PASTORAL CARE AND NEOLIBERAL ECONOMIC POLICY

By Juergen Klute

[This address at the October 2004 conference “Justice and Pastoral Care in a Radically Changing Society” is translated from the German on the World Wide Web,  http://www.juergen-klute.de/jkl-vortraege.html.]


My challenge today is to present several assessments on the relation of pastoral care and neoliberal (economic) policy.

The exact title of my address is “Pastoral Care in the Tension with Neoliberal (Economic) Policy.” A tense relation between pastoral care and current economic policy is assumed. These tensions deserve broad discussion.

First of all, allow me a remark on the term “neoliberalism.” This term is often used in the current discussion of globalization and in the conflict over the right economic priorities in the context of Agenda 2010. A strict scientific definition of the term is hard to find. The term neoliberalism describes certain basic economic convictions that have become increasingly established in the political organization of our society in the last years. In the following I use the term “neoliberalism” to describe these basic convictions and their effects in the social life of our society.

The so-called neoliberal economic policy understands itself as an alternative and replacement of a Keynesian economic policy that marked German economic policy up to the 1970s. Keynes focused on the demand side or customer side. Keynes saw an essential motor of economic development in strengthening the purchasing power of customers. Formulated somewhat simplistically, the more money – purchasing power – is scattered as widely as possible in the population, the greater the purchases and the more can and must be produced. From this perspective, wages and salaries are seen more as purchasing power than as costs. State spending is understood from this perspective as strengthening purchasing power, not as a cost factor. This includes spending for education, culture, public infrastructures, necessities of life and social work alongside spending for public administrations and transfer payments. (1)

These fields of activity represent services that are important in a concept of “the future of work.” In view of the transformation of industrial society into a service society, these services are sacrificed to a neoliberal cost logic or transformed into a low wage sector through the so-called 1-Euro jobs. 1 Euro jobs can only be understood as exploitation, not as an expression of a future-friendly policy.

Neoliberal economic policy can be described most concisely in demarcation to Keynesian demand policy. Neoliberal economic policy prescribes strengthening the supply side.

The pivot of neoliberal economic policy is the cost question. While the basic melody of the Keynesians is “strengthening purchasing power promotes the economy,” the melody of neoliberal economic policy is “lowering costs fosters the economy.”

I assume this melody is not unknown to you from your everyday work.

In the published discourse in the media, this basic melody has developed into a catchy popular composition. With a regularity usually only known from church services, Ms. Christiansen rings out this composition in her Sunday talk show for Germany.

This composition is skillfully tied to the most pressing social problem – mass unemployment – and promises a solution if one follows its points exactly.

Let us first look more closely at the composition. Its title is “Less costs – less burden!”

The costs are listed in the first part of this composition: wages, wage components for the social security systems, legal contractual agreements for the social and health security of employees in businesses, regulations on environmental protection and the taxes and fees with which businesses (like very citizen according to his or her economic capacity) should contribute to financing the community.

A neoliberal view of things is only able to see costs breaking economic growth in these fees that are also contributions to financing the community. – By the way managers’ salaries and the capital yields (profit) are not viewed as costs in this context although they certainly are costs.

The second part of our composition reflects the political demands: radical lowering of these costs. Converted into concrete political demands, this means: deregulation-suspension of protective social regulations for employees as for example suspension of protection against unlawful termination or collective wage agreements – extending working hours without wage bonuses – de-bureaucratization- withdrawal of environmental protection – and so forth.

The third part of the composition promises comfort for the exactions in the second part as therapy for overcoming unemployment. The lower costs and the reduced burdens of the economy will raise the profits of businesses, it is said. When business profits rise, investments will also rise. When investments climb, then growth will also climb. When growth increases, employment will also increase. Unemployment will be reduced. As a good conclusion, this process also leads to higher tax revenues of the state and more contributions to the public social security systems – provided they are not completely privatized by then.

For nearly a quarter century, politicians, economists and the majority of the media have joined in this melody. The expected success on the labor market must still be awaited. That the political demands are not carried out consistently enough and comprehensively enough are cited as reasons for the non-arrival of the predicted success. With the single-mindedness of Tibetan prayer wheels, more of the unsuccessful labor market therapy is urged.

This reasoning calls to mind a behavioral pattern described by Paul Watzlawick in his brilliant little book “Guide to Alienated Existence.” He calls this behavioral pattern “more of the same.”

Watzlawick describes this model as follows:

A drunkard searches under a street lantern. A policeman comes and asks what he has lost and the man answers: “My key.” Then both begin searching. Finally, the policeman wants to know whether the man is sure he lost the key here. The drunkard answers: “No, not here but over there – but it is much too dark there…”

Does this seem absurd to you? Watzlawick asks his readers. If so, you are also searching at the wrong place. Such a search leads to nothing except more of the same, namely nothing.

One of the most successful and effective catastrophe prescriptions that has appeared on our planet in the course of millions of years and has led to the extinction of whole species is hidden behind these simple words, more of the same, Watzlawick explains. What is involved is a game with the past known to our animal ancestors before the sixth day of creation.

[…] This game is based on the stubborn clinging to adjustments and solutions that sometime or other were either successful or the only possible course. The problem with any adjustment to given conditions is that the conditions change with time. This game seems to start here. On one hand, Watzlawick says, no living being can act aimlessly toward the environment – that is, one way today and very differently tomorrow. The vital necessity of adaptation leads inevitably to the formation of certain behavioral patterns whose ideal goal would be successful survival as free of suffering as possible. On the other hand, for reasons that are still incomprehensible to behavioral researches, animals like humans tend to consider the best possible adjustments as the only ones eternally possible. This leads to a twofold blindness. Firstly, the correct adjustment in the course of time is no longer the best possible course. Secondly, there have always been a whole series of other solutions. These different solutions exist now. This double blindness has two consequences, according to Watzlawick: Firstly, it makes the magic formula increasingly unsuccessful and the situation increasingly more difficult and secondly the increasing suffering leads to the seemingly only logical conclusion, namely the conviction of not having done enough for solution. Thus one applies the same “solution” and attains the same misery.

[…} Watzlawick ends this “Guide to Alienated Existence” with an urgent admonition: This effect is guaranteed as long as the aspirant to unhappiness holds to two simple rules: Firstly, there is only one possible, allowed, rational, meaningful and logical solution to the problem. If these efforts have not yet led to success, this only proves that the efforts were insufficient. Secondly, the assumption that there is only this single solution may never be put in question. One may only test the application of this basic assumption. (2)

So much for Paul Watzlawick. The analogies are obvious. Like the drunken man in Watzlawick’s example, neoliberal economic policy has recommended the same therapy for nearly a quarter century for overcoming unemployment: lowering costs and deregulation. Step by step, the political decision-makers have followed the therapy recommendations without the desired result. (3) [This failure has a welcome side effect. It serves the neoliberal lobbyists as proof for the extremely limited effectiveness of political actions. This is presented as a legal argument against bills that are not in the interest of these lobbyists.] The economic lobby in agreement with the great majority of economists and many politicians still single-mindedly urge more of the same after 25 years: deregulation and lowering costs. Other existing explanations and solutions are not accepted.

If one looks at the media, journalists and politicians follow this behavioral pattern. This seems correct for part of the circle of persons. Conversations with politicians strengthen this impression.

However this interpretation can only partly explain why a neoliberal economic policy is followed after a quarter century of unsuccessful effort in finding a way out of unemployment.

To understand this phenomenon, the goals of neoliberal economic policy should be explored. Does the goal – overcoming unemployment – really have priority as argued to the public? Or is there a very different secret goal behind the official goal?

If one looks for example at the late works of one of the most influential theoreticians of neoliberal economics, namely “The Constitution of Freedom” by Friedrich August von Hayek, this question can be quickly answered. Hayek discusses very different questions. Progress and freedom are his presuppositions. Von Hayek sees the meaning of human life in progress. (5) According to his understanding, economic policy has to make possible and promote progress. (6) This is the main goal or challenge of economic policy. Grappling with unemployment and the question about social justice are in no way at the heart of neoliberalism.

The motor of progress for Hayek is the social tension between poor and rich. “Most of our desires,” as Hayek explains in this work, “are things we want because others have them. However while a progressive society relies on this process of learning and imitating, it treats the awakened desires only as incentives to further efforts. A progressive society does not guarantee the results to everyone. It does not worry about the suffering of unfulfilled desires awakened through the example of others. It appears cruel because it multiplies everyone’s desires in the same measure as its gifts to several. However some must lead and the rest follow for society to progress.” (7) Hayek writes on the role of the rich in this process: “A large part of the spending of the rich serves to cover the costs of experimenting with new things that can then be made accessible to the poorer.” (8)

In plain language, a society needs poor persons who long for a better life. A society needs rich persons who live out a corresponding lifestyle and simultaneously awaken the desire in the poor to live this lifestyle. This desire – according to the underlying assumption – activates the readiness in the poor to work more and be more productive, in the hope of making possible a better life, the lifestyle of the rich. The greater the measure of inequality, the more productive forces are aroused in a society, according to F. A. von Hayek’s thesis. (9) Conversely the less the measure of social inequality, the more unproductive is a society. This is F.A. von Hayek’s explicit criticism of the social market economy and all other concepts of society that aim at the highest possible measure of social justice, that is distributive justice. (10) [Hayek’s shift in emphasis over against Adam Smith, one of the fathers of modern economies, is important. For Adam Smith, the division of labor is the key to increasing productivity; for Hayek, the key is mobilization of human desires.

One must admit that the question about the success of this policy can be answered differently if one assumes – starting from this thesis – an expansion of social inequality serving a certain concept of progress as the real goal of neoliberal policy and looks at our social conditions.

A deep crack goes through our society. The number of unemployed has fortified on a high level. Poverty within our society has increased significantly as the different poverty-, wealth- and social reports regularly prove. On the other side, wealth has also significantly risen as the analyses of Ulrich Huster (11) from the Bochum Evangelical academy show.

This development can be verified very impressively in two numbers: in spending for income support and in the financial assets of private households. In 1970 spending for income support amounted to 3.3 billion DM (German marks). In 1998 this spending had increased fourteen-fold to 45 billion DM. In the same time period, the financial assets of private households rose more than eleven-fold from 494 billion DM in 1970 to 5.683 trillion DM in 1998. (12)

If we consider these diverging developments within our society, the effect of neoliberal economic policy could be described most exactly with the term “exclusion”: exclusion of more and more people from “normal” social life and from social participation. According to F.A. von Hayek, this is a desirable effect since he saw the driving force of technical progress in a minimum of social inequality. (13) In this sense, the neoliberal economic policy of the last decades has been very successful.

Freedom of science allows every scientist to develop these conceptual models. In the past, state organs were committed to the social state command anchored in the constitution. In political theory, state organs and political groups bore responsibility for all citizens and did not only serve the interests of a privileged segment as occurred in Germany up to 1918 and as still occurs today in several countries of the world. The acknowledgment of the right to employee’s economic existence is central, not paternalism of the state.

The neoliberal concept of society also penetrates state organs and decision-making bodies. The discussion on the personal responsibility (14) of the unemployed and social security recipients is conducted ever more intensively without asking about the conditions necessary for a high measure of personal responsibility. [In its 1973 memorandum “Social Security in the Industrial Age,” the evangelical church in Germany (EKD) urged economic protection against the great life risks – accidents, sickness, unemployment, death of the breadwinner, old age provisions, additional costs for children’s education in the framework of social responsibility and the subsidiarity principle.]

The fulfillment of the social state rule is made dependent more and more on the good conduct of target groups defined from the state side although their neediness – as in the case of the unemployed – has a structural social cause, namely structural change. (15) This “modern” understanding of the social state stylized as an activating social state passes over the very obvious reasons why the so-called great life risks including unemployment are basically consequences of the high division of labor in modern societies and therefore is socially protected. (16)

In his address “innovative Policy Leads to Just Participation” at the “Basic Values Forum: Justice” of the SPD in Berlin on April 26, 2000, Wolfgang Clement defended the thesis “Prescribed equality – as history teaches – is the death of justice of justice and freedom. On the other hand, modern social market economies could increase the chances for equality without promising or guaranteeing equality in full.” A few decades ago, politicians of Wolfgang Clement’s party understood equal opportunities in this way: the state through its interventions has to insure that unequal starting chances because of social origin be leveled so that every member of society has a real change to optimally develop his or her personal abilities and open access to all social realms in principle to everyone. Equal opportunities is an ineffective cliché or meaningless word when it ignores the existing social inequalities in a society and leads to their fortification and the hardening of social injustice, not to their mastery. (17) [Cf. “For a Future of Solidarity and Justice. The Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany and the German Bishops’ Conference on the Economic and Social Situation in Germany, 1997, especially section 3.3.3: “Given the different starting conditions, reducing indiscrimination on account of inequalities and making possible equal changes and equal living conditions for all members of society is a command of justice.”] With his modern understanding of equal opportunities, Wolfgang Clement obviously bids farewell to a classical understanding of equal opportunities that aims at social justice and social integration.

Ms. Goring-Eckart from the Greens is ideologically close to Wolfgang Clement and confesses very openly that for her social justice and equality are two very different shoes: “The state can no longer try to produce equality as in the last years. The state must make possible justice.” (18) From a social-ethical view, Ms. Goring-Eckhart’s assertion is a contradiction: Inequality is an expression of injustice. (19) Whoever relativizes equality also relativizes social justice. Social justice as a concrete substantive political goal dissolves to a mere abstract anemic appeal to make possible justice. To whom should justice be made possible?

These examples show how much the state has gradually bid farewell to the goal of social integration in favor of an essential acceptance of the exclusion of an increasingly larger group.

Hayek knows that his concept of society produces victims among people. “Society is not concerned about the suffering of unfulfilled desires aroused by the example of others. It seems cruel since the desires of all multiply in the same measure as the gifts to some.” Later he says more directly: “The changes to which people must submit are the costs of progress […]. (20) In other words, for von Hayek, these victims are owed to progress and inevitable. To seek to avoid them means to oppose progress.

What is the relation between a concept of society that consciously accepts the exclusion of certain sectors of the population and describes victims as owed to progress and pastoral care?

The foundation of pastoral action is a New Testament understanding of God and humanity. Persons are justified sinners. Sinners are not sinners by violating legal rules. They are sinners in the biblical light because persons are always responsible to one another – whether they are willing or not. According to Paul, all persons are always entangled in sin – intentionally or unintentionally. (21) In this sense, sin has become the person’s second nature that he or she cannot escape under his or her own steam.

The New Testament understands Jesus’ death and resurrection as a vicarious act of atonement and reconciliation of the sinful person with God, with him or herself and the world. In this sense, New Testament theology thinks of persons as justified sinners who remain captive to a sinful world.

According to the understanding of New Testament theology, all persons are sinners whose actions depend on justification or on God’s salvation. A Christian understanding of the quality of all persons is derived from this equality as sinners before God, before one another and redeemed by God’s healing actions. Equality is understood as a presupposition of freedom, not an enforced conformity or synchronization as a caricature of equality or brutal instrument of political oppression.

Translated in the everyday Christian practice, this New Testament understanding of persons means that the worth and dignity of every person are constant since they are not owed to anyone. The worth and dignity of every person are independent of actions and omissions; they are promised in the act of God’s reconciliation with people initiated by God. Whatever a person does nor does not do, his human existence cannot be denied. His dignity is inalienable.
This understanding of human existence aims at social integration and is in tension to Hayek’s theory that stresses exclusion.

On this background, pastoral care is viewed as a form of Christian action that follows people in emergency situations so they are not left to themselves but supported to trust themselves again, find their life and a way back to human community where their life is given a meaning again. God’s healing actions become visible and experiencable.

Concrete pastoral actions happen in a protected, familiar and personal space from which nothing intrudes from the outside.

Nevertheless pastoral care is not apolitical and cannot be apolitical. All the distresses and suffering confronting ministers are not given by fate like aging, death and the inherent bodily and mental suffering.

Some suffering that is avoidable from the start or produced through false political priorities can be overcome through changed political priorities. These sufferings were not given by fate. They have a political-structural nature. Consequently their causes can be influenced politically and now and then repaired politically.

Some human distresses, the distresses resulting from indebtedness, poverty and unemployment, have effects on the human proneness to offenses.

A politically conscious and reflective pastoral care must ask about its role in society. Does it only offer help, work at symptoms or does it also see political causes for distress and suffering and urge treatment of these causes?

Pastoral care that turns to the victims of social progress must face the question whether or not it shares the neoliberal interpretation that victims are owed to progress. In the past, the two large churches in Germany did not share this neoliberal perspective (cf. their joint Social Declaration) but championed a solidarian and socially just policy. They made clear they gave a priority to a socially integrative policy over an exclusion policy. The churches call this the “option for the poor.” (22)

A socially integrative policy has influenced the execution of sentences since the 1970s. A reintegration of offenders in society (including offender-therapy in forensic psychiatry) has been the primary goal of imprisonment, not vengeance, deterrence and incarceration. This goal has a clear affinity to the New Testament view of the person. A pastoral care with this self-image can be brought into the imprisonment concept with re-socialization as the primary goal.

Whether a society built on exclusion as propagated by Hayek is compatible with pastoral care aiming at social integration is doubtful. Beside the systematic divergence of the two approaches, a changing political consciousness of responsibility and the neoliberal cutting-cost logic are good reasons for this doubt.

The question about the social role and self-image of pastoral care is raised in this changing context.

The basic melody of pastoral action is integration, not exclusion. I see pastoral care in a tension to neoliberal economic policy at this point.

Does pastoral care – as a service provider in the commission of the state machine – only look after the excluded, the victims of progress and thus contribute to a frictionless functioning of a neoliberal society through their “pacification” – or is pastoral care resolutely for their social re-integration, strengthening and accompanying them on the way in engagement for more social justice in our society?