Survival in the Gig Economy
Freedom from the nine-to-five or another form of exploitation? The gig economy is both!
Book gives you the truth about about what to expect and helps you make a plan when nothing is predictable.
Freedom from the nine-to-five or another form of exploitation? The gig economy is both!
Book gives you the truth about about what to expect and helps you make a plan when nothing is predictable.
Walter Brueggeman is a prolific Old Testament scholar who advocates for a broader reading of the bible than what we may hear from some preachers. Most of religious “preaching” addresses our relationships to the creator, to our own prophet (Jesus, Muhammad) and to each other. That is, sermons tell us how we are to conduct ourselves in our individual lives. In God, Neighbor, Empire, Brueggemann expands the concept of “how to live” to societies at large, particularly with respect to political economies.
Bruggeman begins with the idea that God mediates the relationship of humans living in empire and calls us to a greater covenant of neighborliness. We see the historical “patterns of political economy” that recur in the Old Testament: Pharoah in Egypt, the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires, Alexander the Great and finally Rome in the time of Jesus. Bruggeman documents the story of Exodus and God’s promises to his people as the “counter-text” to subvert the narrative of empire.
Both ancient and modern empires have three characteristics to identity them: (1) they exist to extract wealth from the vulnerable and redirect it to the powerful; (2) everything and everyone is reduced to a commodity which can be bought and sold; and (3) empires built on extraction and commodification are willing to commit violence (from the soft oppression of taxes and confiscatory trade to slavery and war) to maintain the former.
The story of God’s relationship with the Israelites is not fixed. God can be demanding—of obedience, worship and sacrifice. But God’s relationship is rooted in a fidelity that pertains to the common good, which is expressed as shalom. God promised Abraham land, people and even a dynasty in return for commitment to Torah. Israel’s relationship with God made it different from the usual “relationships” defined by wealth, power and control.
The counternarrative of empire is “neighbor.” The Sermon on the Mount admonishes us to “love our neighbor as ourselves.” Most of us think about “neighbors” as the folks who live in our communities. But the concept of who is our neighbor expands–throughout the books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus–to include immigrants, strangers, and aliens. In the Gospel of Matthew, this command now includes our enemy.
Most of us have heard these readings about loving our neighbor. We need not romanticize “neighbor” as one with whom we share intimacy. Rather, the term refers to members who share a common destiny and so are ordered according to a common good, a commonality that requires that their relationship be other than that of rivals, competitors or threats.
Bruggeman applies the concept of neighbor to our political economy and the common good. In God’s relationship with the Israelites, “…common good is to provide safety and food, to generate the elemental sustenance that Israel could not generate for itself…the common good requires investment in the neighborhood, and attentiveness to the neighbors, most particularly the neighbor left vulnerable, unprotected, and in need” (hence all the references to widows and orphans). If God is not free to ignore the plight of humanity, we are also not free to “seek a self-indulgent well-being” and abandon the community.
Bruggeman discusses the concepts of labor and agency. Even empires are not run solely by the emperor, but by human agents who can exercise discretion in how they serve both the empire and the people within it. That is, to some extent we are all “co-creators” with the Creator, imbued with the gift of our own free will. Although most of us have to work to provide for our own survival needs, we have some choice (agency) in what type of work we do. Do we choose work that serves empire (the wealthy and powerful) or our neighbors?
Agency is “…the irreducible, inscrutable relationality of the traditional summons not only of God as agent but human agents as well…[and] human agents may set limits on chaos as did the creator God.” Social chaos arises when the vulnerable are left undefended and exposed to the confiscatory propensity of, as Jeremiah calls them, ‘“scoundrels.’”
The converse of whether our work serves empire or neighbor is whether empire honors human labor, particularly the forms of labor that are typically devalued (and thus usually performed by women and persons lower in the social hierarchy). According to Bruggeman, the intent of the “holiness tradition” is to avoid the “profanation that fails to respect, honor, or take seriously the deep mystery of the public good and the neighbors who inhabit it.”
Society becomes “profaned” when “life becomes cheap, neighbors become dispensable, and the common good becomes subject to cynical distortion.” The folks who perform the holiest of labors—caretaking (of children, elderly, sick and infirm), food preparation, cleaning—are treated as expendable. Some of us still remember the plight of underpaid and overworked so-called “essential” workers during the Covid pandemic. Profanity is thus not about pornography as most of us know it, but “the pornography of torture, of hunger amid affluence, of exploitation amid prosperity, of drones, and of the cynical power of the haves against the have-nots.”
“There are no ‘neighbors’ in the empire. There are only threats, allies of convenience, and dispensable labor.”
Societies are ordered by rules, or laws, which set limits and restrain the forces of chaos. Restraint can be accomplished by custom and social expectation in a small community, but larger communities require regulation—that can only be enacted by human agents, acting in accordance within prescribed rules and laws, as well as prevailing social norms.
Many of us view the Old Testament as all about The Law. God hands down the Ten Commandments to Moses, which are carved in stone and seemingly permanent. Indeed, the entire books of Exodus and Deuteronomy are replete with very specific legal proscriptions—along with the threat of punishment for disobedience. Failure to obey the Lord by diligently observing all his commandments and decrees would result in punishment. And this punishment was also described in excruciating detail, including famine and hunger so severe that mothers would eat their own children (Deuteronomy 28: 57)
But Brueggeman argues that the Law is more than just a set of rigid rules cast in stone for all eternity. He also points out that the Ten Commandments are also “counter commands to the commands or Pharoah…They are counter commands to every effort at totalizing, including the totalism of anti-neighborly economics in our own time, and totalizing orthodoxies that know too much of wounding truth.”
“The law is not an abstract system or a scheme of rules…but an inherently unstable structure of thought and expression. It is built upon a distinct set of dynamic, dialogic tensions…Legal thought is not the top-down elaboration of the meaning of a set of rules, by a process of logic or ends-means rationality, nor is it a pattern of conduct that can be adequately represented and understood in the language of social science…It is a way of managing the relations between what looks like a system and many dimensions of actual life…I have been resisting an image of law as rules and policy, but behind those things is a deeper vision: of law as abstract, mechanical, impersonal, essentially bureaucratic in nature, narrowing rather than broadening human capacity for experience, understanding, imagination, and empathy.”
“Ordinary common theology is alive and well and pervasive among us. It is a sanction against those who do not shape up and perform. It is theology that serves as a confirmation for those who live blessed lives of prosperity because they kept “Torah.” It is a tool of reprimand and punishment for those who do not measure up and are left behind—we dare say, willfully left behind—and so it propels the “war on the poor.” We manage, in our anxiety, to infuse a bit of common theology, to infuse a bit of common theology into the most self-serving of all Christian celebrations. And it ends with coal to bad children, with excommunication for the lingering poor in the economy.”
The Law is tempered by Justice—a related, but ironically not the same thing—and Grace. Brueggeman speaks of Justice as “God’s preferential option for the poor…justice as order tends to be from above, and so not attentive or attuned to the lesser folk who make the economy work…The king is to be the great equalizer (speaking of equity!) who functions on behalf of the vulnerable and resourceless in order that they can participate in the luxurious generosity of creation over which the king presides. It is clear that the royal theology of Jerusalem wants to imagine such a human agent who will do that work.”
Justice and Grace are theological constructs that guarantee a social order that does not devolve into social control. That is, they provide a higher model of sociopolitical order for human governance: “Ordinary common theology has no place for the gracious slippage of a reach beyond quid pro quo…The grace of God marks the abundance of the world, the well-being of Israel, the practice of public policy, and the dispatch of persons in their capacity to form and sustain a viable human community in the interest of the common good.”
The book of Exodus and the story of Joseph is “a tale of abundance, anxiety, scarcity, accumulation, monopoly, and eventually violence in a context where there is no regulatory or restraining force. The narrative provides an angle on injustice from which to consider the urgency of justice. Injustice is the capacity to confiscate what belongs to another in order to satisfy an anxiety which, in the process, is free to reduce the losers to helpless victims who are without recourse.”
“Moses is determined that in the covenantal neighborhood there can be no permanent underclass, that conviction requires cancellation of debts, the curbing of economic predation, and the full economic participation and well-being of those who have been lost in the economic shuffle.”
God exhibits Grace each time Israel’s disobedience is forgiven and the covenant is renewed. Grace (sometimes described as forgiveness) is what renews relationship—the proverbial second (or third or more) chance. “In a world of such divinely given chances, social relationships are never quid pro quo; they are marked by a reach beyond that becomes an ethic of grace.”
A corollary to Brueggeman’s theory of “neighbor” is the argument that the drive to accumulate operates to disrupt, distort and corrupt community relations. “There is, however, also written a warning against accumulation, for accumulation will eventuate in Pharoah and transpose the bread of abundance into the bread of parsimony and soon into bondage. And the reason is that some will have too much and they think they are the bakers.”
When there is no accumulation, there is also no shortage. Everyone has enough because no one has too much. This is a “contest” that is as old as Pharoah and as contemporary as oligarchy. “It is a contest between Pharaonic anxiety expressed in the nightmarish sequence of scarcity, accumulation, monopoly, and violence, juxtaposed to emancipatory abundance. In our own time, I judge that the role of totalism is played in our society by corporate capitalism, propelled by market ideology, inured to individualism, sustained by a strong military, and legitimated by the entitlement of patriotic exceptionalism…That ideology is indeed totalizing, it claims that there is no alternative. With only a little imagination, we can see Pharaonic impulses being reperformed, because the ones with the most are the ones who worry about running out for lack of bricks, and that in turn propels accumulation, wherein a few have nearly acquired a monopoly, with violence against others carefully disguised.”
“Pharoah was inconceivable without his brick quotas, his exhibits of wealth, his storehouses of monopoly, and his work force of cheap labor that made it all possible….these divine expectations and summons are about generative and sustainable neighborliness….Surely in Pharoah’s Egypt there were no neighbors.”
Like empire, God is also “tempted by totalism” and so interpersonal commitments should be “kept under review and pushed relentlessly in new directions.” God keeps listening, and urges us to do the same. For us, to “keep listening” means that the circle of neighborliness becomes more radical and inclusive. We see the emergence of God’s compassion in the interpretive process and the expansion of neighborliness throughout scripture.
We should not limit acts of neighborliness to individuals, but expand it to include socio-political structures and cultural norms that promote taking care of each other. “With the loss of the common good, the nullification of “society” by Margaret Thatcher, and the epidemic of privatization all around us, the notion of human agency in the public domain is in retreat.”
“Instead of economic accumulation, spend time pondering the rules of neighborliness written in the Torah. Attention to these rules of neighborliness will keep one mindful of the powerful self as neighbor who will not exalt self over the members of the community.”
Brueggeman’s writing is lyrical, yet probably too esoteric for most readers. It also presumes a familiarity with scripture that most folks who are not preachers, rabbis, or bible scholars do not possess. Yet, his message is sorely needed today, especially in a culture where a large number of Christians in America (as well as Israeli Jews and Arab Muslims—members of the other Abrahamic faiths) subscribe to the ideologies of empire and domination rather than neighborliness. It would be good to see an interfaith group find a way to popularize Brueggeman’s thesis to make it accessible to faith communities.