60: Everyone gets a denarius

So the last will be first, and the first will be last

Nov 21, 2020

Frans Snyders *Still Life with Grapes and Game*, c. 1630

Today I want to talk about the Bible, and I imagine some of you will be like, ah finally I love the Bible and some of you might be like ah I don’t know about this. Either way, I hope you will enjoy it. I’m not particularly religious unless you count the teachings of Avatar the Last Airbender, but I do keep thinking about this one Bible story, which is a real banger, that a friend brought to my attention during the debate earlier this week about student loan debt.

If you missed it, there’s a chance that a Biden administration will enact some form of loan forgiveness in response to the growing student debt crisis, and as a form of economic relief. There have been many bad takes in response, like the usual kind of silliness that young people could easily pay back their loans if they were more responsible with their money, which ignores skyrocketing tuition costs and essentially flat wages. But another response that is particularly bleak is that loan forgiveness would inspire widespread anger and resentment among those who already paid off their student loans. “Gonna be bad,” one columnist shittily concluded.

Just for the record, I finished paying off around $20,000 in debt just a few years ago (a pittance compared today’s higher ed costs) after about 20 years of monthly payments, missed payments, late payments, deferments, forebearances, tanked credit ratings, etc. And I can say, as someone with no small reservoir of anger and resentment, that it would never even occur to me to be angry and resentful that other people might be spared an awful financial burden, just because it’s one that I had to bear. I would like to think that’s the case for most people, but as Roxane Gay wrote about the issue today in the New York Times:

A great many Americans are only concerned with fairness when they think someone else might get something they won’t get. And they are seething with resentment as they imagine a country in which we help one another. It’s appalling, that this is where we are … that this is who we are.

The debate got me thinking about what the particular mindset is that would generate such seething, and how it feels similar to a form of anxiety over who deserves what and who stands to lose what they’re entitled to that feels very deeply woven into the climate crisis.

I tweeted something along these lines, and my friend Erin who is a teacher and extremely smart replied, “It’s also an exact allegory of Matthew 20:1-16.” So I looked it up and here it is you can go read the whole passage, which is also called the “Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard.”

But in a nutshell, Jesus says, imagine the kingdom of heaven as a landowner hiring people to work his in vineyard, and I’m very sorry it’s a he, that is just how land ownership was back in Jesus days. He hires some people first thing in the morning, and then some more people later in the afternoon, and promises to pay them each what is right. At the end of the day, everyone gets exactly one denarius, which is an old Roman coin equal to a day’s wage, regardless of how many hours they worked.

The people who started in the morning say, hey we are clearly getting shafted here, because we’ve been here all day, why don’t we get more denariuses or I think maybe denarii. And the landowner says take your money and GTFO please. Like I said, everyone gets a denarius.

“Or are you envious because I am generous?” he says, and then closes with the beautiful line: “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

This is kind of a weird parable, and people have different takes on it some say it’s about not being rude to religious converts. On one level it is a pretty straightforward story about how God’s grace is extended to everyone, no caveats or qualifiers. But you can also read it as a story about what equality actually looks like.

As one religious scholar put it, “So excessive is God’s propensity to give and care, it violates our instincts about fairness. Such justice looks rash.” Or as my friend Erin said about the parable, “It’s essentially, ‘to the privileged, equality looks like oppression’ in scripture form,” which is perfect.

So like I said, I’ve been thinking about the story, and it reminds me of Elizabeth Anderson’s writing about equality. (See last year’s pre-Thanksgiving issue for more on this.) She challenges the common formulation of “luck equality,” which takes pity on people who have experienced bad luck, and tries to compensate them, but only to the extent that they truly deserve. Instead, Anderson posits, everyone is entitled to a certain base level of shared dignity and well-being, merely because we are all human. Everyone gets a denarius.

You could say, well, that’s just Jesus for you he’s always off doing stuff like that, that is no way to run a vineyard. But as I understand it, the idea is that we all have that propensity for Jesus-level care within us. Or another way to put it, we all have the capacity to not give in to our least Jesus-like tendencies, aka wanting others to suffer just because we have suffered. Even further, we have a potential nature within us that takes joy in seeing others rise, and recognizes our mutual benefit when they do.

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When I was initially considering how the student loan controversy and this parable relates to climate change, I was thinking about the tensions between wealthy and poor countries about who should bear the greatest responsibility for the transition from fossil fuels.

Wealthy nations like the United States have been burning carbon at industrial levels for decades longer than other nations, and therefore bear the overwhelming responsibility for climate change. On the other hand, less wealthy countries bear less responsibility based on past emissions, but often experience the worst impacts. Many of those countries are now rapidly increasing their emissions as they seek to improve their quality of life, so there’s been a rift over who should be held most responsible for global emissions reductions.

I get some serious morning vineyard worker vibes from wealthy nations in this scenario—resentment and unwillingness to sacrifice their own prosperity so that developing countries can seek the same quality of life. Of course, the allegory doesn’t map quite right, because in this case it would be like the workers who were hired in the morning spent the whole day lighting the vineyard on fire as they worked. But you follow me, the vibes are the same.

This week I also happened to be reading The Future We Choose, by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, which addresses this problem in one section. It adds another dimension, though, which is that the debate over who deserves what exists within a zero-sum model of the world’s resources, which was perhaps always false, but is now obsolete as we have to abandon our primary source of energy.

A fair outcome is not viable as long as we pursue it from a mindset of scarcity and competition. The state of the planet no longer allows for this mindset because we have reached existential scarcity: limits to the survival of many of the ecosystems that sustain us and that help to maintain safe greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. If the Amazon is destroyed, carbon emissions will rise so high that the entire planet, not only Brazil, will suffer the consequences.

The authors argue that the previous, extractive paradigm was to compete over resources because we perceived them to be scarce. Now that they truly are scarce (because we have a firm limit on the carbon we can burn), if we continue to compete for what’s left, the planet will degrade such that everyone’s prosperity will collapse. On the other hand, if we can flip the script to generosity and collaboration, they argue, we can reach a state of abundance that benefits everyone.

This section, and the book overall, raises some challenging questions for me about how accountability coexists with cooperation. But the thing that is most appealing to me about their argument is that it starts from a status quo of self-interest, and instead of just making a plea for empathy with the poor, goes a step further to mutual benefit. This is not unlike the racial justice concept of collective liberation, in which I acknowledge that my interests are fused with yours. If you have a free college education, I’m not just happy for you, I also benefit.

If we fight over who gets a denarius, eventually all the denariuses go away and nobody gets any. If we say, Jesus style, everyone gets a denarius, the vineyard thrives as do we all.

Listening

25th December, Everything But The Girl

Watching

Great British Baking Show, season 10. One of the bakers really struggles with anxiety and everyone is so open about it and supportive of him it makes me want to cry.

Bake Off viewers in tears as Michael breaks down again in technical challenge

He just could not get the beignets right.

That is all for this week friends, hope that gives you something to think about over the holiday RE: vineyards and denariuses and climate change. I won’t be sending a newsletter out next week but I will see you on the flipside. I hope everyone has a safe and healthy holiday and honestly just stay home it’s really not worth it. We will be having a two-person Thanksgiving this year with some video calls and I think it will be just fine.

If you are having a hard time, just imagine you and I and everyone else subscribed to this newsletter are having one big virtual Thanksgiving together and you can argue with my stupid opinions I don’t mind and we can all eat whatever we want and it will be super easy to sneak out to smoke weed and it will be the best Thanksgiving ever.

Gobble gobble

Tate

Crisis Palace by Tate Williams

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