|
This is a story about retrieving Matthew 5:14 from the cult of American exceptionalism and from the globe-flattening neoliberal economic (dis)order that eventually drew strength from that narrative. After all, Ronald Reagan, an architect of Milton Friedman’s desolate free-market revolution, never tired of invoking Matthew’s image of a “city on a hill” to justify it. He used that metaphor on the eve of his election in 1980, and then again in his presidential farewell speech in 1989.
This, then, is the story of how Jesus’ profoundly hopeful message that human beings, through their good work together, can become beacons of light in a darkening world, was used to usher in a flattened picture of human beings as individually atomized, self-interested preference-maximizers: homo economicus.
Jason Blakely of Pepperdine University tells this story with exceptional clarity in We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power. He shows how the social sciences, captivated by the mathematical precision of the natural sciences, came to tell a particular kind of story: one that reduced human beings to simple, interchangeable atoms, because their theoretical goals—prediction, control, certainty—required that people be nothing more than pliant, manipulable objects. Human beings thus became billiard balls in a purportedly scientific theory of causal determination.
Economics led the way, giving us the image of the human being as “consumer”:
The consumer (as much an assemblage of facts as a person) was routinely interrogated via complex data and mathematical calculations…. Political parties, businesses, corporations, and other organizations all sought to predict the behavior of this composite representative who was at once a social scientific everyman and a nobody. (9)
But the story gets worse, because of what Blakely calls the “double hermeneutic effect.” Through popular books like Freakonomics, we were encouraged to accept these shallow theories as neutral, scientific descriptions of the world, rather than as reality-shaping interpretations. Believing them to be scientific fact, we began to reshape reality in their image, increasingly understanding ourselves according to this latest model of what passes for scientific truth. (29–31)
The result, Blakely argues, was “a radically new vision of individuals who lacked any sentiments of empathy, fellow feeling, or social solidarity” (35). Social science thereby imagined a radically new kind of society under the pretext of merely describing it (35). Worse still, this new vision made it increasingly difficult to imagine “collective movements and forms of association that broke out of the individualistic, market polis mode,” since that mode came to appear inescapable. (39)
So how do we evade the pincers of this harmful version of the double hermeneutic effect?
Blakely suggests that the cure is hidden in the poison itself. The only reason human beings can reshape reality in such profound ways is because we are meaning-making, story-telling creatures. The problem is not that social science tells a story, but that it too often tells a bad one—and then hides its narrative nature by pretending not to be telling a story at all.
Blakely calls our present situation, then, a “crisis of narrative,” both because we fail to recognize that this economic model is a story, and because we thereby fail to see it as a bad one:
The story of society and human agency as mechanics, susceptible to control and prediction by experts akin to those in the natural sciences, is a bad story. It is a bad story because it cannot accomplish what it promises (prediction). It is a bad story because it orients us toward manipulating the people around us as if they were objects (technocracy). And it is a bad story because it makes us particularly inarticulate and ill-equipped to deal with the world and the moral and political dimensions of our actions. (132)
By accepting the story of homo economicus, we are selling ourselves short. So, let’s stop doing that and instead tell a better story—perhaps even recover the one we began with: the story of the counter-kingdom Jesus proclaims from the mount. Following Christ’s example, let’s tell each other stories that lift the poor, the mourners, the meek, the justice seekers, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and the crucified of history.
Let’s live out of our Maker’s story of healing and blessing and have that become the truth that shapes our reality, thereby properly honouring and stewarding our Creator’s good and precious craft. We may have built reality, but we did not make the world. Our stories, then, need to take their cue from something that moves beyond our desire to manipulate, predict, and control the world, beyond our drive to reduce everything to what we think we have enclosed within our conceptual and technological fists.
Living out of this infinitely better story, we might finally live up to Christ’s image of the city on a hill, a city that will only gleam once everyone, not just the increasingly few victors of a free-market race to the bottom, is given the chance to let their dim light shine.
To quote a great line in a song from the band Soul Asylum (who also titled one of their albums “Let Your Dim Light Shine”)—a song about the desperate need to break out of our self-imposed loneliness and isolation: “In a world frozen over with overexposure, let’s talk it over, let’s go out and paint the town!”
Shalom,
Ron Kuipers
Read and interact with this reflection on Substack.
| 
