Gustavo Gutierrez is a Roman Catholic priest in Peru.
Gustavo Gutierrez is a Roman Catholic priest in Peru.
Gutierrez's work is much more extensive and profound than this short selection can indicate. Restricting myself to the material in the selection, however: Gutierrez is interested in distinguishing between two concepts, the narrower one of "development" and the broader one of "liberation". "Development" is largely a Western-dominated, Western-oriented, materialist perspective. It does not challenge in any fundamental way the oppression of the Third World through the oppressive mechanisms of economic dependency (internationally) and elite oppression (domestically). Gutierrez calls it "aseptic", in that it is devoid of any sense of the real conflict between nations (the oppressed and the oppressors) and between social classes (the elite and the masses).
[Note that this parallels the Marxist idea that "development" is ideological, disguising its maintenance of capitalism under a false cloak of "progress".]
[Note that Gutierrez is talking about more than the mere happenstance of social inequality. Instead, the inequality is both structural (and thus permanent) and radical (so that the inequality is not merely between the haves and the have-mores but between the haves and the have-nots).]
This economic analysis has a counterpart in a philosophy of history and in a theology. The philosophy of history is a humanist Marxism, in which human beings do face historical oppressions but are able to understand and move against them. (Note that this is not "scientific Marxism" or "dialectical materialism" [399A/2/8-10], which hold that individual human will isn't very important.) Similarly, Gutierrez's view sees theology in terms of the liberation of the poor, not the continued welfare of the wealthy, and he finds scriptural authority for that in the New Testament.
Like Friere's pedagogy, liberation theology is designed to make human beings subjects instead of objects. This is the meaning of the puzzling material about Hegel and the dialectic in the middle of the reading (398A/4 — 399A/1) . To be a "subject" here means to have a subjective point of view; it doesn't mean to be subordinate. Quite the opposite, in fact: people are made into objects when they are given no will of their own, i.e., when they are always ruled by another. Thus peasants and the poor are ruled by forces over which they have no control — landowners, or moneylenders, or the weather, or the police, etc. They have no conception that they can be autonomous, thinking agents on their own behalf — i.e., subjects. By relating the peasants' situation to the Bible, liberation theology allows them to come to an understanding of their own situation from the outside, as it were, so that they can respond as human beings, not as mere puppets.
Note that liberation theology is one form of liberation ideology. It provides (for Christians, anyway) a religious basis for liberation ideologies.
Liberation of peasants (Catholic, Latin America)
Base communities; bottom-up organization.
Institutionalized oppression:
Internalized oppression:
Theology:
Quiz question(s): Who is Gustavo Gutierrez (besides the author of the reading, of course)?
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