Theology Corner: May 2009

The Dangers of Reticence

In the beginning I thought, if economists were morally responsible, they would occasionally stay quiet. They tell the public that the recession is partly caused by public pessimism. Then, it seems, they say everything they can to make the public feel economically pessimistic.

Why, in the interests of keeping their diagnosis from contributing to the disease, could economists not just, please, for awhile, stifle their pessimism . . . like, practice the great, under-rated virtue of omission?

But how can we say this without contradicting ourselves? We have already criticized economists for not telling us something (that the bubble would soon burst). Can we now criticize them for telling us something?

Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov titled his autobiography Speak, Memory. Economists ought to write a candid, running biography of the U.S. economy, titling it, Speak, Economy--and they ought to let the economy do just that day after day, without allowing it to stay silent about anything.

Economists have much at stake. The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently wrote, "According to World Bank estimates, the global economic crisis will cause an additional 22 children to die per hour, throughout all of 2009"--and he added that the World Bank admitted it might be twice that. All economists were largely in the dark, but some thought they saw this coming and said too little. Others hardly tried to see what was coming, and they said almost nothing. Either way, governments and businesspeople lacked the truth they needed to stop this slaying of children--and most economists were, at least, slightly implicated.

Theologians also have much at stake, as they prepare us for the next great spiritual recession (triggered, perhaps, by a new disregard for personal meaning and for a basis for that meaning). Perhaps we should demand that they be less reticent about what has happened and what might happen.

For example, they tell us that, because God acts in history, some good things happen that would not otherwise happen, because we alone could never make them happen. There must be at work everywhere a Good that is not our own good--a "Good not our own," as one theologian put it. But very bad things also happen, such as 22 innocent children dying every hour. But here theologians switch their logic, saying that God does not act in the history of calamity, leaving only humans and nature to blame--omitting that, perhaps, because God acts in history, some bad things happen that would not otherwise happen. Theologians, it appears, may be selectively silent about the moral status of the powers they call divine.

Yes, theologians see only through a fog, and economists have fogs of their own. Neither, perhaps, is careful enough to provide a complete picture, which is to say that both are too often silent. Important things are foggy enough as it is, so that staying silent only makes things worse.

We may be better equipped to take care of ourselves if we recognize that we live in a world whose Depth, or Ultimate Power, as Ernest Hemingway and many others have said, may not be entirely fair. We might perform better if we knew that the divine fields of force may be great at creation and redemption but only so-so at morality.

— William Dean, Theologian in Residence