# The Lord is King.

# The Lord is King. Naturally religions, too, foster the habit of looking for favors from on high, through both real-world networks that connect the down and out with the onward and upward, and a cosmic model of the ideal patron-client relationship: Jesus loves me, this I know. Riesebrodt (180) argues that much of fundamentalist religion, here and in Iran is a reaction to the encroachments of bureaucracies:

Depersonalized (and therefore morally vacuous) bureaucratic structures appeared to both Protestant and Shi’ite fundamentalists as tyrannical institutions exercising illegitimate power over the individual. Modern large-scale industrial enterprises and unions --“big business” and “big labor”-- as well as the modern state bureaucracy were regarded as reprehensible from a religious-moral point of view. Fundamentalism’s economic ideal is the small enterprise organized along personalistic-patriarchal lines as the cornerstone of an economy regulated by religious moralism.

For that matter, much the same might be said of organized crime in post-Soviet Russia. In any case, if Rieseboldt’s right, no wonder my own reactions are so dulled: I’m a bureaucrat by training and predilection, too risk-averse to be a happy entrepreneur, and quite fearful of interpersonal dependencies.

Authoritarian religion surrounds us here in the States, but the best book I've read is actually about Brazil, Ireland's Kingdoms Come. There, among Catholics, evangelicals, and devotees of Africa-derived religion, church leaders play a key role in connecting the lowliest of their followers with businessmen and bureaucrats who can provide jobs and other favors. Sometimes it's a matter of recommending a needy church member to one more privileged; it may mean mobilizing the charity of the rich to help the poor; at other times the church leaders act as vigorous advocates for their low income constituents dealing with the police, banks, courts and legislatures. To some degree religious groups can hold the rich accountable to the same divine law as the poor.

Ireland cites Padre Cicero, saint and politician of northeastern Brazil in the early years of the last century. This maverick priest "is protector of the law-abiding poor against bandits, against bosses who don't pay, against strangers who exploit simple folk or befuddle them with false law. He finds jobs for hard workers fallen on hard times. He is the instrument through whom God punishes the rich and the poor who, by their immorality, tear apart families and moral community" (175). Over the course of many years his work served to integrate the backwards region into the broader national economy, and link emerging local elites with national and international networks. "First as good counselor of the drought-uprooted poor, then as attractor of pilgrims, Padre Cicero harnesses and mobilizes labor for the projects of the new elites. Further, he becomes preacher and image maker, enjoining on the poor the norms and values required of them in a wage-earning economy. More particularly, in his daily sermons and in the stories told of him, Padred Cicero preaches and makes plausible a new law and order against the moral economy of backlands banditry" (174).

So while religious groups can help establish or even re-route patron-client networks, they also provide the ideas that make clientelism make sense: basically, trading obedience for the promise of security. Apparently this is true not only of hierarchical Catholics, but also of Africanist religions in which rich white guys fund poor black women as their go-betweens to the spirit hierarchy and, perhaps not incidentally, to the low wage labor pool (142). Even when religious leaders themselves are intent on challenging the elites, they find it not so easy to overcome traditional expectations:

But the new priests do not teach about the saints and do not seem to believe in miracles. They call people together to discuss problems, says Goncalo, but there is no point in that, 'each man knows his own problems.' As priests fail in their duties, he laments, miracles happen less now than when he was young. This is disastrous for the poor, for, as Goncalo understands it, the world stays the same, and the poor may hope only in miracles and the protection of patrons. His critique of the new priests asserts the links that must not be broken between the obedience and loyalty of the poor man, the good priest, and the hierarchy of patrons-- from those on earth to the saints in heaven. Once the links are broken, and especially by the priests who pivotal in the whole system, then all the poor can do together is talk about the wreckage. . . . Goncalo’s expression of the paradigm of coronelismo emphasizes religious elements, but his stories of religious heroes, his images of priest-centered community, and his myths of hope in patron saints contain a model of citizenship. . . . The good and sensible citizen accepts inequality and a lowly position in a social hierarchy; but, in return for respect and loyal service, he expects protection from the insecurities of poverty and inclusion in networks of personally distributed largesse. . . . The humblest citizen, as due reward for loyalty and astuteness, can expect inclusion in a visible, manipulable community through which material resources and the amenities of civilization flow (38-9).

I've met a lot of people like Goncalo; would be one, if I were the trusting sort. It makes total sense to them to trade in their relative independence for security under the boss' wing. I assume they know that, to the rich, any one dependent may be replaced with the greatest of ease, and that any security they may currently enjoy is paid for by their willingness to beat up or rat out their neighbors.

In Brazil, some of the sects develop with few links to the higher social strata. While fiercely virtuous in their private lives, these folks may consider the world unchangeably evil, and efforts to change it pointless. Nevertheless, Ireland speculates that these groups, by the very fact of their social isolation and resistance to mainstream values, may one day be fertile ground for political challenges to the dominant system (223). I see scant evidence of that in the U.S., where, if anything, master marketers like Reed and Falwell have rushed in to build superhighways between corporate elites and the once-neglected world-despising religious right.

Still, I was surprised at a lockout of food workers in Knoxville (10-2-03), when the Unitarian guy got up and said, A bird can't fly with one wing broken. We need labor and management both. Let the voice of conscience whisper in the managers' ears to go back to the bargaining table. The Episcopal guy said, These are decent people, hard workers. Let's not fall into management's wicked ways. A woman in a big hat said, 9/11 was a wakeup call. We need to get back to God. If we turn from our wicked ways, God will change the hearts of management. She was right; a couple weeks later, the workers got a 35c wage increase, plus 5% more on their pensions.


• What we expect of ourselves and each other; the roots of trust and dis-.
TRUST NO ONE! hisses the battle-scarred secret agent to the ingenue in many a melodrama, and never truer words were spoken. Or are they? They seem true. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had my trust betrayed and my heart broken. Certainly I don’t deserve this treatment. I never hurt nobody. So how come people are so mean to me? Are they just mean and selfish by nature? If that’s the case, what makes me different? Maybe you’ve had that puzzlement oncet or twice yourself.

It’s such a relief to trust authority. Later on I might have to slaughter a bunch of kids, or throw myself into the meatgrinder, but for the moment, life is less stressful when I let the boss do the thinking for me. Like every other animal, we try to establish predictable environments, even if it’s just a predictable servitude.

It’s much harder to trust our neighbors. We need each other far more than we need the bosses, but by the same token our disappointments are all the more intense. When other people hurt us it colors not only our personal lives but the way we approach organizations, leaders, and the whole idea of democracy. At the core of our models of the world and politics is what we expect of each other.

The Halliburtons count on us to regard our neighbors and co-workers with the utmost suspicion. The more we distrust each other, the less likely we are to resist the neighborhood gangsters, even when we don’t like them, either. In fact, we come to depend on the gangsters to keep our neighbors in line. Distrust is the life blood of authoritarian power, and the foundation of many of our own get-ahead strategies.

I think distrust has a lot of sources.

# We can misread our neighbors’ self-interest. As I’ve described, figuring out our own interests is a complicated, shifting, and not always very conscious process, and it’s even harder to figure out someone else’s. It helps to know people’s class, income, ethnicity, and gender, because people in similar situations tend to react similarly. But that’s only a tendency, not a destiny, and anyhow “similar” covers a pretty broad range. So, whether they look and sound like us or not, it’s easy to misunderstand what other people want and how they aim to get it. We base our plans on what we expect other people will do, and rage when they don’t perform according to spec (our specs). Even more harmful, we may come to believe that, because our own predictions didn’t work out, people are unpredictable in general. The world seems chaotic, and we lose the sense that we can act effectively. Misreading self-interest, we abandon it as a clue to behavior and look for fixed rules of right and wrong.

We may also assume that differing interests have conflict, that employers and employees, politicians and voters doctors and patients, hunters and hikers are bound to be at loggerheads. But of course they have very large areas of overlapping interest. The trick is not to equate “overlapping” with “identical,” or “different” with “opposing.”

Sometimes when we do share the same interests --clean air, good jobs, good sex, chances to learn, the respect of our peers, and so forth-- that very fact can make it easier for Halliburton to set us into competition with each other. Parents, teachers, preachers, employers may ration out the goodies and make us fight for them. By controlling supply beyond any natural limitations, they control us, too. We end up too busy elbowing each other out of the way to disobey the higher-ups.


# It’s easy to mislead and misunderstand each other. A guy at a social service agency stopped talking to a couple co-workers. They’d infringed on some privilege of his, something that seemed to me mostly symbolic, but he was furious. Did they do that on purpose? I asked. I don’t see why they’d want to offend you. O, they knew all right, he said. How would they know? I asked. Of course they knew, he insisted. Anyone should know something like that.

A woman I know is in a constant state of aggrievement. People are always trespassing her invisible boundaries. Tell ‘m what you want, I advised. They ought to know, she insisted. It’s just common decency. Possibly it’s a component of the passive-aggressive style, expecting others to know what I know because “everybody” should know it without being told; and becoming furious when they disappoint me.

These disappointed people make outrageous demands on others’ understanding. They know themselves so poorly they believe their own habits and assumptions are part of the natural landscape, shared by everyone.

Conflict or no, differing interests aren’t enough in themselves to trigger our distrust. After all, I trust Dick Cheney completely. Everything we know about him indicates that he is very predictable on matters of public policy. We can trust him to go to extraordinary lengths to help the oil companies, even if it means lying the nation into war. On the other hand, I don’t always trust the nice people I work and play with. I don’t understand what they want. Sometimes they don’t understand what they want. So we can’t cooperate on any important task.

We think of trust as having to do with people we like, but above all, trust depends on predictability, of friends, foes, partners and passers-by. I plan my life around what I can expect from the weather, the economy, my body, and other people. I need other folks to be clear about their aims and interests. No matter how nice they are, I distrust people when they don’t or can’t tell me what they want and what they’re going to do.

As we know too well, a lot of things can get in the way of communication and understanding. We may not know our own motives, never mind share them with others. We base our predictions about others on our understanding of ourselves --what we want and how we react-- and when we don’t know ourselves very well we’re very likely to misread others. We miscalculate their interests and misinterpret their strategies.

Another obstacle is the sheer number of folks we have to deal with. Our societies are so large, we can’t possibly know most people personally. Yet democracy requires that all have a voice in big decisions. We can’t establish a trust based on our personal experience with all these folks, so we have to have a story that lets us trust even strangers. These folks are OK because they’re rich, or pitiful, or offer some familiar-seeming feature we can latch on to. In effect we usually require other people to offer stories that meet our approval. Years ago, in Southeast Asia, it was OK for me to be a Christian and a student, however rich & foreign; my hosts resolutely ignored my true status as an unemployed infidel.

More often our stories simply codify our distrust, all the reasons not to connect with the Other.