Introduction

"But what is the significance of the fact that Amos exposes interhuman injustices? In the last analysis, these are crimes that occur among all the peoples of the world in the most varied circumstances; and we always end up finding a modus vivendi with them without much squeamishness. Is not Amos assigning them too much importance when he sees in them the cause of the great approaching disaster?"¹

"It must be thoroughly understood," wrote British Prime Minister Lord John Russell 150 years ago, "that we cannot feed the people." The people in question were the Irish, one million of whom - one Irish man, woman and child out of every eight - died during the great famine of the 1840s. It was an early triumph for economic liberalism.

As Russell and his kind saw it, the functions of government were merely negative: it could do "no more than remove obstacles to amelioration and suffer a society to proceed unchecked in its natural career of advancement".² In England, laissez-faire left open the way "both for the amassing of great wealth and [for] untold suffering"; in Ireland, it precluded positive reform, and so "marked out the road that led to famine, death and emigration on a vast scale".³

It was not that there was no food in Ireland, but that, once the potato crop failed, there was no food that the Irish tenantry could eat or buy. As relief ships sailed in, carrying American corn, they passed ships sailing out, still carrying Irish corn for export to England: wheat, barley and oats were "cash crops", with which, on pain of eviction, the tenants paid their rent, and the landlords maintained a lifestyle of conspicuous, and ultimately ruinous, consumption.

Adherence to laissez-faire was carried to such a length that "in the midst of one of the major famines of history, the government was perpetually nervous of being too good to Ireland and of corrupting the Irish people by kindness".⁴ The people died because the rich and powerful let them die.

At all times and in all places, the poor can tell such tales. Why is this? Is it, as Ina Praetorius argues, because our notion of justice, derived from the Greeks, is skewed? Any man's death may diminish me; but the death of a man diminishes me more than that of a woman, and the death of a wealthy European or North American infinitely more than that of an anonymous Cambodian or Rwandan. Or is it, as other contributors to this issue imply, that our values are skewed because the world they reflect is fundamentally skewed? In the economic calculus of the stock exchange, the World Bank, or the transnational corporation, we are not all equal. Human lives really do have different values.

Faced with such a world, those of us who are poor have limited choices: we can suffer, or we can resist. Those of us who are rich, whether absolutely or relatively, have larger options: we can go along with the way things are or, like Amos - a sheep breeder, a "substantial and respected man of his community" (James L Mays) - we can choose, perversely, to insist on change.

Reformed faith and economic justice will be one of the chief foci of the 23rd general council, which takes place in Debrecen, Hungary, in August next year. For the last two years, Warc has been engaged in a study of this theme, with regional consultations in Manila, Philippines, and Kitwe, Zambia, and a workshop at the European area council in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1995; and an international consultation in Geneva in May this year. Bas Wielenga's Bible study comes from the Manila consultation. The articles by Bob Goudzwaard and Claude Gruson come from the Geneva meeting.

Páraic Réamonn

Notes