DE LA TORRE DOING ETHICS FROM THE MARGINS

Simbarashe Sigauke

DE LA TORRE DOING ETHICS FROM THE MARGINS

De La Torre speaks of overturning an oppressive system by appealing to the Christian narrative. He commences with the story of Israel as a way of questioning the dominant culture. He also analyzes the social conditions of the disenfranchised. De La Torre talks of liberation ethics as a way of debunking, unmasking, and untangling the ideologies of a dominant culture. He introduces the hermeneutical circle as a model to be used by Christian ethicists   as they seek to liberate and save their communities. A hermeneutical circle is a paradigm of doing ethics. De La Torre turns liberation into a five-step blueprint.

1.    Observation: This involves gazing at a situation and calling into question the dominant interpretation through the lens of the marginalized. This is seeing from the margins or below. De La Torre wants to define history as a memory of the marginalized people. He does not rely on the “official” history, which is devoid of the voices of the disenfranchised. He does not want to depend on the history of the colonizer but rather on the history of the colonized, this is the “forgotten” history.

2.   Reflection: Reflecting on the way the current social structures oppress those on the margins.

3.   Prayer: Praying using theological and biblical analysis.

4.   Action: This is the place of shifting from orthodoxy to orthopraxis. It is the implementation of the praxis. Actions include things such as feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting the imprisoned, or social justice.

5.    Reassessing: Reassess the situation in light of new ethical perspectives and information.

According to De La Torre ethics is justice through overturning the dominant culture. Ethics is seeing the least the last and the lost in the context of injustice and through the lens of faith. Ethics cause us to take action together to dismantle systems of oppression where the oppressed and the oppressor are co-liberated. De La Torre made use of the hermeneutical circle in his ethical applications. I have chosen to apply the hermeneutical cycle on the issue of poverty and wealth inequality in the United States of America.

1.    Observation: More than 46 million Americans live in poverty. In November 2012 the U.S. Census Bureau said more than 16% of the population lived in poverty, including almost 20% of American children. A 2013 UNICEF report ranked the U.S. as having the second highest relative child poverty rates in the developed world. The top wealthiest 1% possess 40% of the nation’s wealth; the bottom 80% own 7%; similarly. The richest 1 percent in the United States now own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. The gap between the top 10% and the middle class is over 1,000%; that increases another 1000% for the top 1%.

2.   Reflection: The ideologies of Neoliberalism and Capitalism have perpetrated the current economical milieu. The oligarchs and plutocrats in the Wall Street who commit white-collar crimes are less likely to be caught or even arrested. There are vast differences in wealth across racial groups in the United States. The wealth gap between white and black families nearly tripled from $85,000 in 1984 to $236,500 in 2009.

3.   Prayer: Jesus came to preach the gospel to the poor, to set the captives free and to declare the year of Jubilee. Like Karl Barth said, “Jesus is the movement of social justice.” Jesus is the lamb that takes away the sins of the world.

4.   Action: Muhammad Yunus’s concept of microcredit and microfinance, which he implemented successfully in Bangladesh. He gave tiny loans to the poor.

5.    Reassessing: When we see this current economic situation from the vantage point of economic privilege, we ignore how normative interpretation maintains societal power relationships detrimental to the poor. Yet if we see it through the lens of the oppressed we come to a place of liberation.