Seeking Social Salvation in a World Made Frictionless: Communion, Extractivism and Integral Ecology

Plenary Session: "Seeking Social Salvation in a World Made Frictionless" 33 riot, part of the northern white working class's resistance to the legal victories of the Civil Rights Movement. 6 Legal and political wrangling about school desegregation would continue for three decades, as white flight accelerated to the suburbs.A second glimpse concerns another crisis that was unfolding at the same time.Pittsburgh's steel industry, which itself had only recently desegregated its union seniority system, would, within a year of that event, begin its collapse under competition from what we would come to call globalization.As a child I didn't distinguish the working class from the middle class.I thought they meant the same thing.Steel workers drove luxury cars, owned boats and had hunting cabins.That was all gone by the time I was in high school.A way of life was destroyed: By 1983, 133,000 manufacturing jobs had been lost.Pittsburgh's unemployment rate hit 17 percent.Some surrounding towns were as high as 27 percent-worse than during the Great Depression. 7 There is much to be said about both of these conflicts.Here I want to focus on one of their shared characteristics: how their outcomes were driven by a lack of social and economic friction.My aim here is not to suggest reductionistically that all of these struggles are driven by one dynamic, but to unearth a factor that runs through them all and frustrates our attempts to address them.The riot was a violent reaction to an attempt to advance racial justice.School desegregation, however, was not defeated in the streets.Although resistance took place in courtrooms and school board meetings, above all, refusal was enacted in real estate offices through the market freedom of white buyers.My family fled the neighborhood where my parents had first dated, a home they had painstakingly remodeled together after they married and a parish where my grandfather had built the convent in which my grade school teachers, the Sisters of St.Joseph of Baden lived.These astoundingly deep connections could not hold us.They were swamped by racial animus and fear.We fled a community with deep ties for an uprooted existence in what were then the exurbs.As the collapse of the steel industry unfolded, there was a common video trope on the evening news: the bemused faces of union steelworkers gathered around garbagecan fires at picket lines that were painfully futile against globalization and deindustrialization.You can't picket that.The world had changed and they had no tools to engage it.I grew up in a no-place that couldn't define itself, because it could neither acknowledge these battlefields nor imagine what to do about them.The Catholic Church overwhelmingly dwelt then and dwells still, in the same unacknowledged territory.This is not to say there weren't homilies about racial or economic injustice, 6 This was likely 1972 when "24,000 of the city's 70,000 school students vacated the schools" during a "citywide school boycott," Joe W. Trotter and Jared N. Day,