of the great evils with which our own nation is menaced
at the present time is the wonderful growth of wealth in the hands of a
comparatively few individuals. The very liberties for which our fathers
contended so steadfastly and courageously, and which they bequeathed to us as a
priceless legacy, are endangered by the monstrous power which this accumulation
of wealth gives to a few individuals and a few powerful corporations. . . . It
threatens to give shape to the legislation, both state and national, of the
entire country. If this evil should not be checked, and measures not taken to
prevent the continued enormous growth of riches among the class already rich,
and the painful increase of destitution and want among the poor, the nation is
likely to be overtaken by disaster; for, according to history, such a tendency
among nations once powerful was the sure precursor of ruin.2
A fitting warning
for our day. There are a couple of ways to correct this imbalance. One is to
tax massive wealth inequality out of existence to help lift up the lower levels
of society. And progressive taxation will always be necessary as long as there
are members of society who are sick, disabled, aged, mentally ill, or otherwise
unable to provide for themselves. Charity is never sufficient to meet these
needs. But there is another way we can equalize wealth in society that does not
involve taxation. It is actually to create the sort of capitalism Adam Smith
and other worldly philosophers envisioned. William Greider put it well: “The
problem is not that capital is privately owned, as Marx supposed. The problem
is that most people don’t own any.”3
In our current
system, those who actually create the products and sell them, as well as those
who fill support functions in businesses do not receive a proportionate share
of the wealth they create. This is because they do not share in the ownership
of the businesses where they work. Consequently, the profits all go to
investors and executives. This creates a dual wage system. One group of people is
paid as much as possible; the other group is paid as little as possible (a “competitive”
wage, we call it). This system is designed to create increasing inequality. But
consider Michael Ventura’s perspective on this system:
As a worker, I am not an “operating
cost.” I am how the job gets done. I am the job. I am the company. . . . I’m
willing to take my lumps in a world in which little is certain, but I deserve a
say. Not just some cosmetic “input,” but significant power in good times or
bad. A place at the table where decisions are made. Nothing less is fair. So
nothing less is moral. . . . It takes more than investment and management to
make a company live. It takes the labor, skill, and talent of the people who do
the company’s work. Isn’t that an investment? Doesn’t it deserve a fair return,
a voice, a share of the power? . . . If the people who do the work don’t own
some part of the product, and don’t have any power over what happens to their
enterprise—they are being robbed. You are being robbed. And don’t think for a
minute that those who are robbing you don’t know they are robbing you. They
know how much they get from you and how little they give back. They are
thieves. They are stealing your life.4
Sharing
ownership of businesses with workers would do more to equalize wealth in our
modern society than any other method. This is not communism. It is capitalism
as it was initially intended to be. How exactly the surviving Lehites achieved
a society with not just no poor, but where “there were not rich and poor” (4
Ne. 1:3) is not explained in the Book of Mormon, but it certainly didn’t come
about by allowing some people to own the time and labor of others or to treat
them as “human resources” or “commodities.”
This
last section was not part of my lesson on Sunday. Not nearly enough time. And
it’s probably not appropriate for a priesthood meeting. But maybe it is. If we’re
serious about establishing Zion, we need to consider the practical aspects of
what we will need to do to accomplish this herculean task. It’s not going to
happen by magic.
_______________________
1. See Roger Terry, “The Least of These,” Liahona (December 2000), https://www.lds.org/study/liahona/2000/12/the-least-of-these?lang=eng.
2. James R. Clark, comp., Messages
of the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
6 vols. (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1965–75), 2:267–72.
3. William Greider, One
World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism (New York:
Touchstone, 1997), 416.
4. Michael Ventura, “Someone Is Stealing Your Life,” Utne Reader (July/August 1991); 78, 80,
reprinted from the L.A. Weekly.
