we are the system

The downfall of Wall Street this week has been ringing loudly in my thoughts, but Wall Street itself has been fairly quiet. No apology. (Part of me is brimming with anger: Have they not any shame for telling the government to fuck off when they were making millions, and then going back to the tax payers for a bail out when they had dug themselves in deep shit? Has this experience humbled them at all? Or are they hidden away, gloating because they got away with a lot of money?)

But maybe I need to apologize too? I was part of that system and part of that myth. I may not have worked directly in investment banking, but I was part of the post-graduate herd of sheep that run towards New York City and fill the lower ranks of investment banks and consulting firms, without necessarily questioning the bigger picture or the assumptions of what we were doing. I may not have made the huge bonuses, but I did wine and dine a little too heartily on money that had to come from somewhere. I was fortunate that I was never asked to work directly in predatory mortgage lending, but I did work in mortgage product design that had the potential to be damaging without proper regulation. I may not have advocated for the risky leverage ratios held by investment banks, but I did do some capital regulation calculations that I barely understood. And so I was/am part of the system. And somehow, I am also responsible for what is happening.

But how do you feel sorry for something that you didn’t do directly but somehow benefited from?

In Terra Nullius: A Journey Through No One's Land (a beautifully written book by the way), Sven Lindqvist reflects on feeling contrition concerning the murder of and the theft of land from the aborigines in Australia.

According to my Religious Education teacher in at secondary school, ‘contrition’ is at the core of all religions. It’s easy to make mistakes. Anybody can make mistakes, even commit crimes. The important thing is knowing how to feel contrition afterwards. That was why he began every lesson with the same question: ‘What constitutes contrition?’ To this day, I can still rattle off the answer in my sleep:
I realize I have done wrong.
I regret what I have done.
I promise never to do it again.
Today I tend to think these three criteria for contrition are far too introverted. ‘Realize’, ‘regret’ and ‘promise’ can all be done internally, in complete secrecy, without betraying any outward sign of realization of promise. Such an internal contrition process is precious little comfort the victim of the wrong I committed. And the promise is easily forgotten if nobody knows it was made. So the criteria should demand a more public process of contrition. Perhaps like this:
I freely admit that I have done wrong.
I ask forgiveness of those I have wronged.
I promise to do my best to make amends to them.
Here, the third criterion promises not only that I will not repeat the crime, but also that I will make efforts to put things right to the best of my ability. For the victims, redress is the most tangible result of my contrition and a measure of sincerity.
Can we feel contrition for other people’s crimes? Can we feel contrition for crimes we have not committed personally, but have subsequently profited from? How can we formulate the criteria for contrition to make them applicable to collective responsibility for historical crimes? Perhaps like this:
We freely admit that our predecessors have done wrong and that we are profiting from it.
We ask forgiveness of those who were wronged and of their descendants.
We promise to do our best to make amends to those who were wronged for the effects that still remain.
The larger the collective, the more diluted the personal responsibility. The less intimate the contrition, the greater the risk that it will just be hollow ceremony. A representative steps forward on our behalf, admits the wrong committed, apologizes, pays what it takes and appoints a committee to ‘monitor our practices’.

But Wall Street hasn’t even done that.*

And there are plenty of other systemic sins that we are part of—that we are responsible—but whose web of guilt is so diffuse that it’s easy to shift the blame. But the systems are composed of individuals, and as individuals, we all contribute our small, unsuspecting part in the greater injustices.

As American consumers, we are purchasers of products produced in unethical and inhumane circumstances. As Americans, we live on land that was seized from its original inhabitants. And though most of us are fortunate enough to have never been in such situations, we are certainly capable of inflicting direct bodily harm upon others.

Stanley Milgram, in conclusion to his famous experiments where test subjects delivered what they believed to be crippling electric shocks to a fellow human being (while they could hear that person screaming for it to stop), as long as the authority figure said it was okay, writes:

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with the fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

This is not to say that we are incapable of good, or that we do no good at all, but to emphasize that our brokenness infects nearly every action or decision that we are in, every relationship that we are in, and every system or institutional structure that we are part of. At the end of the day, we all must throw ourselves at the mercy of God.



* Terra Nullius ends the above quoted section with “Australia isn’t even doing that”. I switched it for Wall Street, but I need to give the original author credit.
** This entry draws inspiration and direct quotes from a talk on sin that my husband gave earlier this week.