getting started

I need to get a few thoughts out there for people to chew over. So I am putting up some pages called ‘Introducing Shalom, which look at how biblical spirituality arose from contact with the natural world, how this gave rise to a sense of the interdependence of all things and to a dream of a new harmony and fruitfulness. I would be pleased to hear reactions to it.

an economic system that denies vision

We have a problem. ‘Developed’ nations have embraced a culture in which market transactions dominate life and thought. We are taught to see ourselves as ‘consumers’ and we accept this degrading description with hardly a murmur, because we are so deeply under  its spell.  The roots of this culture are woven into our history and relate to the repeal of usury laws, the Protestant work ethic and the theories of Adam Smith among other things.

The reason that it has taken hold so powerfully is that it clearly works, at least at one level. A culture focussed on the market makes for efficient transactions and provides a powerful vehicle for technological change. Countries such as the UK have now been on a bender for a couple of hundred years. We have been like at a party. New technologies, like this computer, cars, planes have proliferated. We buy and throw, buy and throw in a an ever increasing orgy of consumption, but soon it will come to an end and our nakedness will be revealed.

Climate change is the presenting issue. We are burning fossil fuels at such a rate that we have altered the atmosphere. No one knows the detail about how it will play out, but the most serious scientific commentators are talking about mass extinction of species, starvation and desertification on a scale never yet seen in the human era, the migration of hundreds of millions of desperate people, political unrest, violence… and worse.

And yet we find it so difficult to respond. Governments are huffing and puffing, but doing very little. The problem is that we have been corrupted. It is well accepted that Adam Smith’s model of life works with only one facet of human character, that is our self-interest. Economic commentators have dubbed this fictitious person homo economicus . Building our societies around this perversion of humanity with its flawed value system has led to our current impasse. We simply cannot see that there is any other way to live. In fact economics as we now have it works by systematically denying vision. The market must be free to develop without recourse to anything other than the minimum of laws to regulate its behaviour. Any ‘vision’ or ideology is deeply suspect for fear that it will constrain the magic of the market.

It is vision that we desperately need, but where will it come from?