Contract or Body?

A bunch of freshman boys this week drew my attention to two very different ways of looking at the world in, of all things, Willa Cather’s My Antonia. Early in the story, the American boy Jim Burden meets a Bohemian family out on the Nebraska prairie. The clash of cultures is sometimes amusing, sometimes poignant as the Americans turn up their noses at sourdough bread and the Bohemians plead for the Americans to teach their children English. But the most persistent difference, as the students noticed, is the Bohemians’ reckless generosity and the Americans’ reluctance to accept their gifts. Antonia gives Jim a silver ring at their first meeting, and not much later, her father promises him a valuable rifle. Jim is uncomfortable in the situation, bewildered at the custom and blaming it for why the foreigners never “get on” in the world.
The students at first wanted to suggest that the Bohemians give in order to get, and they could give some evidence of such motive in Antonia’s mother, a woman so desperate to keep her family fed and warm in the new country that she complains loudly about her deprivation and demands a cooking pot the first time she sees the Americans’ well-stocked kitchen. Jim thought it weak-minded of his grandmother to give her the pot. On the other hand, Antonia’s mother shares the only thing she has – dried mushrooms carefully carried from Bohemia – with Jim’s grandmother, who has been complaining of how little she has to enhance cooking out on the frontier. Although Antonia and her brother testify to the wonders of the seasoning, the Americans toss the chips into the fire because they don’t understand and don’t trust the gift.

As we discussed the two ways of looking at the world, the students remembered an earlier conversation about two metaphors for society – the “contract” of Locke and Rousseau and the “body” of Aristotle. It seemed that the Bohemians were operating under a “body” understanding – giving to somebody else strengthens the whole community that I’m part of, and so it is a benefit to me. (I had recently been reading Pericles’ speech where he asserts that individual prosperity when the body is suffering is doomed while individual suffering while the body is healthy will be healed.) The Americans seemed to be operating under a “contract” model – what I give is a subtraction from me, and I have to be sure I’m getting back at least as much. Antonia makes the point clear to Jim -- his rich family would be better off if they would help the neighbors in their time of need – and Jim can do no better than to complain that her family is greedy.

What’s the model for us? At some level, surely, any society worthy of the name ought to recognize its responsibility to all its members. A column in the New York Times today describes a corporation’s resistance to adding a single penny to tomato pickers’ piece pay: “Telling Burger King to pay an extra penny for tomatoes and provide a decent wage to migrant workers would hardly bankrupt the company. Indeed, it would cost Burger King only $250,000 a year. At Goldman Sachs, that sort of money shouldn’t be too hard to find. In 2006, the bonuses of the top 12 Goldman Sachs executives exceeded $200 million — more than twice as much money as all of the roughly 10,000 tomato pickers in southern Florida earned that year.” If that inequity is not iniquity, what is? No society can survive or thrive while denying basic dignity to every human being.

But the “body” metaphor in history has been the basis for terrible oppression, injustice and inhumanity against anyone who was “other” than the acceptable body. The burning of heretics was justified as the removal of a “cancer” from the body politic. The “head” of the body in some systems was a king, understood to rule by divine right, and the members were unfree – they had to live in a world that somebody else made without their participation. Against such a system, Jefferson rose up to revolt against tyranny and to celebrate an America that had “banished from our shores that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered.”

I’d say we have the chance for the best of both worlds here. America leaves us free to form our own communities. The “nation” was never intended to be the locus of our whole life – if anything, the states were that in the beginning, and our voluntary associations can be that now. We have not put in common what nations historically have put in common – language, religion, ethnicity, etc. – but rather dedication to the proposition that all men are created equal. That doesn’t mean we should live without associations with, say, religion in common, but it means the state will neither dictate to us what that will be nor interfere with our forming such an association.

For the Christian community, biblically, the question is settled: We are a body (Romans 12, Ephesians 4, 1 Corinthians 12, etc.). But we are not the state, and the state is not us. We are a chosen race, a holy nation, a people set apart, and we can govern ourselves in significant ways, but we are not meant to govern anyone else – they, like we, must be free. We can form our own culture – a body where we recognize that giving enhances rather than diminishes us – while supporting every other’s right to human dignity and respecting their freedom to choose in what body they will participate.