Yes…..Yes(3)
An appeal to all Christians.
It seems to me that Capitalism is the exact opposite of Christianity. Here’s why. The celebrated economist, Joseph Schumpeter (born in 1883) defined Capitalism as “A perennial Gale of Creative Destruction,” with as its goal “to maximize personal consumption.” We know all about that, as we, with no exceptions, are constantly urged by every media source to buy the newest, the most up-to-date models, while discarding the old ones: it’s called planned obsolescence.
There is just a slight problem with this assumption: the current version of the Market economy was designed more than a century ago in a world with a few people – perhaps one billion – and to function there assuming unlimited resources. But our present world will soon have 7 billion of us greedy customers, and there now are shortages of arable land, fish, trees, and, one of these days, oil as well. Increasingly the constraints the world faces are environmental, not economic. Yesterday, in the 20th Century, the size of the fish catch depended on the investment in trawlers, but, today, in the 21st Century, the sustainable yield is the controlling factor. Yesterday, in the 20th Century, the amount of water pumped to irrigate the 250 million hectares in the world which lack sufficient rain, was determined by the number of wells drilled into the aquifers. Today in the 21st Century it is the sustainable yield of the underground water sources that determine the amounts used.
The trouble with Capitalism is that it has no mechanism to stop the ongoing devastation and must, by its own momentum, continue until every last bit of creation has fallen victim to its relentless goal. Technology and cheap oil has made exponential growth possible, which has taken us in a surprisingly short time from a relatively empty world to a world full of people and their furniture. It is now saturated with our things, but empty of what has been there before.
All this offers a golden opportunity for Christians to point out the right way. The Lord tells us in Micah 6:8 to “act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” Granted, Capitalism can be rightly credited with having unleashed enormous forces of productivity and technology, but at what cost? Take the automobile, our means of transportation of choice. While I am writing this, the entire Western world is frantically trying to save its automotive industry. Billions of taxpayers money are being expended to help the domestic car manufacturers to re-organize so that it can thrive again.
And what does the automobile do, apart from bringing a person from A to B in comfort? Calculate the cost! If the car were invented today, it would not pass of being fit for human use. Each year more than a million people are killed in accidents and more than 20 million injured, many maimed for life. The environmental damage cannot be calculated, so immense. Its main merit is that it and technology in general has speeded up “The Return of Christ,” because it has increased the tempo of global destruction to the point where Christ’ return has been advanced by decades if not centuries.
How come Capitalism crept up on us so stealthily that we now think of it as the most common and preferable mode of life? We are in that peculiar situation which reminds me of the Proverbial Frog, who, if it were thrown into a pan of hot water, would immediately jump out, but, when seated contentedly in a pan that is slowly brought to a boiling point, will blithely be cooked to a crisp. That’s what Capitalism is doing to us, literally.
Yes, Capitalism has reduced much of the world to ruin and squalor, a world that God, when he created it, called ‘good’ seven times, and ‘very good’ when it was all finished. If it is a sin to kill and to steal, then surely it is a sin to destroy carrying capacity – the capacity of the earth to support life now and in the future. To hand back to God the gift of Creation in a degraded state capable of supporting less life, less abundantly and for a shorter future, is surely a sin. Of all people Christians should realize this grave misstep and start planning for alternate ways to honor the Lord, repent from this sin against creation and take steps to move about so that it benefits us as well as enhances God’s world, and devise an alternative to Capitalism.
Here is where we are at: after a century or so of triumph as the dominant mode of global development, capitalism has fashioned for itself a world in which one out of two human beings lives on $2 per day or less, and more than one in three still lacks access to a toilet. It was not so before Capitalism, when Africa was flourishing and Asia’s personal income equal to Europe’s. Now most children in the world never complete their education, and most will live out their lives without dependable medical care. As the world economic crisis deepens, already deplorable conditions in the Third World will only deteriorate further.
I cited the prophet Micah who urges us to act justly, to love mercy and walk humbly with our God, because, if we closely examine ourselves, then we must admit that the church at large too is in the grip of Capitalism, is also like that frog which is slowly burning to a crisp. We are told to act justly. That applies not only to being honest, not to steal or kill, or worship false gods. Capitalism is actually a god. We must face the failures of the Growth Society. We must stop crying out to the growing economy, “Deliver me for you are my god.” We must have the courage to ask with Isaiah, “Is not this idol I hold in my right hand a lie? Isaiah 44:20”.
Justice equally applies to the cosmos. Says John 3:16, God loved so much that His beloved Son was offered to rectify the mess we have made of creation, thanks to our infatuation with Capitalism. Yes, ‘to act justly’ applies to all of creation as well. When you attend a baptism in church, as I did recently, then the parents or the persons concerned are asked questions regarding their commitment to Christ, such as resisting evil, seek Christ, strive for justice among people, but never is there a question asking to seek the best for Creation, the cosmos God loves so much. (John 3:16)
No wonder our planet is dying. Or rather, its flesh and blood creatures are. At the height of the financial crisis last year, a Swiss conversation group released a study showing that as many as one-third of known mammals on earth face imminent extinction, perhaps in a matter of decades, as a result of habitat destruction and mass killing by human beings. I have, in my columns, been one of the few that has consistently connected the dots between this and similar warnings of mass species extinctions and our, so revered, system of capitalism, which slowly at first, but now with earth-breaking speed is threatening human civilization and the natural world alike.
To ‘love mercy’ applies to the entire human race, none excepted. We, the original beneficiaries of the capitalistic system have failed to share our wealth, have failed to ‘love mercy’ for the greater majority of the human race, evident in almost universal poverty.
Our failure to ‘walk humbly’ is evident in our arrogant approach to the environment. So severely has capitalism disrupted the world’s climate (the petroleum economy, let us not forget, has been the main pillar of capitalist industrial development for the last 100 years) that even if all carbon emissions were halted tomorrow, scientists now believe that the earth’s atmosphere would warm for another 1,000 years. Hundreds of millions of people, and billions of other animals, will be displaced by rising sea levels, or will starve or suffer malnutrition as a result of flooding, drought, and fire, or else will die from illnesses caused by new plague vectors opened up by sudden climate change and a gravely weakened world health system.
In 1997, a group of European academics published a book called The Black Book of Communism, in which they documented the brutality and mass killings committed by totalitarian Communist regimes in the course of the twentieth century. Perhaps a group of academics will one day publish a Black Book of Capitalism. It won’t be difficult to do, and, of course, just as the Black Book on Communism came about after it had collapsed, so the one on Capitalism will only then appear when it too has been written off as a Crime Against Humanity, as a mode of life that subordinates all human and spiritual values to the pursuit of private wealth and maximum personal consumption of the chosen few, at the expense of most others in the world. Blind as we are to our current state, history will view us as criminals. I might mention the hidden indignities and daily humiliations of the working class and the poor; the strangulation of daily life by corporate bureaucracies such as the telecom companies, and the computer giants; the corruption of art and culture by money; the destruction of eroticism by pornography; the corruption of higher education by corporatization; the ceaseless pitching of harmful products to our children and infants; the obliteration of the natural landscape by strip malls, highways, and toxic dumps; the abuse of elderly men and women by low-paid workers in squalid for-profit institutions; the fact that millions of poor children are sold into sexual slavery, and millions of others are orphaned by AIDS; the fact that tens of millions of women turn to prostitution to pay their bills; and the suffering of the 50 million to 100 million vertebrates that die in scientific laboratories each year. I might also mention the dozens of wars and civil conflicts that are directly or indirectly rooted in the inequalities that are always part and parcel of the capitalist system – the bloody conflicts that simmer along sometimes for decades without ever coming to a solution, in such places as Somalia, Ethiopia, Darfur, Rwanda, Congo, Nepal, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Iraq, where millions of wretchedly poor people die at the hands of other wretchedly poor people. Capitalism is responsible for all this too.
If all this is true, and I think it is, should not the Christian Community rise up and protest, while simultaneously, now that Capitalism has been found wanting, offer a new approach, a new Way to Life?