Risk assessment

That process is not easy, especially in a culture that offers those of us who are privileged a steady stream of rewards for suppressing these thoughts and not facing these struggles. It is easy to turn away from injustice and turn to supermarkets with endless shelves of food, to glasses overflowing with wine, to television’s stories that lull us to sleep on those nights when food and drink have not erased completely our troubling thoughts of the world.

It’s also not easy to speak prophetically because in unjust systems the people who carry out the system’s orders usually don’t seem to be bad people. The corporate CEO who throws workers out of their jobs to increase profits also is a great softball coach on the weekends. The colonel who orders cluster bombs dropped in civilian areas, ensuring that children will die for years to come, also is a caring parent. The real estate developer who destroys habitat to put up McMansions also keeps a lovely garden at home. And all of them, no doubt, contribute generously to their churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. Many of us, in fact, do jobs that we know contribute to the unjust distribution of resources and the steady erosion of the planet’s ability to sustain life. I don’t exempt myself from this; I work at the University of Texas at Austin, where -- no matter how much critical material I teach in my courses -- I help legitimate an ideological factory system that certifies students to go off in the world and fire those workers, drop those bombs, and destroy that habitat.

So how are we to find the strength to speak in the prophetic voice? The answer is in the collective. Unless one is truly a saint, it is difficult to resist all the temptations and confront self and others without support. We think of prophets as lonely figures who have stepped out, or been cast out, of a society for speaking the truth bluntly. But even if an occasional idiosyncratic figure can speak from such a solitary place, most of us cannot endure that kind of isolation. So, we must speak prophetically together, not in unison or in lockstep -- speaking prophetically means speaking from one’s own heart, which will mean our voices are always distinctive -- but in solidarity.

But even when we are surrounded by those who share our concerns for the world and for each other, there are always risks if we are to take up this role. To claim the prophetic voice that is in each of us, we have to assess those risks so that we can deal with them sensibly. Here I want to borrow from an exercise developed by Allan G. Johnson.[4] At a conference for activists working on issues around racial justice, Johnson posed three questions about risk. My slightly modified version of his list is:

1.      What are the risks you would have to take (or have taken) if you actively work for social justice in a way that is self-critical and challenges powerful institutions and people?

2.      What are the risks if you don’t do that work?

3.      If you take the risks in #1, in order to survive and thrive what do you need from:

·         yourself

·         others

·         institutions and organizations (public and private)

When people with relatively high levels of privilege do not make a conscious attempt to assess accurately these things, we tend to overestimate the risks of acting and underestimate the risks of not acting. In other words, privilege makes it easy to avoid our responsibilities. So, it’s important for us to consider these questions carefully, not just for what we learn about ourselves but to help us in reaching out to others. We need support, and others need us to support them, to understand the risks they face. We need each other to encourage us to take risks.

The prophetic path to love

We live in a society that appears to be awash in political talk and religious activity. But, in fact, we live in a deeply depoliticized society, full of political chatter on cable TV but lacking spaces in which we can have meaningful discussions about how to address problems that politicians often ignore. We live in a largely soulless culture in which megachurches flourish, but many of us search for something beyond doctrine and dogma to help us answer questions that preachers often ignore. We live in a world in which politics is too often little more than public spectacle and religion is too easily cordoned off as a private matter.

In such a society, we don’t need more politicians who avoid the pressing problems that have no apparent solutions. We don’t need more preachers afraid of the questions that go beyond the available answers. And we don’t need a prophet. We need prophets, ordinary people like us who are willing to tap into the prophetic voice that I believe is within us all.

To speak in that voice is not to claim exclusive insight or definitive knowledge; it is not to speak arrogantly. To speak in the prophetic voice is not to proclaim the truth self-righteously but to claim our rightful place in the collective struggle to understand the truth, which we do in order to deepen our capacity to love. This we should never forget: We seek the prophetic voice within us to allow us to love more fully, something that Paul understood. When we call out injustice, when we find the courage to speak truths in a fallen world, it can be easy to be consumed by our anger and our grief, to lose track of that love. I know this, painfully, from experience.

So, as we go forward to find the courage to speak prophetically, we should hold onto these words from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians:

Let us seek knowledge. Pray that we stay strong in our faith in each other, that we help each other find the courage to speak prophetically. But, more than anything, let us remember to keep our hearts open so that we do not lose the capacity to love, always more. Let us leave here today taking seriously -- as if our lives depended on it -- a question posed in song by one among us who regularly dares to speak in the prophetic voice, Michael Franti:

“Is your love enough, or can you love some more?”[5]

======================
[1] Wes Jackson, “Toward an Ignorance-Based Worldview,” The Land Report, Spring 2005, pp. 14-16.

[2] For more on this, see my 2003 interview with Wes Jackson.

[3] Karl Marx, letter to Arnold Ruge, September 1843. 

[4] Johnson has written two widely used texts about power and privilege: The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005); and Privilege, Power, and Difference, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005).

[5] Michael Franti and Spearhead, “Is Love Enough?” from the 2006 CD “Yell Fire!” That question also runs throughout Franti’s video documenting his trip to Iraq, Palestine, and Israel, “I Know I’m Not Alone,”

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