NOVEMBER 2010
Our World today
This is a good news column. World-wide surveys indicate that Canada is the best country to live in, and that people in the Netherlands are the happiest. Assuming that this wellbeing also applies to the Dutch now living in Canada, they and their offspring enjoy the best of all worlds. The news cannot be better.
We all know that we live on perilous planet, in a very worried world. In response people across the globe demonstrate, fed up with governments bailing out the bankers at their expense: that too is good news.
Paul Gilding, the Australian environmentalist and author of The Great Disruption argues that these public protests are signs that the current growth-obsessed capitalist system is reaching its financial and ecological limits. Says he: “I look at the world as an integrated system, so I don’t see these protests, or the debt crisis, or inequality, or the economy, or the climate going weird, in isolation — I see our system in the painful process of breaking down,” which is what he means by The Great Disruption.
In essence he believes that our blind faith in economic growth, our ineffective democracy, our overloading of planet earth is really a form of global suicide.
Recent events in the world of money – the debt crises in Greece, Italy and Spain come to mind – remind me of the kid in the fairy story who cries out what everyone knows but is afraid to say: “the emperor has no clothes”. In other words: capitalism is counterfeit.
Here’s why. For decades we’ve been told that global market capitalism benefits all. The reasoning is something like this: “in spite of the rich getting richer, in spite of corporations focusing solely on profit, in spite of pollution going un-priced and unchecked, we all would be better off. Wealth might not be equally distributed, but the poor would become less poor, those who work hard would get jobs, those who study diligently would get better positions and we’ll have enough wealth to fix the environment.” That capitalistic promise is now being exposed as fraud. That is good news.
Signs are that we could be facing a new depression. If it does, it could well be worse than the dirty Thirties. David Leonhardt in The New York Times explains that underneath the misery of the Great Depression, the United States economy was quietly making enormous strides during the 1930s. Television and nylon stockings were invented. Refrigerators and washing machines turned into mass-market products. Railroads became faster and roads smoother and wider. As the economic historian Alexander J. Field has said, the 1930s constituted ‘the most technologically progressive decade of the century.’
True, the 1930s was a tough time to make a living, with no unemployment insurance, no pensions, but, since society then still was mostly rural-based, nobody went hungry. Technology invented then would later spread world-wide and would power the post-WWII consumer boom.
We now are mostly city-dwellers, always just three days away from starvation, burdened by mega debt, saddled with political stagnation, aging populations, climate problems, continuous financial crises, just to name the most obvious. All this suggests that if our world today – North America and Europe- suffers a severe economic downturn, depression-like destitution will be far more devastating.
Frankly I see us facing a wall, the end of the future, the end of progress and growth, in essence the end of history, because today, apart from the ultra-vulnerable computer structure, there’s really nothing new on the horizon, climate change being the exception. Examples: Steve Jobs is dead. Space travel has stopped. The Concorde, the ultimate in air transport – 3 hours from Paris or London to New York or Washington – has been scrapped. Nixon, 40 years ago, promised that the war on Cancer would be won. Today not only cancer, but also obesity, Alzheimer’s and diabetes are rampant. Nuclear energy was touted as too cheap to measure: today electricity rates in Ontario have skyrocketed. Average income, in constant dollars, is less now than decades ago. Nothing has really improved in the last thirty years, not health care, not education, not air travel, not work opportunity. Efforts to combat Climate Change have virtually been abandoned. The fate of the Euro is still an enigma and the US Dollar is still in the doldrums, amplifying monetary mayhem. Since our entire system depends on progress, stagnation signals collapse.
To me these are the signs of the fig-tree (Matt 24:32), all pointing to end-times, which means that we have nothing but joy to look forward to: the return of the Lord, and the coming of his glorious kingdom. That is the real Good News!
Bert Hielema daily prays for that Kingdom to come, a topic of his two new books, The Shortest Day and Day without End, available by e-mailing bert@hielema.ca.