February 7 2016
A WORLD IN DISARRAY: another of my jeremiads, of course.
Disarray? Not here in Tweed so much.
This week I went to two evening meetings, something I not often do, except for choir – which really does not qualify as a meeting, and a bible study group, which also is not a place where you meet strangers. Yes, that is what I call meetings, a place where I meet new people and greet old friends.
The first was on Tuesday in the (new) library building where the talk was Climate Change and its effect on Gardening. Well attended. It also offered multiple tips how to grow stuff organically. Since I rely on our garden for much of the produce we eat – potatoes, cabbages, kale, onions, beets, green beans, carrots as well as apples and raspberries – I still have a lot to learn. Even after more than four decades of veggie gardening, I still see myself as a novice. So am eager to become more informed, especially at a time when so many drastic changes are taking place everywhere, and, as one speaker said: “in a few years’ time in a world of disarray, growing your own maybe the only way to secure a reliable food source.” Yes, with too much drought and/or too much rain, better prepare for the worst. I increasingly believe that the churches’ failure to actively incorporate God’s direct word – creation – in its day-to-day prescription for eternal life, is the real cause why so many have left the church and why among those who are still attend church, aspects of amnesia are approaching.
Here is a different take on this meeting: I see the meetings of the Tweed Horticultural Society as a divine manifestation at par with the regular Sunday worship. I did count 9 members of our church there.
More about that next week.
That was one meeting. The other was a few days later, on Thursday, where a totally new concept for Tweed was introduced: sponsoring a Syrian refugee family. Again religious overtones: an expression of ‘loving one’s neighbor’.
Here too there was a good crowd, some 60 people, basically open to sponsoring a Syrian family of four, mother, father, 2 children. In this venture I chair the finance/ fundraising committee which must collect $30,000 of which $26,000 already has been raised. I presume I will have to do a bit of door-knocking for this excellent cause.
Both meetings emphasized to me that our world is in disarray because we all live in One World, where Climate Change is universal and Global Disorder affects us all.
Somehow I am developing a totally new view on religion, and it scares me, because it makes we feel too different. If you have been a regular reader of my blog, and there are a few, then you may have noticed that I see the earth as God’s primary Word, his direct Word, while the Scriptures, the Old and New Testaments, I see as God’s secondary Word, his indirect one, as it has come to us through human hands, inspired as it is by the Holy Spirit. Yes, God’s primary word is more important: we are to inherit it!
I am always reading something. This week it is an interesting book, one of my own, entitled THE CIVILIZATION OF THE MIDDLE AGES by Norman F. Cantor, almost 600 pages. Reading it made me wonder whether history is repeating itself, because I see a remarkable similarity between the 14th and 15th centuries and today.
These two centuries too were periods of crisis and dissolution. Plagues and wars were severe and frequent. The people themselves were acutely aware that theirs was a troubled world. Even the weather was different then: the onset of a little Ice Age played havoc with the crops, just as Global Warming is doing today.
The book relates how the gap between rich and poor widened everywhere as trade declined, again exactly what is happening now. The church was all mixed up too, just as today. Then the selling of indulgences for the remission of sin was a popular way to raise money for the church; now in the fastest growing churches are the Prosperity kind: its main message is that when you become a “ true Christian’ God will bless you materially. The leading Republican candidates, Cruz and Rubio preach that gospel, are supposedly fervent Evangelicals, but they despise the poor, favor guns, and want to do away with Obamacare and benevolent government.
The big difference between then and now has been that the late Middle Ages saw that terrible Black Plague that killed 20-30 percent of the European population, especially the urban dwellers. Frankly today also the world is ripe for another pandemic. Already 90 percent of people suffer from one or more ailments. We also have:
? Global warming and resultant climate instability;
? The contamination of all ecosystems and food chains—and all humans—with persistent organic pollutants and other novel entities such as nano-particles;
? The depletion of key resources and damage to ecosystems that provide life-supporting “goods and services”; and
? The loss of species and biodiversity, a human-induced “sixth great extinction” that threatens the overall web of life.
All this sets the stage for another type of universal disease, probably something totally new, against which there is no effective antidote.
Take Africa and Asia at this point: both tremendously susceptible to a virus of some sort. Perhaps the current ZIKA variety may mutate into something affecting adults as well. Today anything is possible. I read last week how typhus has hit Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, where a water crisis has fueled fears of new epidemics. All over Africa the taps and wells are running dry, setting the stage for wide-spread hunger and disease.
Then there is the USA.
One look at the USA, and we see political chaos. We also see debt at an all-time high, with stagnant wages, with jobs mostly of the ‘service’ kind paying less than a living wage and even these are disappearing because the public has out-shopped itself and is trying to pay-off debts, with the result that even Wal-Mart is closing stores and entire shopping centres stand empty. There is a billion square feet of vacant commercial retail space, more than Canada has in total. When people have ‘nothing’ to lose, they ‘lose’ it, so they do the craziest things, like voting for Donald Trump, a Hitler-like person, or the right wing Cruz or Rubio, and prefer the old Senator, Ernie Sanders, over the establishment Hillary Clinton.
Chaos everywhere.
China in particular. There peasants by the millions flocked to the cities and found jobs in steel mills and other factories. Now they are being fired by the hundreds of thousands and returning to their rural roots, where they will sow dissension and cause exactly the riots the Communist rulers so fear. Just imagine: steel production in 1990 was a mere 70 million tons. This year the mill capacity is 825 million tons. Automobile production in 1994 was only 1.4 million. Now the factories there can produce 33 million of cars per year. Cement production went completely astronomical. In the three years of 2011-12-13 China produced more cement than the entire 100 years of the 20th Century in the USA.
All this infrastructure outlay and increase in industrial capacity was done on borrowed money. The trouble with borrowing is that when the ability to pay the debt goes down and markets disappear, the outstanding debts increase because of added interest. Wait for China’s economy to implode and, as it comprises close to 20 percent of the world’s Gross Domestic Product, expect a global recession if not a depression.
Believe me: all signs of collapse are present. Add the weather factor, the overpopulation, Europe on the edge of a break-up, the USA scene more confused than ever, all of which makes me thankful that, for the time being Canada, where I live, looks like an oasis of stability.
Of course, my age group is of the privileged sector. I remember that, as a self-employed person, I enrolled into the CPP, the Canada Pension Plan, where my first annual payment was $75.00 plus my employer’s portion, another $75.00. My last payment, before I retired in 1993 was exactly 10 times as much: $750.00 + $750.00. In total, adding 8 percent compound interest, my total CPP pension pot came to about $35,000.00. I drew that out in 4 years, from age 65-68. In the meantime the CPP payments have increased, thanks to a bit of inflation, to more than $12,000 annually so that now, almost 20 years later, the Canadian government and its tax payers, have paid me more than $240,000 beyond my contributions. How long can that last?
The entire world is in disarray, with, at best, a stagnant economy. Yet all levels of governments have based the payments of all pensions and medical benefits on infinite growth. Someday in the not too distant future, the expense ratio will exceed the revenue projection by such a large margin that matters will run stuck.
Just as one’s own garden produce may soon be the only source of food left, so too the government money stream, now originating in Ottawa or Washington may cease, and people would have to rely on their own resources or simply starve. That’s happening already in Greece and many regions in Africa, as well as in parts of the Middle East, that’s why the Middle East is coming to Tweed, one of the few sane areas left in the world.
Here, in Eastern Ontario, 100 years ago, people mostly lived on small farms, with a few cows, a few apple trees, a large garden, chickens, a pig, a horse or two, a cheese factory or creamery every few miles, all close to a ‘walk-to’ one-room schools where the basics of reading and writing and arithmetic were taught.
However, the past will never be repeated. The past is gone. The rural landscape is now dotted with fancy homes and 2-3 car garages, needed to transport the owners to far away employment places. Our society is built entirely on an abundance of cheap fuel, a sort of energy that we now know is also the source of the greatest threat humanity has ever faced.
The stage is set for a totally new world. We suddenly hear of dangerous mosquitoes. Of course they always were there, but now they have turned vicious. It seems that, in a world of disarray, all things turn against us. Of course, rather than embracing the world, rather than recognizing that we are part of the earth, rather than admitting that the Lord has fashioned us out of the clay of the earth and blew his own breath into our nostrils to make us human, we wanted to be gods ourselves. Pride, hubris, self-aggrandizing, has now brought us to the state where we are at the very edge of the abyss. No wonder it feels that the whole world is going through a long, nervous breakdown.
To repeat: the entire financial world is faced with new conditions, such as negative yields on money and gigantic debt levels. Then there are the growing geopolitical risks, including those stemming from the Middle East, Europe’s identity crisis, rising tensions in Asia, and the lingering risks of a more aggressive Russia. Something has to give.
Welcome to the New Abnormal for growth, inflation, monetary policies, and asset prices, and make yourself at home. It looks like we’ll be here for a while.
What is really happening is that the Lord is testing us as never before. In a world in total disarray wherever we look, there’s no way we can escape God’s judgement. The earth is taking her revenge. For us the only way left is to bow humbly before God’s majesty, kneeling before his judgement throne, and confess, as the prodigal son did in that familiar parable that Jesus taught us (Luke 15): Father I have sinned against heaven and against you”.
Of course, that’s not easy. It means that we must acknowledge that we have gone wrong, that society is at odds with the gospel, the Good News of the Kingdom – the new earth- to come.
That calls for a new mindset because, by and large what is commonly called Christianity has ceased to be Christian because it still sees the earth as a planet to escape from, regards the earth as evil. That has to change.