Our World Today

Posted on November 3, 2013 by Bert Hielema

Money is our God.

The structure of Capitalism is religious, according to a growing number of independent thinkers. It is the worship of ‘debt’.

An article appearing in the (Dutch) De Groene Amsterdammer, written by Frank Mulder.

Part 2

How do we get rid of the devil?

In general economists have no clue about religion. Economic textbooks shy away from the goal-means-mechanism that Goudzwaard introduces. The exceptions are Father and Son Skidelsky whose book appeared in 2012: How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life.  Skidelsky Senior is a political economist at Oxford and a member of the House of Lords. Son Skidelsky is a political scientist. They tell us that, although main stream economists have grandiose ideas aiming for the wellbeing for everybody, our way to attain that lofty goal will do us in.

“Blame Keynes”, so says Robert Jacob Alexander Baron Skidelsky when interviewed in connection with the translation of their book into Dutch. “Keynes condemned greed and usury, but was of the opinion that they were necessary for a while to generate productivity. Eventually, when we are so rich that we can afford to take it easy, we hopefully will abandon that position.”

Skidelsky describes the switching of the goal with the means with the age-old metaphor of a deal with the devil. “It is the classical Faustian bargain” says Skidelsky. “Faust was a man who, according to tradition, made a deal with the devil to obtain the goals he was after. There are several versions, some to do with money or sex or power, but the end result is always that the devil comes to claim the soul. We all know that it is impossible to call on the devil for help and not pay the ultimate price.”

But then, early in the 19th century, we encounter the Goethe version. He romanticizes the matter and shows that the deal actually is quite clever. The devil in the end loses his prey because God favours the cause of progress and so saves his soul. “That is an unreal solution,” says Skidelsky, “because pre-modern people would never have fallen for this. Ever since Aristotle they know that the good life is not something that lies in the future. The good life consists of the kind of life that is made worthy by life itself. It is not possible to attain the good life through less than the best we are capable of. In the West we have succumbed to the means at the expense of our goals.

Father and son Skidelsky list a series of very concrete guidelines to escape from the Faustian contract. They are both interesting and down-to-earth, but all is not well: on the very last page of their book, without further elaboration, they put a damper on the entire affair. They write: “We question whether a society without the inspiration of faith can accomplish the return to the good life.” This made me wonder (says Frank Mulder, the Dutch author of this essay): “What’s the use trying to do this in society if faith is on the way out?” So I asked Skidelsky: “You think that faith is disappearing? That is a secular thesis that I can’t buy. I am convinced that we’ll see all sorts of religious revivals. People have to be motivated to go into a different direction and that means they will explore different ways: You wait and see.”

(See my remarks on this at the very end. I believe that Skidelsky is correct.)

We regard the financial markets as the motors of the economy. They have to run closely behind the real economy in order to retain their dynamics. One of the former presidents of the German Bundesbank, Hans Tietmeyer said in Davos a while ago: “At last the financial markets are in control rather than politics. Perhaps that’s why Lloyd Blankfein, former boss of Goldman Sachs –  the largest money-maker on earth – during the 2008 money crisis with a straight face dared to assert that by providing money to business, he was doing ‘the work of God’. He didn’t say which god.

The reversal of goal and means has also been described by the already cited Philip Goodchild, philosopher and theologian at the University of Nottingham, UK. In 2007 he wrote the book Theology of Money. In a telephone interview he explains that “Nobody regards money as their ultimate goal in life, but I look at what takes place in real life. When, in daily life, we pay obeisance to money, if money determines our values, then that is our real religion”.

Goodchild reasons the same way as Benjamins who also sees money as something more than a means of exchange, more than merely a bookkeeping entry. “Money in essence is a debit entry created by commercial banks. In case of government bodies such as the USA Federal Bank they create money through the now well-known QE: Quantitative Easing – $85 Billion each month. However money is not something we possess, it is an obligation, the symbol of the debt of some other person or corporation or government. Therefore it possesses a power that affects us all. The money we carry around in our wallets is always en route to a return – with profit – to its creator, because money always goes back to its base, which is money. “This collective debt is hanging over our economy as a crude reminder that compels us to earn money. We need that debt to be able to realize our goals, but, at the same time, it burdens us with certain limitations and rules. It is a force that has hollowed out the traditional society and has given us a new social structure. All these issues point to a deity. Yet that same deity is in reality just as powerless as the old gods. The system plays around with its weakness. We have to listen to the requirements of the financial markets: if we don’t, they simply collapse. And that is not allowed to happen because we depend on them. Therefore what benefits the markets is more urgent than the interests of the man on the street.”

Debts can only be discharged with new money which is, in turn another debit. “It’s a trap from which there is no escape. The economy is being driven by a steadily escalating monetary debt, a debt not only from one rich banker to another, but a debt from everybody to everybody else. It’s impossible to have no growth, because that leads to stagnation, which means that, in order to revive the economy we have to assume more debt. In Great Britain there is a new housing bubble, which is a solution that is an antidote for the crisis, but at the same time it creates a real problem.

Goodchild again: “In the final analysis there are only three ways to get rid of debt. (1) devaluation of the country’s currency;(2) induce inflation, and (3) go bankrupt.  At some time in the future we have to face this debt problem.”

He continues: “One thing I have underestimated, and that is the capacity of the central banks to pump up the economy by assuming these debts. That really is a new phase in capitalism: they are the new bubble, so to say. It never leaves their balance sheets: it circulates from one account to another. This means that – for the time being- the economy still functions.

“However, the political consequences are enormous. The influence of the central banks has become gigantic. They did not grab this influence, no, it has been put on their shoulders. They still are trying to figure out how to use this authority. What is clear is that from now on they are in charge of economic policy. Good bye to democracy. The only aim now is financial stability. The only aim now is the abstract power of the debt obligations.”

“This means that the Mammon is dead,” asserts Goodchild. “The (financial) crisis has exposed the Mammon. But people refuse to believe this. They try to repair the damage which will be risky. They are trying to keep a dying patient alive. Perhaps he will survive for a decade, as in Japan. Soap bubbles can expand forever, as long as nature can tolerate economic growth. But soap bubbles also produce continuous crises. Time and again there is the risk of collapse, and when it does come there will be an immense crisis in democracy, endangering it as a social system.”

These are unorthodox opinions.

Yes, these are unusual insights, and also important. It is for obvious reasons that thinkers such as Goodchild and Goudzwaard belong to a tiny club of prophets who, prior to the onset of the crisis, issued warning signs. Their theological analysis aided them to see through the illusions. But do they offer solutions? Is it really possible to do without these idols? Many theologians don’t buy this. They contend that humanity has an inborn inclination to always worship something or another.

“We cannot pull ourselves out of the quagmire by our own bootstraps. We need to be liberated from these notions”, says Roelf Haan, a development economist and theologian. “I can’t live without transcendence, without faith. To have faith does not mean that I take delight in my mysticism but that I interpret the world in a certain way. I believe that God looks at history from the point of view of the poor, those who fall through the cracks. That sort of vision does not bank on the system: on the contrary it attempts to free itself from it. That is not some kind of escapism. We have to think outside the system, but, at the same time we must operate in the day-to-day economy.”

Christian theology asserts that we can escape the trap of goal and means. “Redemption is an economic concept,” says the Czech multi-tasker Sedl?cek. “The redemption of which the Bible speaks refers in the first place to the buying back – redeem – of a person who had become a slave on account of his debts. Jesus continuously uses economic language. “Sin” also means “debt”. Jesus proclaimed the Year of Jubilee, the year the Jews expected to cancel all debts. He did away with the cold accounting calculation of good and evil and substituted it with ‘grace’. All those morality systems in search of debt are swept away in one grandiose gesture. The entire idea of tit for tat is replaced by love. Love, in the end, triumphs over law.”

What has this to do with economists? “Quite a bit”, according to Sedl?cek: “The way the Greeks tackled the problem of debt is pure theology. According to the law we still are entitled to money. Either that or are we supposed to wipe the slate clean? And how often must we do that? Seven times? Seventy times seven times? But that is impossible. But in Jesus’ time all this debt cancelling also made no sense at all. That’s why it is so unique. And it applies to us all, because in the end it’s the only way out to get rid of the Devil.”

My remarks.

For the time being we are stuck with the devil. Debt and the devil will do us in. We are taught by Jesus to pray to ‘forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors’. I believe that these debts include environmental debts, which are also immense beyond calculation. Jesus wondered whether he would find faith on earth upon his return. (Luke 18: 8). Of course there will be faith. When we lose faith in the New Creation – which I think is the kind of faith Jesus is referring to – where Jesus will be among us as the Primus Inter Pares, the first among equals, people will concoct all sorts of substitute-faiths with have no real substance.

Next week:

What did Jesus think about money?

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Our World Today

Posted on October 27, 2013 by Bert Hielema

Two of my readers sent me an article, published last week in

De Groene Amsterdammer a Dutch periodical in print since 1877.

Frank Mulder, a writer-journalist was the author.

I found the article of such value that I have, to the best of my ability, translated it, also, of course, because it fits in with my views on both religion and economics.

Since the Dutch version is more than 3500 words, I will present it in two parts.

Money is our God.

Part One.

Summary:

Capitalism is more than a model. It is a religion according to a growing number of independent thinkers. “Is it possible that theology can teach something to economists?” asks Frank Mulder.

Here it is:

I am looking for Mammon! Theologians: take note!

Haven’t you heard of that crazy human who, for all to see in pure daylight, grabbed a gold bar, carried it onto the trading floor and kept on yelling “I am looking for Mammon! I am looking for Mammon!”

Never heard it before? It’s Nietzsche’s famous parable about the fool who declares that God is dead. However “Being dead”, according to the explanation of the scientist Phillip Goodchild, “now means that this time it’s money’s turn to die.”

Why? Picture the stock market today. Because there are so many floor traders who don’t believe in Mammon they started to ridicule the man. Some wondered whether “He has been bought out”, another person suggested “Perhaps he went bankrupt”; somebody else asked. “Maybe he left for China, where people don’t pay capital gains tax.”

While all these money-men crowd around the besotted man and poke fun at him the fellow jumps up and down, looks straight at them and, totally bewildered, yells: “Where did Mammon go? I know what happened! We killed him – you and I! We all are his murderers! And how did we do that? How were we able to rob the world of her treasures? Who pushed the delete button to wipe out those crazy calculations? What’s going to happen now that we have exposed all our possessions to all possible risks? Where in heaven’s name are we going? Are we gambling it all on the throw of the dice? Are we venturing into the Great Unknown, into the Infinite Nothingness?”

Comments Philip Goodchild: “Yes, the god of money is dead and we have killed him,” in his essay on the debt crisis. He wrote this in a periodical not read by economists but by theologians. So theologians take note! That is not a random event because, according to Goodchild, economics belongs to the realm of theology. Economics also has everything to do with crisis and redemption, with promise and debt. Therefore economics is a power worth listening to because we cannot exist without it. And that means that it resembles a god. That’s why, in order to analyze this, we must involve theology.

Here is another voice

In a restaurant in Prague we find Tom?š Sedl?cek busy drinking a ginger lemonade. The 36 year old economist with Attention Deficit Hyper Activity symptoms races through life as a writer, producer, university lecturer, advisor to the Prime Minister and chief macro-economist with the Czech bank CSOB.

He caused quite a furor at home and abroad with his book The Economy of Good and Evil. In it he borrows, seemingly at random, those economical and theological snippets he finds interesting.

Economics is more than mathematical formulas, asserts Sedl?cek.

Economists often act as if markets are rational, as if suspended above us there is some sort of intelligence making sure that the outcome is rational. But that is a myth, just as the homo economicus, always on the alert to maximize utility, is a myth. “Mathematical models are beautiful but they exist only in our imagination” so says Sedl?cek. “People often say that they work in theory but not in real life. Actually the opposite is true. It functions well in real life, but it is difficult to reconcile this with our theories: that’s why we wrap them in all sorts of concoctions: myths in other words. “Nothing wrong with that” says Sedl?cek, “as long as we realize that they are pure inventions, but, of course, contemporary economy never admits that. Let’s face it: it also takes place in many other sciences. Before you criticize our models, they say, come and study with us for five years: only then can you grasp our methods of validation. Well, that was precisely the way the monks in the Middle Ages reasoned. In my opinion they exactly resemble each other. In those days, monks studied, wearing black clothes; now these people are dressed in white.”

Economists presume that the economy is like a machine, something easy to grasp. “But no, that’s not the case at all. The economy is not something tangible. It cannot exist without the state. It is not a machine: the economy has a soul, so to say.”

Sedl?cek wants to know how that soul comes into being. “It’s a matter of ethics, a product of our culture, the end result of age-long discussions about good and evil. It goes back all the way to ancient Greek wisdom, to the Judeo-Christian theology. Without that heritage our economy would have never assumed its current form.” Only when we recognize this basis, according to this Czech citizen, is it possible to reveal the myths and the religious background of the modern economy.

Goodchild and Sedl?cek are only two persons out of a growing body of people who look at the economy with theological eyes.

Take money. Money cannot possibly be reduced to a material phenomenon. Here’s an experiment: place a Hundred Dollar Bill on the table during a meeting. Every few seconds our eyes focus on that piece of paper. It exercises a power by its very presence, independent of time and context. It possesses magic. Theologians call that spirituality. Two Thousand years ago Jesus spoke words which were difficult to digest for his followers: “You cannot serve two masters. You cannot serve God and the Mammon.” The Mammon – a word that carries with it the meaning of money, of security, of authority – strives to attain divine status. Indeed, it is an idol, an idol of the unjust sort, says Jesus, an idol who blinds people.

How is that possible? How can money cause visionary distortion? In other words, how can money impose its own value system? That becomes plain when we observe the two functions which form the basis of money, so say the money experts. In the first place money is a means of exchange. We trade, exchanging goods for money, because in that way we can create more prosperity. That makes money the great symbol of mutuality, of reciprocity. By means of money we are able to suppress evil and scarcity. Our society which cannot function without money, substitutes traditional values, such as benevolence, with this win-win standard, while traditional vices, say envy and greed, are more and more regarded as positive.

Money can also be used as a means to add and subtract. In that way too money can influence our outlook on the world. It’s impossible for money to express everything in dollars and cents. Take love for instance or nature, or community feeling. Basically money is only concerned with tangible items, it’s purely utilitarian. It cannot possibly measure pain and enjoyment, yet even there, money structures society.

Our economic system uses money as the preeminent building block to structure Capitalism. This allows money to have an even greater impact on society. Money does not only colour our values, it also needs our trust, so says Simon Critchley, a British philosopher. In a telephonic interview he explains: “We cannot regard the economy merely as a tool because it is much more than that. Capitalism is an ideology. We regard ourselves too modern to have superstitions, but capitalism is a faith structure, and the crisis in our economy is a crisis of faith. It was for valid reasons that the Romans, at times, featured the goddess Fides – Faith – on their coins. Money is based on faith.”

Critchley – himself an atheist – acknowledges that money tends to assume a dominating position, something in line with what Jesus suggests. Critchley states: “We assume that we are taken in by the goods we buy, but that is not true. It’s money that we worship. Financial markets bank on that. That’s the reason why our entire economic order acquires a religious structure. It’s strange that we hardly give that a thought.”

Although Capitalism has a religious structure this does not mean that it has a religious dogma. All it has is a religious worship structure. Already in 1921 the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamins wrote this in his essay Kapitalismus als Religion (capitalism as religion). Willem Schinkel, sociologist and philosopher, explains what he meant with that. “Capitalism is the worship of debt. That concerns all of us because we all have debt. The word ‘credit’ has as root the Latin verb ‘credo’ which means ‘I believe.’ In Christianity there is the concept of redemption but in the Capitalist type of religion the debt is never repaid. Debt is the basic ingredient. We have to go into debt in order to maintain consumption. In short: debt rules, and because we are part and parcel of this structure, it is difficult to offer criticism.”

Just as in the ancient religions, so too capitalism has its own fetishisms with their peculiar features. Schinkel again: “Just as animistic shamans promote fetishes in the form of images, the credit agencies capture the chaotic financial world out there by means of easy to understand graphics and tables. These acquire authority, a spiritual weight that supersedes the tangible.”

Look at the current Greece situation where the credit agencies devalued its financial situation, blindly following the computer systems, and so brought an entire continent to the brink of bankruptcy. Or look how the Central Bankers, the High Priests of the Capitalist Religion, with a single out of place word are able to cause currencies to tumble.

This comparison with the priests of primitive cultures has already years ago been made by Bob Goudzwaard, economics professor emeritus of the (Amsterdam) Free University, a person who has never been afraid for a bit of theology. According to Goudzwaard all modern ideologies contain at a certain moment traces of theology, including Capitalism, of course. According to him this has to do with a primitive mechanism, that is to say the reversal of goal and means. As individual or as society we pursue legitimate goals, so he explains in his book Hope in Troubled Times (Wegen van Hoop in tijden van Crisis). “We pursue Prosperity or Peace. But when these goals are threatened, we grab every possible means or instrument to get to these goals regardless of the cost. Take economic expansion, a means that in 1957 in the Treaty of Rome is mentioned by name as the necessary road to Prosperity and Peace. A later further development was the deregulation of financial markets. After that the ‘Lisbon’ requirement expressed it even more concretely by mentioning annual three percent economic growth. Everybody, from government minister to banker, claims of course that: “Growth as such is not the goal: our real aim is prosperity and peace for the sake of national wellbeing. But, yes, growth it is the necessary tool.”

According to Goudzwaard this sort of reasoning makes us directly dependent on these provisions. What is really happening is that we put blinkers on, narrowing our vision, which religion tends to do. Goudzwaard asserts that the same thing happened in primitive cultures. People, in times of national distress, ceded part of their authority to what they perceived as higher powers, their idols. Consequently this led to actual worship, complete with certain norms and values. Even human sacrifices were made.

This same assimilation of values Goudzwaard also notices in the modern economy but then on a more rational and systematic level and therefore much more pervasive. “That’s why it has become a virtue in the name of dynamism to break up functioning businesses and sell them piecemeal,” according to Goudzwaard in an interview prior to the credit crisis.

Next week: How do we get rid of the devil?

P.S. Readers of this blog come from more than 25 countries. The largest block of visitors comes from the USA. The second largest group is from CHINA.

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By Bert Hielema

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Our World Today

Posted on October 20, 2013 by Bert Hielema

Oct.20 -13

(If you have trouble reading this, click on ‘home’).

Collapse?!

We have three bird feeders. In the past month no birds came. No, that’s not correct:  one lonely chickadee fed on my feeder, a far cry from years ago when I routinely spotted sparrows, juncos, wood peckers and many others. We have lots of crows, however: their screeching wakes us up in the morning.

Monarch butterflies, you wonder? Well I saw one. For all practical purposes this beautiful butterfly has disappeared, another victim of our greed for speed. Now that most people live in urban areas, city people do not notice these changes, but we, some 5 km from the built-up area of the Village of Tweed, population 1800, see this and are dismayed and worried.

Are these disappearances omens of collapse?

Yes, they signify collapse of some sort. Apart from the lack of birds, it has been a fabulous year for growing. I have never had such an abundance of everything as this season: my root cellar is filled with apples, potatoes, cabbages and carrots. We had to buy an extra freezer to accommodate the apple sauce, apple-carrot juice, kale, leeks, beans, beets and other produce.

Each year I try something new. This year, for the first time, I made sauerkraut. Now that I have done it – it is so easy – I will do it every year from now on.

Collapse is not a popular topic, just as talking about preventing heart attacks is a taboo subject. Several friends of mine have had one: totally predictable, of course. It usually is the result of lack of exercise and fatty diets, resulting in expanding waistlines and clogged arteries. I was at a banquet a few weeks ago, sitting at a table with an overweight older man who was putting layers of butter on his bun: a perfect candidate for trouble which, out of the blue, hits: chest pains and a rush to the Emergency Room. Fortunately these people there are pretty good. After a bypass doctors recommend a totally changed lifestyle with daily walks and a different diet. In my book prevention is better than a cure. Prevention prevents the excruciating pain as well as the immense expense to society in Canada, and possible bankruptcy in the USA where a heart operation cost $100,000.

Just as a coronary is often the result of wrong habits which can result in some sort of collapse, our economy too suffers from faulty behaviour. Collapse there too is preventable but there too our living habits ensure that collapse is in the cards, and when it happens it means death of the economy and with it the death of many. Just as a heart attack is the result of undisciplined  living so economic collapse too has its roots in discarding common sense, often the result of allowing spending and polluting to continue without regard for the consequences.

Our Golden Decades

As a Western society we have become slaves of the past. The half-century, from 1950 to 2000 were the golden years with 3+percent economic growth. It was a perfect period for politicians capable of promising the cake and delivering it with icing: bountiful support for retirement after 60 or 65; generous disability benefits; excellent support for medical problems and all sorts of extra help such as free prescriptions and subsidies for hearing aids and walkers. A growing Gross Domestic Product made that possible.

Today all we hear from governments is that their first aims are to engender economic growth. No politician can expect to win on a platform of cutbacks and reduced pensions and benefits. Yet these days are here, and have already come in many parts of Europe.

Growth is down to a level less than the rate of inflation, which means reduced tax income and greater deficits because the opposite is happening on the expense column: there more money is needed for food stamps in the USA and welfare in Canada. Higher unemployment places greater pressure on the health-care system as uncertainty and discontent are detrimental to one’s health and also causes more domestic violence.

I once was unemployed in my first year in Canada in 1951-52. My most miserable memories go back to that week when my brother and I lived in a room in downtown Hamilton: he sick, I no work. Fortunately it only lasted only a few days: a caring couple took in my brother until he was healthy again and I soon found work.

The plight of politicians

Politicians are caught in a real bind, evident in the situation in the USA. The recent last minute agreement there means nothing and has solved nothing because the Tea Party’s religion founded on theocratic theories of government exposes insoluble problems, not of a religious nature. What has developed over the last 50-60 years, ever since World War II, will not be solved in one session, actually will never be resolved: the era of extravagance is over. We are dealing with a total new economic environment since that post-war period was completely exceptional in human history. What is coming is a reverting to the normal: living within our means, economically and environmentally but that will not happen before there is a disastrous overshoot: a total or near total collapse, not unlike a heart attack in a person’s life.

In the 1930’s the new oil driven machinery made farmworkers redundant and threw a lot of people on the street for which there was no work and no other source of income. Then many still had roots in the farming community where they were fed by their relatives. Now farmers are mostly mono-crop producers. Only the cessation of the armistice of 1918 and the 1939 resumption of hostilities between Germany on the one hand and the World War I allies – France, Great Britain and Russia- on the other hand, created enough economic activity to soak up all available idle hands to ensure prosperity for the next 60 years. We now face a number of different challenges: where in the late 1920’s cheap oil furloughed thousands of workers, today, with at least four times the number of potential workers, robots and smart software are one important obstacle to rewarding work, potentially making untold millions of willing workers superfluous. The other drawbacks are environmental depletion, global pollution and massive population growth. These factors are setting the stage for a disastrous reversal, the real reason why we see political turmoil in the USA and Europe. People sense this intuitively. Rather than less government we need more, as the obstacles are so great that even universal action cannot reverse this predicament, made worse by our reluctance to face the truth.

The Disappearing Middle Class

Take robots. Robots pay no taxes. Robots also need no medical insurance. Robots never go on strike, never complain. Robots and software are taking middle class jobs in the name of efficiency, making the rich richer and the poor poorer, leaving unemployment and low-wage jobs in their wake. No work is disastrous in many fronts: psychologically, economically and physically. “Idleness is the root of all evil,” says an old proverb.

Don’t believe the official line. Governments face the impossible task to secure money for idled hands while at the same time forced to fund extra support for physical and psychological problems at a time when tax income is drastically reduced.

Just as a heart attack takes place when a person lives beyond his or her physical limits and so experiences a possibly fatal collapse so too the entire economy may experience a complete economic stagnation when too many simultaneous malfunctions cause monetary mayhem, resulting in total stoppage of normal life. A heart attack involves a small part of the body: clogged arteries leading to decreased blood flow, preventing the heart pumps from providing blood to the rest of the body, so too blockage of the money flow from taxpayer to government and back to where it is needed can lead to economic cataclysm. Had in the USA the debt ceiling not been extended, global chaos could have been the result. And someday soon this will happen. “You shall not live by debt alone”. Debt is financing much of our lifestyle, increasingly consisting of environmental debt as well.

By and large the reigning media fail to report the true picture in the world. Bad news does not sell, so they keep on repeating that technology or ‘fracking’ or ‘the tarsands’ will save us, fostering false hope. As a species, Margaret Atwood observes in her dystopian novel “Oryx and Crake,” “we’re doomed by hope.” Absurd promises of hope and glory are endlessly served up by the entertainment industry, the political and economic elite, the class of courtiers who pose as journalists, self-help gurus like Oprah and religious belief systems that assure followers that God will always protect them. It is collective self-delusion, a retreat into magical thinking.

Infinite Growth is Infinite Insanity

Infinite growth is infinite insanity. Just as patients after a by-pass must change their lifestyle or else, so we too must go back to simpler ways. The anthropologist Joseph Tainter in his book “The Collapse of Complex Societies” looked at the collapse of civilizations from the Roman to the Mayan. He concluded that they disintegrated because they finally could not sustain the bureaucratic complexities they had created. Obama-Care is a good example. Layers of bureaucracy demand more and more exploitation, not only of the environment but of the laboring classes. They become calcified by systems that are unable to respond to the changing reality around them. They, like our elite universities and business schools, churn out systems managers, people who are taught not to think but to blindly service the system. These systems managers know only how to perpetuate themselves and the system they serve. They have no clue that by doing this we collectively are killing the planet ruining everything we hold dear.

Final times are upon us. As a human race we are racing toward the end, but deny it by frantically believing that what worked in the past will also work tomorrow and beyond. We insist that continued reliance on fossil fuel and speculations will sustain the empire. We promote extravagant and senseless projects and imperial adventures. The predominant view is that economic growth can continue indefinitely, without slowing down or stopping. Last week Prime Minister Harper, in the Throne Speech has again pronounced the pursuit of economic growth as Canada’s national religion. In the USA Bernanke bombards the system with $85 billion each month. It is like a patient who needs constant blood transfusions to stay alive.  Our current monetary system is built on Infinite Growth: it must work that way because debt and the repayment of debt depend on it. Only Infinite Growth makes it possible to have liberal state pension plans, Social Security, and the many wonders that our financial system can deliver. Only Infinite Growth makes more and better technological innovations possible because there is always an infinite supply of the resources available to make these innovations.

We all are victims of a false religion. All false gods are an illusion. My paternal grandfather started his prayer at meal-time with the words of Psalm 115: “Not to us, Lord, not to us, but to your name give the glory.” That same Psalm relates something to us today: “their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands…..Their makers will come to be like them and so will all who trust in them.”

Our idol is Infinite Growth fueled by borrowed billions. Our society, constructed on the idol of Infinite Growth, will collapse as soon as infinite borrowing stops. We are rapidly reaching the point where the costs of increased debt and the expense of extracting oil and other minerals are so high that in total, society is worse off, in terms of the total amount of goods produced by society. We already are reaching diminishing returns with oil which is a major reason why world economic growth is slowing. It is also a major reason that many of the heavy oil consuming nations have been struggling with recession-like symptoms. These symptoms are mostly being covered up with deficit spending, ultra-low interest rates and Billions in Quantitative Easing. If this stimulus – new blood – stops, the economy – the body – collapses. Our collapse will take the whole planet with it.

Lord’s Day 1 of the Heidelberg Catechism comes to mind. “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” The answer to that question is our only hope.

 

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Our World Today

Posted on October 13, 2013 by Bert Hielema

RELIGION FOR DUMMIES

The Christian Right and Obama.

R.J. Rushdoony was a Presbyterian preacher, who claimed that he based his beliefs on the teachings of Calvin and Dooyeweerd  No wonder Calvinism does not have a good name nowadays because one of his quotes was: “The heresy of democracy has worked havoc in church and state … Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies.” He proposed that Old Testament laws should be applied to modern society.He wanted to see the country ruled by God’s law as recorded in the five Books of Moses so he started a movement now known as ‘Dominionism’. He wrote: “We are very much in need now of Christian pioneers. This means a people who are zealous to grow and to exercise dominion in Christ.” That sounded OK to me until he defined ‘dominion,’ referring to the sort of ‘dominion’ that is found in Genesis 1: 28 in the King James translation: “Ye shall have ‘dominion’ over land and sea. When Jesus talked about ‘power’ he said that he had come to serve and not to be served.  In Genesis 2:15 God asked the human race to take care of the earth. I have been told that the Hebrew word used there is the same as in Joshua 24: 15 where Israel’s leader tells his people: “As for me and my household we will serve the Lord.” In the same way we must ‘serve’ creation. Bonhoeffer wrote that God, creation and the human race belong together. Of course, it’s God’s creation and we belong to it with every sinew of our existence.

This brings me to today’s Republican Party.

Religion for dummies: just keep the rules, believe that the world is created in 6 days, no voice for women, the earth is there to be exploited, is basically evil and, since we are going to be raptured anyway, we can safely leave behind the mess we made. Dummy religion is where black is black, white is white, and where there is no dialogue.

Today all religions suffer from this simplification. Islam has its Taliban. Judaism has its conservative element. Christianity, both Roman Catholic and Protestantism have their own fundamentalist wings. I left a Christian Reformed congregation in St. Catharines, On. when its minister proved inapproachable. He later left the denomination to serve in the Orthodox Reformed Church.

There’s something afoot in religion, something new. Here is what I read in the New York Times: “Take the New York Jewish population which is quite large. Among the general Jewish part many are no longer attending synagogue. There has been religious growth, but this growth was almost all among Orthodox Jews. The city’s Reform and Conservative populations continued to drop, as did Jewish religious observance over all. As a result, New York’s Jewish community is increasingly polarized, with more Jews at the most traditional end of the theological spectrum, more Jews entirely detached from the institutions of their ancestral faith — and ever-fewer observant Jews anywhere in the middle. What’s happened in New York is happening nationally; a recent Pew Study found a similar pattern of growth among the Orthodox and a similar waning of religious practice and affiliation in the rest of the American Jewish population.

“This is not just a Jewish story. It’s been the story of religion in the West for over 40 years. The most traditional groups have been relatively resilient. The more liberal, modernizing bodies have lost membership, money, morale. And the culture as a whole has become steadily more disengaged from organized faith. There is still a religious middle today, but it isn’t institutionally Judeo-Christian in the way it was in 1945. Instead, it’s defined by nondenominational ministries, “spiritual but not religious” pieties and ancient heresies reinvented as self-help.

“Of late, this process of polarization has carried an air of inevitability. You can hew to a traditional faith in late modernity, it has seemed, only to the extent that you separate yourself from the American and Western mainstream. There is no middle ground, no center that holds for long, and the attempt to find one quickly leads to accommodation, drift and dissolution.” So far the New York Times article

If you want to have a thriving church, dumb it down. Go to the Old Testament, pick and choose something that is easy to do and not difficult for people to grasp and you can start a mega church and become rich in the process. Of course this works only in the USA, where the general level of education is pretty low. Adults in Japan, Canada, Australia, Finland and multiple other countries score significantly higher than the United States which came in 16th overall in reading, math and problem solving.

A few more rules: Don’t mention Christ and his love commandment. Don’t mention Paul who said that we have to investigate everything and retain what is viable (1Thessalonian 5:21). Don’t tell them that (Philippians 2:12) “We have to work out our salvation with fear and trembling.” Why? Because to be a Christian is hard work, involves a constant struggle and a lot of prayer and uncertainty, especially since most churches are no help at all: they are stagnant and unable to evolve.

In these last days to be relevant means the integration of the Created Word with the Written Word. Churches don’t know how to do that even though they have the correct formulation such as the Belgic Confession which says: “We know God first by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book…. As the Apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20: “all these things are enough to convict men and to leave them without excuse.”

I call creation God’s Primary Word. His Secondary word, as defined in this same article says: “Secondly He makes himself known to us more openly by his holy and divine word, as much as we need in this life for his glory and for the salvation of his own.”

Curiously God’s Secondary Word is called holy and divine while God’s Primary Word by which men stand convicted and left without excuse is not mentioned as holy and divine. It is about time for the church to remove that difference. Psalm 119: 105 combines these two Words beautifully: God’s Word- his Secondary – is a lamp for our feet and a light for our path (in God’s Primary Word.) We stare so much into the light- the Bible- that we are blinded to see our way clear in God’s Created Word.

Back to those ‘religious’ Republicans.

Chris Hedges, an investigative journalist, has made a special study of the religious background of the Republican movement in which the Christian Right has found its home. He writes: “There is a desire felt by tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, to destroy the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment, radically diminish the role of government to create a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and force a recalcitrant world to bend to the will of an imperial and “Christian” America.”

He continues: “Its public face is on display in the House of Representatives. This ideology, which is the driving force behind the shutdown of the government, calls for the eradication of social “deviants,” beginning with gay men and lesbians, whose sexual orientation, those in the movement say, is a curse and an illness, contaminating the American family and the country. Once these “deviants” are removed, other “deviants,” including Muslims, liberals, feminists, intellectuals, left-wing activists, undocumented workers, poor African-Americans and those dismissed as “nominal Christians”—meaning Christians who do not embrace this peculiar interpretation of the Bible—will also be ruthlessly repressed. The “deviant” government bureaucrats, the “deviant” media, the “deviant” schools and the “deviant” churches, all agents of Satan, will be crushed or radically reformed. The rights of these “deviants” will be annulled. “Christian values” and “family values” will, in the new state, be propagated by all institutions. Education and social welfare will be handed over to the church. Facts and self-criticism will be replaced with relentless indoctrination.”

Pretty radical stuff and taken word for word from the Rushdoony script, rooted in a radical ideology known as Dominionism or Christian Reconstructionism.  It seeks to reduce government to organizing little more than defense, internal security and the protection of property rights.

The current debt ceiling gives these people a perfect excuse to implement their fundamentally unbiblical view of religion, totally based on the Old Testament, totally ignoring the teaching of Christ who has given a new commandment, one much more simple and much more difficult: “Love God and his creation above all and your fellow citizen of whatever colour and sexual orientation as yourself.” The Republican Party fuses the Christian religion with the script and language of American imperialism and nationalism and combining it with the cruelest aspects of corporate capitalism, in the process flagrantly distorting and misusing the Bible.

Politics in the USA is in shambles, has been for a long time. Politics always everywhere is a matter of compromise. The first criterion is the welfare of the land and the betterment of the poor. Obamacare is trying that and the Republicans- 75 % of its supporters are church-goers –are dead-set against that. Whether the issue is climate change or inflation, party members believe what they want to believe, and any contrary evidence is dismissed as a hoax, the product of vast liberal conspiracies. Science is dismissed as undemocratic. Stephen Harper, Canada’s Prime Minister, would perfectly fit in that Republican Party if he were a US citizen.

Let me speculate a bit. Where does this irrationality come from?

I believe that this irrational stance has something to do with the times we live in. People are baffled, angry and armed to the teeth. They fear for the future. The ruling element in the Republican Party is the white middle class, living in the Southern states where the colour bias has never disappeared. They see having a black person in the White House as an abomination. They hate Obama and will do anything to thwart his ways. They also are deeply influenced by Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth” and the “Left Behind” series, both predicting a speedy end to this world, and Rapture, the unbiblical idea that the true believers will be fetched up  into the sky to meet Christ.

This means that there is a distinct suicidal element in this latest political drama. Combine this with the prospect that we are on the way to economic slowdown and possible collapse, and the scene is set for great anxiety and false explanations.

Here is what Stephen D. King, chief economist at HSBC, the author of “When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence” has to say. (The HSBC is one of the world’s largest banks.) “As bad as things in Washington are — the federal government shutdown since Tuesday, the slim but real potential for a debt default, a political system that seems increasingly ungovernable — they are going to get much worse, for the United States and other advanced economies, in the years ahead. ….The numbers no longer add up. Even before the Great Recession, rich countries were seeing their tax revenues weaken, social expenditures rise, government debts accumulate and creditors fret thanks to lower economic growth rates….We are reaching end times for Western affluence. …….In the United States, which ostensibly has the right institutions (if not the political will) to deal with its economic problems, a potentially explosive fiscal situation could be resolved through scurrilous means, but only by threatening global financial and economic instability. Interest rates can be held lower than the inflation rate, as the Fed has done. Or the government could devalue the dollar, thereby hitting Asian and Arab creditors. Such “default by stealth,” however, might threaten a crisis of confidence in the dollar, wiping away the purchasing-power benefits Americans get from the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency.”

Religious Dummies believe that there is a simple answer to a very complicated problem. They opt for this illusion because the reality is too bleak to bear. But as the current fiscal crisis demonstrates, facing the pain will not be easy. And the waking up from our collective illusions has barely begun.

Welcome to Century 21. The short 20th Century started in 1914 and lasted till 1989 with the break-up of the USSR, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The interim period is over. We now have entered an even more devastating new era.

 

 

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Our World Today

Posted on October 6, 2013 by Bert Hielema

 October  6 2013

The March of Folly is becoming a Run toward Ruin.

 On May 27 1985 I bought a book: The March of Folly, fresh off the press. The author, Barbara Tuchman, started it with: “A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.”

She cites in some 400 pages, plus notes, four examples starting with “The Trojans take the wooden horse within their walls”, jumping a few thousand years when (1470-1530) “The renaissance Popes provoke the Protestant secession,”  then relating how “The British lose America,” and ending with “America betrays herself in Vietnam.” The USA was involved there from 1963 till 1975, losing almost 60,000 men.

America has one overriding obsession: oil. No wonder. When I travel in the USA, I am amazed how dispersed the population is. When the fire season was at its height- fire doesn’t seem to have an off-season anymore – thousands of homes, situated in the most remote areas, are at risk. People love to be ‘out there’ far away from everybody. But this is only possible when we have wheels, and a combustion engine to move these. All of this means that public transportation is impossible in most areas.

If we really tote up the price of fuel, then we have to include America’s Armed Forces, its Air Force, Navy and Army, almost solely busy protecting the life lines from the global oil fields to North America.  Of course, occasionally its roaming flotillas help out when a natural disaster strikes, because, wherever in the world there always is an American aircraft carrier task force nearby ready to help out, but they are everywhere not for that reason: our world is a dangerous one and we never know where there is a threat to American interests – meaning oil.

America sees threats where others don’t. Vietnam was such an example, a war then fought to thwart the Red Danger. Not surprisingly, once it was over and the US lost Vietnam it became peacefully united, and is now a tourist attraction.It’s been a long time since Vietnam, the last example cited by Tuchman. Since then foolishness has not ceased. On the contrary.

Foolish money

Europe has not been un-familiar with folly. The idea to make Europe something like the United States of Europe must be lauded. To be able to travel and trade across the continent without a custom check is admirable. To introduce a common currency for countries as diverse as Germany and Greece and the Netherlands and Portugal is proving to be utter folly. Southerly climates generate a different type of people. The Northerly harsh winters have inculcated in these sober Dutchmen and frugal Germans a notion of thrift and foresight that never was part of their Mediterranean neighbours who, in a pinch could live off the land year-round. That alone made their attitude toward life totally different. The Euro gave the Mediterranean folk cheap money, easy credit, and so they had a whale of a fiesta. Brussels, from where Europe is governed, knew their lies, tolerated their fraud, obsessed with an idea that would make Europe the envy of the world. The entire Euro experiment reminds me of a penny-pinching person sharing a joint account with a spend-thrift cousin. Count Axel Oxenstierna, onetime chancellor of Sweden during the Thirty Years’ War, said on his death-bed: “Know my son with how little wisdom the world is governed.” The March of the Euro is a March of Folly.

Superlative folly

Then there is the world’s super power: the US of A. Compare its medical expenses to any other of the other large high-income countries. The US spends 18 per cent of its gross domestic product on health against 12 per cent in the next highest spender, France. The US public sector uses a higher share of GDP than those of Italy, the UK, Japan and Canada, though many millions are left uncovered. US spending per head is almost 100 per cent more than in Canada and 150 per cent more than in the UK. What does the US get in return? Life expectancy at birth is the lowest of these countries, while infant mortality is the highest. Potential years of life lost by people under the age of 70 are also far higher. For males this must be partly due to violent deaths. But it is also true for women. Now these crazy Republicans have provoked a Government crisis for the sole reason to deprive the poor of low-cost health care. This is only the latest in a series of follies unequalled in modern history.

The folly of Iraq

The USA, from 2001 till 2008, was governed by President Bush who, when he campaigned, asked his father’s friend, Dick Cheney, to look for a suitable vice-president. Mr. Cheney looked in the mirror and found his man. As the CEO of Halliburton, an oil-service industry, his hungry eyes were always fixated on the Middle East where most of the easy-to-get oil was located. His new position gave him the opportunity to obtain access to this treasure.

September 11 2001 allowed the opening. That’s when America took the first steps on its major March of Folly, based on pure deceit, hubris and thirst for oil, that same polluting stuff that is turning the March of Folly into a Run toward Ruin.

The first obligation of a nation involves the welfare of its citizens: their education, their physical and mental well-being, and the state of their infrastructure, such as roads, water, sewer and utilities. In the last few decades the USA has failed in all these categories. As already noted its medical system is the most costly in the world by far while its populace must endure results far below most developed nations. The same applies to its elementary and secondary education. Where does the money go? The USA with 5% of the world’s population spends as much on the military as the remaining 95 percent of the entire world.

Blinded by the prospect of untapped oil wealth in Iraq, the USA duped congress into believing that Saddam Hussein had WMD – Weapons of Mass Destruction.  What other country could have invaded Iraq, hardly knowing the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite? If there ever was a March of Folly, it is the totally irrational Iraq invasion. Saddam, through brute force kept the population from killing each other in a religious strife. Now, with no central authority able to enforce a stand-off, ethnic cleansing between the two religious streams is killing hundreds of thousands.

Bush and Cheney launched the invasion with plans to garrison Iraq for decades, with the larger goal of subduing neighboring states, especially Iran. In an off the cuff remark Cheney said: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad; real men want to go to Tehran”.

Just imagine: The US military, in a bare few years in Iraq, have built a staggering 505 bases, ranging from combat outposts to ones the size of small American towns with their own electricity generators, water purifiers, fire departments, fast-food restaurants, and even miniature golf courses at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars and then, only a few years later, abandoned all of them, dismantling some, turning others over to the Iraqi military or into ghost towns, and leaving yet others to be looted and stripped. Why? Because they planned to stay there for decades and use Iraq as a spring board to conquer the entire Middle East for the greater glory of Halliburton.

And that was only the beginning

Of course Bush Cheney expected to be there for a couple of decades. Why build a $750 million compound, 104 acre Vatican-size fortress in the centre of Baghdad unless the US administration had plans to stay put there for the foreseeable future? Just imagine: 27 blast-resistant buildings, an indoor pool, basketball courts, a fire station which was to operate as a command-and-control center for our ongoing garrisoning of the country and the region. Now, with the army gone, the embassy’s staff cut, it’s a global white elephant.

With $4-6 trillion wasted on two useless wars, two so-called “good wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq against lightly armed minority insurgencies have only accomplished what Hosea 8: 7 describes as “they sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.” The ungluing of the social fabric in the Middle East and North Africa can be traced directly to the invasion of Iraq.

The damage done by wasting these trillions rather than spend them on education, better health, re-building cities- Detroit comes to mind- will only be evident in the coming years when this March of Folly will have become a Run toward Ruin.

Much worse to come

 Right now the greatest leap into foolishness is still in progress. The stage is set for global disaster when temperatures soar beyond a range in which humans can comfortably thrive. Climate stability is now a thing of the past. As extreme weather events grow in severity, communities should but are not adopting strategies that build resilience against the effect of these and other climate shocks. Needed are dramatic steps to avoid raising global temperatures to more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. According to Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre, this would require a 10% reduction in CO2 emissions per year, starting now—a rate so significant that it can only be achieved through dramatic reductions in energy use. Will it happen? No.

Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, has written that our inability to deal with climate change is due in part to the way our mind is wired. Gilbert describes that because global warming doesn’t take a human form this makes it difficult for us to think of it as an enemy. Also our brains fail to accurately perceive gradual change as opposed to rapid shifts. Climate Change has occurred slowly enough for our minds to normalize it, which is precisely the reason why it makes it a deadly threat. Gilbert writes, “because it fails to trip the brain’s alarm, it leaves us soundly asleep in a burning bed.” Climate change is history’s most dramatic and perfect example of the “boiling frog” phenomenon, in which slow, compounding, detrimental change goes mostly unnoticed until it reaches a magnitude where adequate response is exceedingly difficult and costly and even impossible.

The sorriest thing is that those who should know better, and I refer to the church-going crowd, are among the worst deniers of Climate Change. The reason for that is the “Heaven” heresy. The church people, almost unanimously, believe that upon death they go to heaven. So why bother with the earth? Satan is having a field-day in the church.

Governments are no help. They consist of elected officials who, if they are bringers of bad news, are voted out of office. So, always, without exception, they talk optimism, more jobs and greater growth. Governments are hell-bent to stimulate growth. Bernanke infuses $85 billion each month to artificially activate the stalled economy. Fracking is the total opposite of CO2 reduction because its takes lots of energy to free the fuel embedded in rocks underground.

When Hitler came to power in 1933 his aims were clearly outlined in his Mein Kampf. The world – England, and France in particular – chose to ignore his intentions and Munich was the result, now forever associated with appeasement. Chamberlain’s infamous words were: “Peace in our time”. But war came anyway, 60 million died and many more displaced.

 

Today we have manifold ‘Munichs”:” economic growth in our time”, ignoring the ever more evident signs of Climate Change. Warming of the climate system is beyond a shadow of a doubt. Since the 1950s the atmosphere and oceans have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea levels have risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased. This time death and displacement will be in the billions.

That is the ultimate event of folly: running headlong into ruin.

“A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.”

Climate Change is the folly of follies.

Just a thought:

I can imagine that the Lord might ask us: “What have you done to limit your Carbon Foot Print to prevent Climate Change ?”

 

 

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Posted on September 29, 2013 by Bert Hielema

September 29 2013

 Ten Ideas for Saving the Planet: John B. Cobb, Jr.

 Quite the pretentious title.

 John B. Cobb Jr. (born February 9, 1925) is an American theologian, philosopher, and environmentalist and the author of more than fifty books. Recently the older of my two younger brothers in Holland sent me Cobb’s 30 page essay “Ten Ideas for Saving the Planet”.

These Ten Ideas are:

1. Reality is composed of interrelated events.

2. There are gradations of intrinsic value.

3. God aims at maximizing value.

4. Humans are uniquely (but by no means exclusively) valuable and      uniquely responsible.

5. Education is for wisdom.

6. The economy should be directed toward flourishing of the biosphere.

7. Agriculture should regenerate the soil.

8. Comfortable habitat should make minimal demands on resources.

9. Most manufacturing should be local.

10. Every community should be part of a community of communities.

My preliminary thoughts

There’s nothing really striking about these Ten Ideas. They simply reflect the way Cobb thinks, influenced, of course, by his theology, just as my comments are influenced by my theology.

When two people engage in a dialogue, they usually start with something positive, accordingly I start to state that we both agree that we must live as if it were possible to save the planet. In everything I do I try to keep that in mind, and pray for forgiveness when I am unable to do so, which is the case quite often.

I miss in Cobb, the theologian, a biblical approach. He is what is called a Process Theologian, people who teach that God has limited knowledge, lacks foresight of what is going to happen, and so God doesn’t know the future nor can he predict its outcome. Process theologians deny the truthfulness of Scripture which clearly declares that God’s purpose is “unchangeable” (Heb. 6:17) and that he himself is the only constant in creation. His name is Yahweh which means One Who Is and Was and Always will be.

I am fully with Cobb when, in his introduction, he writes that “I realized that theology must be eco-theology if it is to be helpful to how we live in the world. The world, after all, is not simply a human world. It is a web of life.”

Excellent, but then he fails to implement this approach. Unless theology takes into account the ‘oikos’ the entire ‘house’ we live in, the outcome tends to be mere words. “Faith without deeds is dead” writes the apostle James. I see these deeds primarily relating to love the ‘oikos’, our earthly abode. When we do that we automatically love all it contains, including our neighbours.

I also agree when he writes: “We must be honest. We live in a terrible time. We know that our actions are destroying the ability of the Earth to support us, but we seem incapable of changing direction. We plunge blindly ahead, either ignoring the reality of what is happening or hoping that some technological miracle will save us. It will not. The modern world has overshot the limits of what the Earth can bear, and our civilization will collapse.”

To me this sounds contradictory. How can we save something that will collapse anyway?

Ah, here comes his Process Theology! He writes: “But the powers of God are not absolute. God cannot reverse the past or manipulate the present like a puppeteer. God’s power is that of persuasion not coercion, of love not manipulation. In many ways it is too late. Too much has been lost. Too much is being lost. The poor are the first to suffer.”

I see God’s powers as absolute. I also believe that we will see a New Beginning, that our present polluting life will become pure living: our mourning turn into dancing.

Again something I like: “One reason we behave so badly is that the modern world has a misleading understanding of the nature of reality. What is mis-leading leads astray, and humanity collectively has been led far, far astray.”

I headed this section with the comment of “Quite the pretentious title”.  Cobb’s Ten Ideas remind me of the Ten Commandments, rules to live by if God gives us the grace to abide by them. God also laid down conditions that would have kept us from destroying the world. The Year of Jubilee comes to mind, where, in every 50th year all property sold would go back to the original owners, forever preventing people from becoming too rich.

It is true that we are incapable to save us from ourselves, and the paradox is that we don’t have to, for the simple reason that the world – and us – has been saved already. It was saved on Golgotha when Jesus gave his life as a ransom to buy the world back – redeem – from the Satan who had been able to lay hands on it.

I compare this act of salvation to a real estate transaction. (I was a real estate broker for a while). After all, our planet is essentially ‘real estate’. The price to buy it back has been paid – Jesus’ blood was the principal sum, his life was sacrificed – by which all the conditions of sale were completed and – as we say in Real Estate terms – the sale is final. The closing date, the transfer of the property, the planet and all it contains from Satan to the new owners – the followers of Christ – will take place when Christ returns.

Now to the meat of the matter: since I found the first four ideas too theoretical I will skip them and start with number 5 and give my comments only. 

Education is for wisdom.

Cobb claims to be an eco-theologian, so it is surprising that he nowhere mentions that “The fear of the Lord is the start of wisdom”. For an eco- theologian this is a gross oversight because wisdom can only come when we look at creation in awesome wonder and study its intricacy and marvelous composition. Then and there we are at the start of amazing discoveries. Wisdom begins with wonder in the double sense of the word.

6. The economy should be directed toward flourishing of the biosphere.

The biosphere includes the air we breathe, now being polluted because of energy use. Today the economic world is synonymous with energy: it takes energy to make anything, from a piece of steel to a loaf of bread. It takes energy to transport anything. Humans need energy in the form of food to continue to live. In general, the more external energy used, the more humans are able to control their environment.  We are now reaching energy limits on two fronts: we running low on external energy and we are damaging the environment with it.

We can’t save the earth and continue to use energy as we are doing. The only way to save the earth is to use human and renewable energy- sun, wind- only.

Today we have more than seven plus billion consumers in the world, all striving to better themselves by using more energy. The only way to do that is to exploit everything for a while, until the entire structure collapses. No way can we keep the economic system we have devised going at the current rate. This past week the IPCC report came out: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It recommends cutting back on energy use. Will you? Nobody I know is driving less or plans to become self-sufficient and attempts to live a carbon-free life. Fracking is postponing Peak Oil for a while, the most terrible way to delay the inevitable. Rather than cleaning the air, the hard-to-get fuels, including Alberta’s Tarsands, will accelerate cosmic collapse.

7. Agriculture should regenerate the soil.

To meet the need for greater food supply, humans began using agriculture about 10,000 years ago which increased the amount of human food available per acre, and also made population growth possible. The world did not reach one billion people until 1812. Then doubled it to two billion in one century and tripled it in my life time thanks to oil. It also meant that pesticides and fertilizer run-off and the use of heavy machinery added to erosion, all leading not to regenerating, but degeneration.

Frankly the only economy that is totally sustainable is the hunter-gatherer one. It had little need to “save for tomorrow,” because it was difficult to carry anything during travels. The amount of food an individual could eat was pretty much limited by appetite, so having “more food” for one individual wasn’t particularly helpful. The Garden of Eden comes to mind.

Today, even with water shortages looming, a major portion of agriculture comes from irrigation, which leads to salt deposits. If we really love the land – See John 3:16 – we must let land lay idle, use crop rotation, grow organically, which is much more labour intensive but will put a lot of people to work!

8. Comfortable habitat should make minimal demands on resources.

Europe was built with two legs in mind. North America was built for four wheels. No wonder Europe does well on 50% less energy than the USA.

Cobb recommends people moving to well insulated high rises. Toronto is going that way, except that these condominiums are mostly clad with glass, a very poor insulator, which brings me to energy use.

Soon after agriculture began, humans began to use resources of other types, such as wood from forests and metals such as iron and bronze. With any of these resources, there is a tendency to use the “cheapest” (easiest to extract, closest at hand, highest ore concentration) first. If extraction is to continue, increasing amounts of energy per unit extracted are likely to be required for later extraction. Take Europe. By 1500 Europe was on the edge of a fuel and nutritional disaster. It was saved in the sixteenth century only by the burning of soft coal and the cultivation of potatoes and maize. The use of coal allowed more energy per person, and took pressure off of limited forest resources. After coal came oil and natural gas. Once these sources are exhausted, we have nothing to fall back on except sun and wind, and thus we are back to Square One, the hunter-gathering society and a greatly reduced population. The world today can never support 7 billion, let alone the projected 10 billion in 2050.

9. Most manufacturing should be local.

The availability of fossil fuels, starting around 1800, has allowed much of what we now call “technology.” Without fossil fuels, our ability to make materials such as metals and glass is severely restricted. Without fossil fuels, we are also lacking for the basic building blocks for plastics, synthetic fabrics, and even modern medicines. Technology provided ways to use fossil fuel resources in ways that helped overcome many human limits. The desire to use more technology led to increasing use of fossil fuels in the 19th and 20th centuries. Cobb’s point to keep manufacturing local, rather than use China, is well taken.

10. Every community should be part of a community of communities.

We have created a society where it is exceedingly difficult to be part of a viable community. We live far too spread out, in subdivisions away from the core and in exurban homes far from work and recreation. The long drive to work, the two-jobs to make ends meet, makes life so busy that there is little or no time for anything else but eat-sleep-work.

Look at the churches, the prime example of community: “I believe in the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints,” the only article in the Apostles’ Creed that needed a qualifying statement. Almost all churches are suffering, perhaps, with the exception of mega-churches, so big that community is hardly possible.

General remarks.

Looking back I have noticed that when civilizations collapse, it was generally for financial reasons. Here’s a possible scenario – evident today. Shortages of resources lead to falling wages for the common worker. The government must provide more and more services such as welfare, unemployment insurance and medical service, leading to a need for higher taxes. The increasingly impoverished workers cannot pay these taxes and this clash between needed taxes and ability to pay these taxes brings about the collapse. We already see many resource wars and revolutions, leading to deaths of workers. Egypt, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Kenya, all recent examples of desperate people. The coming financial turmoil in the USA is another symptom of decline.

There’s no way that we can save the world as it is today: not a John R. Cobb, not an Obama, not the United Nations. The world is hell-bent to destruct itself. We know our society and economy must soon change. We will not do anything seriously to prepare for that change. So it will be even more damaging when it comes.

And that’s the way it was ordained to be from the day when humanity in a paradise setting decided that going without God was the way to go.

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