February 2011.
OUR WORLD TODAY
Where are we in OUR WORLD TODAY and where is the world heading?
In general we are somewhere between the time God created the world ‘in the beginning’, and the Last Day, also known as Judgment Day. My bet is that we are very close to the Day of Christ’s return, judging by the books with “End” in them, such as The End of History, The End of Oil, The End of Faith, The End of Nature, The End of Science, and The End of Growth. They all point to a growing awareness that OUR WORLD TODAY is running out of steam.
Take The End of Growth. Our world has an obsession with growth, with an ever bigger Gross Domestic Product. The aim of every government is to increase what the nation is producing, never mind that this means more pollution, more Climate Change, more harm to creation. But politicians want to be (re-)elected, and the absence of growth hampers this and harms the rich, the Wall Street financial types who really run OUR WORLD TODAY. No or negative growth means dissatisfied voters, means closed factories and stagnation. So, never mind the cost, growth must continue, by fair or foul means.
It’s easy to grow from a low base. China with a per capita income of $3000 with ten percent growth only generates an extra $300, while the USA with $33,000 income per person has trouble growing at only three percent growth, which still adds $1,000. But grow we must or the economy will collapse.
So we are boxed in. For the 2.7 billion people now living on less than $2 a day, economic growth is essential to provide their most basic needs. We, the wealthy, need growth to pay off our debts and prevent civil unrest. To produce growth takes vast amounts of energy, while our best source – fossil fuel – is both the main contributor to climate change, and comes with an ever rising price tag.
Here is our dilemma: we can’t live with growth, and we can’t live without it. This paradox is the biggest challenge in OUR WORLD TODAY. We are blind to this contradiction because, by and large, our quest for economic expansion is based on ‘religion’, not faith in God, but faith in progress, faith that science will redeem us.
The ultimate result is The End of Capitalism, and with it the end of our comfortable lives.
Does that mean inflation? Probably. The basic cost of doing business is increasingly burdened by extra security concerns, environmental hazards, pensions and health care costs, more older people, more costly commodities, all these are expenses passed on to the rest of us, but there is a limit to what we are able to pay as basic pay has not increased.
What is sure is that, in OUR WORLD TODAY, we are witnessing immense economic, political and socio-cultural upheavals, none of them easily controlled by the people in power. The result: ever greater uncertainty as doubt feeds on itself while trying to deal with the new problems posed by terrorism, dollar doldrums, climate and regime change, popular uprisings, peak oil, pandemics, food shortfalls, water scarcity and nuclear proliferation.
Governments everywhere appear paralyzed. Haiti still horrible, New Orleans still not repaired, Israel and Palestine still at odds, the Middle East a mess, Iraq and Afghanistan too costly to continue, deficits out of control, Spain, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, all US States basically broke, a US congress blind to reality.
The extraordinary expansion of the world economy in the postwar years – from 1945 to 1975 – was followed by a long period of economic stagnation, after which Western nations survived on playing with money, involving debt upon debt, both financial and environmental. According to Laurence Koftikoff, a Boston University professor, the USA financial debt alone amounts to $200 Trillion, or $700,000 for every one of the 300 million Americans. If this is true, the debt will never be repaid signalling The End of Money.
OUR WORLD TODAY is especially a more perilous place because we have not protected our planet which, essentially, is our parent. We live, as it were, between two trees, the ones depicted in Genesis 1 and in Revelation 22, suggesting that The Beginning and The End are closely linked. That’s why it is still our task to pick up the ball Adam dropped: our focus must always be on being fully human, on being Adam, on being ‘born of the earth’. The word Adamah means that each one of us is tied with every gene of our existence to the life-bearing earth.
Bert Hielema’s blog – hielema.ca – receives an average of 50 hits per day.