Reality and Rhetoric
Bartell, Ernest
Rosa Luxemburg herself, for whom Dbblin fabulates a scarifying dream sequence externalizing her well-documented internal conflict between political ideology and personal passion. The other...
...Lord Bauer's pastoral advice to clerics is that they should be offering compassion, presumably in lieu of saying things that might make the natives restless...
...So too is the persistent preoccupation of ignorant clerics with income inequalities between rich nations and poor nations...
...His word of praise for rapid industrial growth in Brazil also tactfully ignores the crippling Brazilian debt crisis of the past two years...
...He died in Alsace in 1957...
...Lord Bauer's analysis of "ecclesiastical economics" is even more selective, and his assertions even more sweeping than in his treatment of development literature...
...In his reflections on social justice Lord Bauer is equallv undisturbed by the fact that the high coucentration of ownership of land and natural resources in many countries of Latin America, often coupled with the protection of militaryauthoritarian governments, precludes effective economic and political participation by vast numbers of human beings...
...The pope ought not to use the "catch-phrase 'the earth belongs to all,' " which for Lord Bauer epitomizes the central thrust of papal documents...
...Lord Bauer has also discovered the Christian churches to be fiddled with challengers to his beliefs, so there is a recently published essay provocatively titled "Ecclesiastical Economics: Envy Legitimized" in which his principal adversary is the late Pope Paul VI...
...Lawrence S. Cunningham M ANY academic theologians wonder openly (and -- let's be honest here -- jealously) why Harvey Cox gets so much attention from the national media...
...Indeed, the Asians whose industrial success stories Lord Bauer touts might also like to point out that their success has been preceded and accompanied by land reforms and by fiscal policies for income redistribution...
...he is a sort of Baptist Xavier Rynne...
...like Hannes Diisterberg, the dead lover who haunts Rosa Luxemburg's dreams, he spent World War I as an army doctor...
...November 1918: A German Revolution was written in Pads and San Francisco between 1937 and 1941, though its German publication was delayed until 1950 and its English translation had to wait for Dbblin's posthumous recognition here via Rainer Werner Fasabinder's recent film, Berlin Alexanderplatz...
...As Gi~nter Grass, his fellow expressionist and his most renowned disciple, admits, DiSblin stands in the second rank of modern German writers below Mann and Kafka...
...It would be more correct to say that policy makers are still caught in the complexity of a development process that contains conflicts between the exigencies of national and intern~.tional r :integration and the as18 May 1984:305 pirations of the people in a particular society and culture...
...The Chilean commitment to completely free international movement of goods and financial capital succeeded in bankrupting a major share of the country's industry with resulting unemployment of close to 30 percent...
...This postmodern theology, Cox _,elieves " aerging "from the botCommonweal: 308...
...Drawing upon his own previously undisclosed theological background, Lord Bauer tells his readers that the letters of Paul VI "are not theological, doctrinal, or philosophical statements reaffirming Christian beliefs . . . . They are political statements supported by bogus arguments, and as such can only confuse believers...
...After telling his readers that "modem clerical opinion endows envy with moral legitimacy and intellectual respectability," he proceeds to the intellectual feat of defining "the central theme and supporting arguments" of Christian social teaching on distributive and social justice in le~ss than four lines, beginning with the assertions, "social justice requires that incomes should be substantially equal...
...Fortunately, the popes and his readers have Lord Bauer to set them straight...
...He finds these letters unequivocally "immoral...
...He is quick to criticize the inefficiencies of marketing boards, collectivized agriculture, and other forms of government intervention in developing economies, while praising Western-style industrial growth in the relatively open economies of Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and even Brazil...
...in 1973 we got direct coverage (or uncoverage) from the hot tubs of Esalen in The Seduction of the Spirit...
...Cox uses these two exemplary locations to argue his basic thesis: modern liberal theology is in a terminal state and postmodern theology is suffering its birthpangs...
...Neither does the fact that in countries with surplus labor the opei'ation of free labor markets can prevent workers from appropriating the income generated by gains in their own productivity, as workers in the West are accustomed to do...
...Nevertheless there is no absurdity in the comparison that has been made between November 1918 and Doctor Faustus...
...An Independent Socialist in politics, Dbblin worked for two decades as a physician in the Berlin slums while spending all the time he could snatch from his practice developing an original expressionistic fiction...
...As both a Socialist and a Jew, Laissez faire lives...
...Lord Bauer explicitly professe s "a reluctance to formulate a theory of economic development," so his defense consists principally of swashbuckling attacks upon those he perceives as his challengers in the worlds of academe and public policy...
...I t is anomalous," he states in an apparent reversal of his earlier condemnation of modernization literature and praise of the rich variety of human experience in the third world, "to insist [as Paul _~I does] that the West should respect Third World cultures and at the same time to urge that the West should pay taxes for the benefit of those who embrace cultures inimical to economic advance...
...Advocates of devel. opment planning and foreign aid of all types are led to Lord Bauer's verbal slaughter...
...Catholic readers may be flattered that Lord Bauer chooses two letters of Paul VI as the principal sources for his discoveries of the errors in Christian social teaching...
...One development economist, Nicholas Stern, rates an entire essay of rebuttal to his 1974 critique of Lord Bauer's development economics...
...Reality and Rhetoric consists of eight such assaults published as essays over the past thirty years, some in revised and expanded form, plus previously unpublished opening and closing chapters...
...The campesinos in El Salvador might well disagree...
...Lord Bauer seems not to find any inconsistency between his condemnation of modernization according to the dictates of the dominant players on the world scene and his unrelenting advocacy of national and international free markets for goods, resources, and technology, which are major carders of Western culture, tastes, and attitudes...
...Torn in conscience and driven to attempted suicide by guilt over the war, Becker undergoes a Christian rebirth...
...At the same time he chooses not to mention the dr,/matic failure of the much heralded regime in Chile during the 1970s...
...From the 1950s there are development economists and local policy makers in the newly independent nations carved out of colonial "British Afri...
...Such omissions are, of course, the author's right, but they surely undercut his sweeping assertion that it is the discredited modernization theories which "have continued to dominate political and public discourse...
...If they aren't willing to play by our rules, let them starve...
...Ernest B a r t e l l L oGIc in the service of ideology is a weapon that P. T. Bauer has brandished with vigor over the years in defense of rudimentary neoclassical economics as the paradigm for global development policy...
...Signs & portents on the edges RELlaiON IN TRE SECULAR CITY TOWARDS A POSTMODERN THEOLOGY Harvey Cox Simon & Schuster, $16.95, 304 pp...
...Certainly clerics like Paul VI should not be offering foreign aid out of Lord Bauer's tax payments...
...Continued on page 308) Commonweal: 306 18 May 1984:307 (Continued from page 306~ Lest Protestant theologians feel slighted, the reader is told that many other Christian clerics besides the popes have chosen to speak on subjects about which they are ignoran...
...bal assaults rather than with positive proposals for theory and policy, Lord Bauer has called his readers over the years to share his cherished beliefs in the sufficiency for humankind of an economic order defined by unconstrained private ownership of property and by the unhampered pursuit of private profit through an all-encompassing system of free markets for goods and services, labor, and financial capital...
...In that year DiSblin, like his character Becker, experienced a religious conversion and became a Roman Catholic, though one more existentialist than orthodox...
...He correctly observes that elements of these theories have disappeared from academic literature, but he fails to give his readers any indication of the evolution of development theory since its early Eurocentric phase...
...The other is a fictional creation, the idealistic schoolmaster Friedrich Becker...
...Lord Bauer's use of history to defend his neoclassical economic principles is selective...
...appreciable differences in incomes reflect exploitation, oppression, discrimination or improper privilege...
...Cox is hardly a Paul Tillich but there he is on page one of the Sunday New York...
...In 1965 Cox reported from the heady swirl of the urban metropolis in The Secular City...
...Lord Bauer also fails to address the deleterious impact that the proclivity of the very rich in many developing countries to consume luxury imports and to export their savings has on employment for their less favored fellow citizens...
...Such phrases, he instructs us, are "bound to provoke envy, or something stronger...
...Indeed, Lord Bauer assures the popes that' 'lack of natural resources, including land, has little or nothing to do with the poverty of individuals or of societies...
...Both novels are gnarled and knotty, bitterly funny, ambiguously ironic, psychologically profound, exasperatingly demanding of one's patience and intelligence...
...Paul VI, however, is found guilty of "arguments and allegations [which] reflect unthinking surrender to intellectual fashion and political nostrums...
...The structuralist analyses of development, the rise and decline of dependency theory, global interdependence, the "basic needs" policy literature, and the interdisciplinary attempts to identify alternative, often culturally indigenous, strategies for development plus the policies that have sprung from them are mostly ignored in Lord Bauer's literature review...
...REALITY AND RHETORIC STUBIES IN THE ECONOMICS OF BEVELOPMENT P. T. Bauer Harvard, $15, 184 pp...
...Each of the essays bristles with attacks on Lord Bauer's chosen adversaries, and they are a diverse lot...
...But he is not allowed to attain the peace of God he seeks: joining the Spartacist revolt almost by accident, Becker survives the massacre to spend the Weimar years as a wandering prophet, In his handling of these spiritually tortured characters Dbblin is more akin to Dostoevsky than to Tolstoy...
...With verDtblin fled from Germany to France in 1933 and then to America, one jump ahead of the Wehrmacht, in 1940...
...Cox has two things going for him: He is a very lively writer and he is a master of what I would call the "you are there" style of theological discourse...
...In his review of development literature Lord Bauer dissects the modernization theories popular in the fifties with arguments familiar to a whole generation of social scientists of all political persuasions...
...His novels brought him the respect of contemporades like Kafka but (till the success in 1929 of Berlin Alexanderplatz) very little fame...
...Times Book Review...
...It is now 1984 and Cox tells us what is going on in two strangely paired locations: Jerry Falwell's fundamentalist Vatican in Lynchburg, Virginia, and the "basic Christian communities" of Latin America...
...Instead, he piously comments "the presence of landless workers in such areas reflects . . . primarily the lack of ambition, enterprise, and skill...
...For those interested in a compendium of Lord Bauer's visceral sentiments about economics, theology, and culture the present volume should prove useful...
...However, those interested in the complex issues of human development in the third world might, with good neoclassical rationality, prefer to spend their time and money elsewhere...
...Lord Bauer's assault on Christian social teaching is less an essay on justice than a diatribe against interference with free markets and against the distribution of wealth and income according to any norms other than those of the marketplace...
...in 1969 he theologized amid the flower children and New Left activists (The Feast of Fools...
...Lord Bauer, like many other commentators, notes that this picture "does not do justice to the rich variety of humanity and experience in the less developed world...
...According to the simplistic modernization theories the development of poor and stagnating countries must march to the tune of the rich and progressing countries...
...And both lead the reader to a devastating sense of a personal tragedy inextricably linked with the larger world-tragedy that is twentiethcentury Germany...
...The fact that the terms of trade in international markets are consistently biased against the international purchasing power of primary products, the principal exports of most Third World countries, may disturb the clerics, but apparently does not concern Lord Bauer...
...Born in 1878, Alfred Dbblin was trained as a neurologist and,psychiatrist...
Vol. 111 • May 1984 • No. 10
