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We are now engaged in an urgent, long-running contest between the claims of private wellbeing and the requirements of the public good. That contest penetrates into every dimension of our shared life. On the one side is the necessity of the common good without which we could not live. The point is as old as the tenth commandment from Moses at Sinai:

Thou shalt not covet (Exodus 20:17).

The commandment utilizes the term “neighbor” three times, and affirms that the neighbor is an elemental and indispensable component of my shared life:

Thou shalt not covet your neighbor’s house; thou shalt not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

The commandment is an anticipation of the belated phrase, “It takes a village.” Of course it does; it takes a village to accomplish almost anything that matters long-term.

From the commandment we can readily discern some elemental accents of the common good:

• The public good that we share consists in public health provisions that include all members of the community;

• likewise the public good requires that there be adequate, secure housing for all member of the community;

• likewise provision for public education is a public good, even if some privileged folk hope for a better educational opportunity for their advantaged children;

• It is no stretch to claim, beyond that familiar triad, that there is a stake in the public good of the arts that make available to all the articulation of honesty and beauty so essential to our common wellbeing. 

It follows, of course, that the public good of health, housing, education, and the arts requires adequate funding through taxation that is fair and not regressive. The public good consists in our capacity and readiness to construct and sustain a viable commonality of resources and instruments of just distribution of those resources.

On the other hand the rise of individualism through the work of Descartes, Locke, and Fichte identifies and celebrates the individual person as an agent of freedom with generative capacity. The emergence of individualism at the outset of the modern era was against a backdrop of socioeconomic top-down governance in which the church all too readily colluded. The early proponents of individualism (including Adam Smith) always insisted that the individual person was a member of the community with important obligations and responsibilities toward the community.

Since those early days of individualism, however, the subject has evolved in less responsible ways. We have arrived at a sense of self as a consumer who’s every want and need must be met. Indeed advertising functions not only to assuage our wants and needs, but serves to create new wants and needs even before we could imagine them. Thus the evolution of selfhood among us has easily, in our culture, embraced an unchecked narcissism; when that narcissism is linked to power, moreover, it is easy to arrive at a Promethean sense of self as an agent who is self-made and entitled to all wealth and power that he/she can amass. And of course it follows that in a Promethean world of the self-made, there are those who are predictably “left behind.” In the old text the “left behind” included “widows, orphans, and immigrants,” but that roster readily includes all of those who lack leverage and resources. 

Thus the contest is joined between a communitarianism in which human persons all share a common destiny, and an individualism that imagines that some in their promethean posturing are larger than life, are exempt from “our common lot,” and entitled to a greater share of the resources of the earth. That advantage and privilege are sustained by great power and wealth and their ruthless utilization. 

The issue of course is already joined in scripture. The tenth commandment reflects the conviction that human persons in a neighborhood are people who have a stake in a common life, who share common resources, and who live with common expectations.  Ample room is made in the prohibition for self-gain and self-advancement, but the defining framework is that of a community in which all commonly participate as neighbors. There is a powerful strand of scripture that sees coveting as the capacity to damage or destroy common life. In the prophet Micah a stern warning is issued against those who covet (2:1-2).  It is clear that “coveting” includes both the will and desire to have what the neighbor has and the force to seize it. The poet anticipates that such coveting produces devastation and ruin as the property of the coveter is redeployed to others.

Scripture offers three dramatic narratives of coveting that bring disaster when private claims skew the wellbeing of the community:

• The most primitive narrative is that of Achan in Joshua 7. Aachen’s transgression is in keeping for himself a treasure of the community, a privatization that brings disaster to his people (Joshua 7:10-11).

• The most dramatic and better known narrative is that of Naboth and his vineyard (I Kings 21). Naboth is a small time peasant farmer who belongs with and cherishes his family inheritance of a small farm plot. He is confronted by Ahab and Jezebel with all the power of the state behind them. He refuses their offer to purchase his farm because it is not for sale. It cannot be for sale because it belongs with and for his family. Frustrated by such peasant recalcitrance, the royal couple stoops to violence in order to seize the property of Naboth. In the end the violent action of the royal couple committed against a vulnerable peasant evokes the harsh interruption of prophetic judgment.

• In the narrative of the early church, the narrative of Ananias and Sapphire offers a compelling counterpoint to the sin of Achan cited above (Act 5:1-11).  Like Achan, the couple in the early church withheld some of their economic gain from the common life of the faith community. The death of Ananias who violated the community is abrupt and beyond explanation:

Now when Ananias heard these words, he fell down and died (v. 5).

In like manner the death of Sapphire is sudden and without explanation:

Immediately she fell down at his feet and died (v. 10).

Violation of the wellbeing of the community evokes great cost from the perpetrators!

All of the above is commonplace in my thinking and is the context in which I have read the stunning book of Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (2016). The book is repetitious and not very clearly organized, but nonetheless stunning. Malm’s book is a consideration of the rise of the “fossil economy” that results in the growing power of fossil fuels and the growth of carbon dioxide in the air (p. 11). In Malm’s narrative the pivot point is that the power of steam is the moment when James Watt designed the first steam engine in 1784. Malm suggests that this invention is the beginning of the Anthropocene when human persons came to dominate the planet and the beginning of industrialization that brought with it new prosperity and new death dealing pollution.

Malm converts the either/or of communitarian cooperation/ individual competition into the power-energy question of water or fossil fuels, with this correlation:

Water:  communitarian cooperation;

Fossil fuel:  privatized competition.

This pairing is indeed breathtaking. Malm makes these three points concerning water:

-Water has its own “logic” (298). 

Water is inherently communitarian:

Water is a moveable, wandering thing, and must of necessity continue common by the law of nature; so that I can only have a temporary, transient usufructuary property therein; wherefore, if a body of water runs out of my pond into another man’s, I have no right to reclaim it (pp. 117-118).

Peasants were tied together in… “communities of water.” They adhered to…the notion that the welfare of the whole always trumped the interests and desires of the few…In these hundreds of ecosystems organized around the shared usage of water and irrigation features, the actions of a few directly affected the welfare or the whole community (p. 293).

There is no property in water. Every proprietor has an equal right to use the water which flows in the stream, and consequently no proprietor can have the right to use the water to the prejudice of any other proprietor without the consent of the other proprietors, who may be affected by his operations (pp. 296-297).

Water will not and cannot become private property.

-Water is local in its placement and is not readily transferable:

Conditioned by the properties of the landscape, supplies of moving water were found only in some places; impossible to detach from surface of the earth, their current could not…be transferred to distant sites …Water as a fuel was not portable (p. 124).

-Water is quite labor intense. The operation of water mills required labor, in some contexts forced labor:

Water mills became dependent on forced labor for their existence and expansion… apprentices might be subject to beatings with sticks to keep them awake during night work, whippings with leather straps for underperformance, even experiments in torture (p. 132).

That labor, moreover, was to some extent defined by the will of those who labored:

Human beings and horses were endowed with their own wills…Brutes were governed by instincts and passions which we cannot always foresee or control, since they are perhaps never precisely the same (pp. 213-214).

All of these features together signify that water can be a bit recalcitrant and does not always and everywhere yield to the demands of particular users; thus water is somewhat unreliable as a source of energy.

By contrast steam power is much more readily amenable to private ownership, use, and administration. Malm scores these points concerning steam power:

-Steam power is largely free of disruption because it does not depend on labor intensity:

Steam had the prime advantage of overcoming the barriers to procurement not of energy, but of labour (124).

Rotative engines were praised for their ability to impel automatic machines, dispensing with the need for unruly labour (195).

Steam was perceived as the ultimate substitute for labour, because it was everything that labour was not….Steam was valued for having no ways of its own, no external laws, no residual existence outside that brought forth by its owners; it was absolutely, indeed ontologically subservient to those who possessed it (215).

As a result steam power made possible factories that were free of recalcitrant labor and could operate “in a state of unbroken activity” (172). There was no need for rest breaks for laboring people.

-As a result, steam power is characterized by its “manageability”:

What distinguishes it from all others is its manageability. Wind power must be taken as it is given by nature…The power of steam is just what we choose to make it (213).

It could be exclusively owned and thus monopolized (273). It has no will of its own and no “motive power” (205).

-Malm notices that steam power evoked a fashion that amounted to a fetish:

A fetish is a thing supposedly endowed with its own autonomous force. It is treated as though divinity, beauty, excitement, virtue, growth or some other vital potency [that] inheres in it…It possesses some sort of power (200).

Thus steam readily morphed into an ideology that easily inferred class power and class ownership (215). Thus it can be understood as “the materialized power of the bourgeoisie” (218). It became a tool for capitalist power, wealth, and control (286) wherein some were able to assert their power over others (256).  It evoked a competitive market process that is quite in contrast to the regime of cooperation in the administration of water.

-Writ large, Malm suggests that the discovery of steam power was the very beginning of the Anthropocene wherein human agents could exercise complete control over the earth and its resources (p. 28). Malm goes on to comment on the emerging capitalocene wherein some exercised life-or-death power over others (392). It is for good reason that the new era brought on by steam would evoke resistant hostility. Thus Frederick Marryat could coin the phrase “steam demonology” to see steam as a form of evil. Marryat articulates three facets of that demonology:

• The engine is an agent of despotism that caused starvation for some;

• The engine is an agent of degradation that ruined the landscape; and

• The engine is a bringer of doom through unpredictable heat (225).

The force of steam power served to skew social relationships between the powerful and the powerless. In a poetic mode, steam power is taken as an embodiment of the bad king, Moloch:

Like the ancient Moloch grim, his sire

In Himmon’s vale (i. e. Gehenna, or hell] that stood,

His bowels are of living fire,

And children are his food.

His priesthood are a hungry band,

Blood-thirsty, proud, and bold;

‘Tis they direct his giant hand,

In turning blood to gold (241).

Steam-Moloch enslaves and turns blood to gold, that is, issues in capitalism of the ownership class (286). That ruthless capitalism is wholly indifferent to place and people. The marks of that now free-floating power includes,

de-historcising, universalising, eternalising, naturalising…these are the most quotidian—not to say hackneyed—strategies of ideological legitimation (271).

Thus the old issue of community/private interest is joined around questions of energy and power.

The church has a profound stake in this contest and is decisively on the side of communitarian energy as with water. The move from private to communitarian in the church is of crucial importance. I am reminded of an astonishing revision made in The Evangelical Catechism, the instruction of my youth. The first question of the catechism, echoing the more influential Heidelberg Catechism is, “What should be the chief concern of man?” The old answer, reflecting individualized pietism, was,

Man’s chief concern should be the eternal salvation of his soul. 

But the revised version of the catechism, reflective of the social gospel and likely the impact of Reinhold Niebuhr, changed to this answer:

Man’s chief concern should be to seek after the Kingdom of God and his righteousness.

The move from one answer to the other is a turn toward a communitarian, this-worldly accent. It is not too much, I judge, to suggest a correlation between the two answers and the interface of water and steam:

Water:  God’s kingdom of righteousness;

Steam:  Save yourself!

The alteration in the answer is a harbinger of Liberation Theology that was to emerge later. But the issue is already joined in the Sermon on the Mount:

Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things [food, drink, clothing] will be given to you as well (Matthew 6:33).

There can be no “separate peace,” no private accomplishment of wellbeing. The owners and managers of steam power imagined that the ownership class could foster its private wellbeing apart from the future of the larger population. But the elemental communitarianism of water testified to the contrary. Thus it occurs to me that the “water of baptism” is indeed an immersion into a common humanity before God, a commonality that cannot be overridden by private forms of energy and power. We stand together before God with profound need and with gratitude in equally deep measure. It turns out that in “the water of baptism” the church has been entrusted with a mighty claim for the priority of community that resists and refuses the ideology of capitalist privatism. For that reason we have to seek the shalom of the city (Babylon), for there can be no private shalom, certainly not through wealth, power, or a monopoly of energy (Jeremiah 29:7).