In my blog post last week, I quoted Marianne Williamson asking us to reimagine the world we live in.

What is the America you want? You know, there’s been all this talk about manifestation and visualization. Well, don’t just visualize the world you want for yourself. Visualize the planet the way you wish to see it.

As I indicated, I think this is a serious and important question: What do we want our world to be? It’s a question we avoid because we think the situation of the world is just the way it is and beyond our power to change. But the world is what people have made it to be.

Now, I’m not naïve. I know the world can’t be changed on a dime. But nothing will change unless people have a clear vision for what a better world would look like, unless they can articulate “this is how the state of the world is wrong and this is what it should be.”

I think most of us greatly underestimate how integrated our world has become. We retain memories from childhood of books, TV shows, and movies that emphasized the differences in dress and music and cultural habits of the world’s peoples. Some of that is still true but in general our lives are far more similar than different.

One example I’ve cited before is housing. A recurring political topic here in our small city (100,000) of Santa Fe is lack of “affordable housing.” Repeatedly people talk about this as “Santa Fe’s housing problem.” But Santa Fe doesn’t have a housing problem. The United States, and even the world, have a housing problem. And, unsurprisingly, most cities have seen a significant increase in their homeless population as a result.

Which is not to say that local communities shouldn’t try to address these problems. But the lack of affordable housing is occurring for real reasons, global economic and political reasons. If we imagine and want a world where all people have adequate housing, then those economic and pollical factors have to be addressed. And that involves making real changes in the world’s economic and political systems.

And that means making real changes in our economic and political system, because the United States, while its role is declining, remains the single most important economic and political influence in the world. Of course, just raising the topic can send blood pressures soaring, but we have to step away from partisan rhetoric and identities. Rather, again the question is: What do we want our country and the world to look like?

Our divisive partisan politics seriously resists having such open-ended conversations. Yet, this is the conversation we need to have, rather than the endless shouting and name calling we resort to these days. Partisan politics wants us to stay in our lanes and only consider party sanctioned options for our myriad of problems. Serious conversation, however, can lead us to new possibilities that go beyond what is “politically permitted.”

Here in the United States, our greatest challenge now is to restore our sense of community. Unfortunately, historically it has often taken a war to move people together but that won’t work anymore. Instead, we need to develop a genuine sense of common welfare and purpose. We need to recognize that our welfare is collective, not individual, and that, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians, “If one member suffers, all suffer together.”

Lately, there has been an increasingly tendency to compare our situation with the collapse of the Roman Empire. It’s not an inappropriate comparison. One of the astonishing things about the empire’s fall is how much was lost and seemingly given up. In its last centuries, Rome had achieved incredible cultural and technological achievements. Many of its buildings and roadways are still with us and more are being uncovered. Europe would not again reach a comparable level of achievement for a thousand years.

How could all that have been given up? One of the most important explanations seems to be that most people stopped caring about it because so few actually benefited from it. Wealth and power had so concentrated in a tiny minority that the vast majority of people were just getting by.

As evidence of how desperate the situation had become, a recent study found that average life spans increased in the years following Rome’s fall because more food went to those who grew it, rather than to the wealthy elites who basically took it. So, when the barbarians pushed into the empire’s frontiers, fewer and fewer had the motivation to keep them out. Did they really have much to lose?

The parallel with our situation should be obvious. According to public health researcher Steven H. Woolf, life expectancy in the US has been gradually falling behind other countries since the 1950s. And the gap is accelerating. The US now ranks 46^th, behind even Albania, one of Europe’s poorest countries, and Lebanon. And almost all the factors explaining this trend involve policy decisions based on the priority of profits, deregulation, and lower taxes which benefit the wealthy.

Richard Murphy is an English retired professor of accounting who has become an ardent advocate for finance and tax reform. A consistent theme of his message is the need for society to prioritize “care” in its policies and institutions, as he explains in a recent video on the failings of the politics of both the right and the left.

Without care at the centre of economic thinking, markets fragment society, trust collapses, and democracy weakens. Better management is not enough. We need care as a new organising principle….

Neither [right or left] answers the central question: what is the economy for?  If the answer is still “growth first, and care later”, then nothing changes, and voters will notice. That is the real crisis.

And so this is where both the right-wing have failed in practice, and the left-wing have failed in imagination. We are stuck with a political class that cannot think beyond markets, marginal tweaks, focus groups, and the fear of challenging the power of capital. This is not leadership. This is exhaustion.

We do not need a new leader. We need a new organising principle. One person isn’t going to change everything; ideas can. A politics of care means that the economy exists to support life itself and the life of everyone.  And that public services are investments and not costs. And that care work is foundational and not residual. And that the state exists to enable resilience and not just growth. This is not utopian. This is what is necessary, and deep down, that’s what people know.

“The economy exists to support life itself and the life of everyone.” Support for such idea can be found throughout the Bible, especially in the Prophets and the teachings of Jesus, and in most of the world’s religions. What Murphy calls care, the Bible calls compassion or mercy, and is fundamental to our relationships with all humans and the whole creation. Further, the prophets railed against the notion that religion can somehow substitute for this essential dimension of life. Or as it says in James,

If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

The underlying principle of the Bible’s expectation of compassion is that all people are fundamentally one, both with each other and with God. Thus, when Jesus is asked to name the greatest commandment, he responds in Luke,

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself.”

When Jesus is then asked, “And who is my neighbor?” he responds with the parable of the Good Samaritan. But then he turns the tables on the questioner and asks him, who was a neighbor to the robbers’ victim? Thus, for Jesus the issue isn’t who are my neighbors, but how am I being a neighbor to those in need.

In dealing with today’s challenges, Richard Murphy emphasizes at the end of his video the need for conversation. As I said earlier, conversation is the only way we will together genuinely imagine a better world for all of us. Even more, in conversation other people stop being “them” and instead we recognize them as “one of us”, and “we” takes precedence over “me.”

The Orthodox Jewish Bible translation of Proverbs 29:18 reads, “Where there is no chazon (prophetic vision), the people cast off restraint [i.e., perish ungovernable] ….” Our lack of vision of a better world is increasingly rendering our country and our world “ungovernable.” As I also quoted Marian Williamson last week, “We have to look to the vertical, not just the horizontal” and “we are deeply in need of a deeper conversation.” We need to listen, not to politicians, but to one another and to the voice that is heard only in our deepest silence.

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