June 10 2023
THREE SOCIETAL FAILURES
My Latin dictionary defines the verb deficio, as: to fail, or, to do less than one might. Our word ‘deficit’ finds its root there, a ‘failure’ to live up to expectations.
Societal failure affects us all. The most common one is monetary: “the excess of expenditure or liabilities over income or assets in a given period”. The Economist, that 150+ years old British weekly, in its mid-May edition, sported on its cover, FISCAL FANTASY LAND, referring in its editorial to the deficits all major governments run, manageable when debt only costs 1-1.5 percent, but now courting ‘failure’, having soared to quadruple that amount.
With life expectancy increasing and a rapidly soaring population of older people, clamoring for good pensions, a bubbling increase in ‘old age’ ailments is guaranteed. Add crumbling infrastructure and looming climate change, requiring repair and costly upkeep, while wars and military hardware call for immense investments, the need for money goes sky-high, financed through debt. How high can debt go, before societal failure looms?
Other ‘failures’, environmental and religious, are even more dangerous.
ARCTIC NEWS June 3 2023 opens with:
• Earth’s energy imbalance is at record high
• emissions are at record high
• greenhouse gas concentrations are at record high
• temperatures are very high, especially in the Arctic
• North Atlantic Sea surface temperature is at record high
• sea ice is very vulnerable
• the Jet Stream is strongly deformed.
It continues:
El Niño is on the way, sunspots are higher than predicted and the Tonga submarine volcano did add large amounts of water vapor high into the atmosphere.
Both loss of Arctic Sea ice and eruption of seafloor methane constitute tipping points that threaten to abruptly accelerate the temperature rise in the Arctic, thus also accelerating loss of permafrost in Siberia and North America that threatens to trigger further releases of greenhouse gases.
Well?
Where the monetary deficit/failure can cause financial hardship, the environmental shortfall, the lack of arable land, the poisoning of water and soil, the heating of the atmosphere, can end all life on earth.
The Future.
Today’s ‘weather’ situation, has direct consequences for us. The world economy has been based on temperate atmospheric conditions: moderate heat, regular rains, fertile soils. All these are now in jeopardy, on the verge of radical change.
That’s just the weather.
The faith failure.
Jesus, at one time, lamented, “However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8).
Reading and re-reading Karen Armstrong’s book, Sacred Nature, it is quite clear that humans are religious beings, have been throughout history. I come from a string of deeply believing God-fearing Christians. My children have followed in that line, but not my grandchildren. For them there is nothing that attracts them to ‘religion’. I believe the church, by neglecting to preach and practise the ‘Earth-Word’, as indicated in John 3: 16, is squarely to blame.
It is not ‘faith’ that has declined. There still is faith in progress, faith in democracy, faith in technology, dubious faith in AI, but the trouble is that ‘The Great Adversary, Satan, the Devil, whatever you call this entity’, rules the world – 1John 5: 19 – and – assuming he is male – his aim is to destroy it.
We now have reached the condition where this secular faith is backfiring, witness the universal conflagration. That faith deficit already started in The Garden of Eden, when the human pair, call them Adam and Eve, didn’t quite trust God’s instructions to be a ‘servant and enhancer of creation’. So, when their previous regard of the earth’s bounty ‘beautiful to look at and good for food’, as in Genesis 2:9, was, prompted by the great seducer, reversed to ‘good for food and of nice appearance, (Genesis 3:6), this also caused a faith deficit, now evident ‘in extremis’.
Summary.
We are stuck in a pattern from which there is no escape. As I write this I am ‘house-bound’, not because I am ill, but because ‘the outside’ is ill: it is dangerous to inhale the air because of our environmental endeavors.
The word deficit means: ‘failure’. Our money policies ‘lack’ wisdom. Our environmental practices ‘lack’ wisdom. Our faith life ‘lacks’ wisdom. The Bible, that forgotten book, has a line about wisdom: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning – the beginning! – of wisdom”. That really means that LIFE starts with “being in awe of God’s Creation”. Once we start ‘serving’ God’s earth, we no longer ‘lack’ but have life in abundance.
By the way.
A couple of nights ago, I was looking at the sky. Here’s what I saw:
Forests Fires: The sun turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. (Acts 2:20)