PREPARING FOR COLLAPSE (5)
High Time for Change. Can we?
here’s a peculiar passage in Revelation 18, referring to the church, I believe, urging her to quit what she is doing and make an abrupt departure from ‘the world’. The text, verse 4, says Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you not will receive any of her plagues; for her sins are piled up to heaven. Is it a coincidence that Climate Change is a matter that is occurring in the heavens? Climate Change is a direct result of our sins against creation.
It seems to me that, prior to collapse we must recognize the situation and leave ‘the world’, something that is physically impossible, of course, but which must happen nonetheless. “You are in the world, but not of the world”, the Bible tells us. Adhering to the ‘world’ is a spiritual matter, because it pertains to the ‘religion of progress and unlimited growth’ Thus our ‘leaving’ is a foreswearing of worshiping the ‘idols of our age’ and returning to a way of life that is in accordance with the Spirit of God, the creator of heaven and earth.
The majority of the world’s population now lives in cities, also called “Babel”. Yet the New Creation is also called a city, “The New Jerusalem, so matters are not cut and dried, black and white. Actually, in the Western World the boundaries between country living and city dwelling no longer exist. I live in the ‘country’, but I am just as dependent on motorized transportation and the use of fossil fuels for electricity and heating as urbanites.
Was the past better?
I am old enough to have experienced a totally different world. My parents were born at the very end of the 19th Century. I have known my four grandparents who started their lives about 150 years ago, an age before the advent of our carbon-driven world, an age before the rise of the consumer economy.
Raised into a large family – I was my mother’s fourth child in 5 years of marriage with another five children to follow – I was repeatedly farmed out when another sibling was about to be born. The only place always available was the farm of my maternal grandparents of which I have lasting memories.
How simple was their life. Just imagine: no electricity, no running water, a foul- smelling outhouse at the back of the cow barn over the cesspool where also the cattle manure ended up, periodically scooped empty by hand for use in the fields as fertilizer. It reminds of a somewhat crude story, supposedly taking place in a one-room rural school, where the only teacher cultivated a large vegetable garden. The school inspector came and marveled at the luscious plants and wondered how. One young boy signaled that he had to go. The teacher consulted his chart and said: third row, fourth plant.
Back to the almost medieval conditions in which my grandparents lived. All cooking and eating was done in a special small building separate from the main dwelling, with the woodstove space split from the eating area. The walkway between the main dwelling and the ‘stookhut’ – the cook house – was paved with red brick where, in a corner, a hand pump was placed over the cistern which gathered all rain water. My grandmother, each Saturday, would broom fresh sand in the seams between the bricks.
There was, of course, a formal dining room, used on Sundays and when visitors came. There a beautifully colored oil lamp was suspended from the high ceiling, easily lowered or raised when more or less light was needed.
All worked long hours. Up early to milk a dozen cows, yielding perhaps 3 milk cans full, containers now only seen as antiques and used for flowers or to hold a mailbox. Each morning these cans would be carted to the platform on the edge of the canal, to be fetched by a horse-drawn punter and transported to the milk processing plant a few kilometers away, to be returned that same day with whey for the pigs and a small can of buttermilk porridge, a daily menu item.
Once a week my paternal grandfather would come calling, a grocer, in his two-wheeled horse-drawn buggy bartering eggs for coffee, tea, sugar. Very little money would be involved. A large vegetable garden and lots of canning would guarantee food for the winter, potatoes being the main staple. A pig would be slaughtered in the fall, the bacon hanging in the chimney for curing.
Simple living. Compared to today the lack of affluence and technology is striking. No carbon footprint. Deeply religious.
A century ago, economic activity took place primarily in the physical world of production. People made things: they farmed, crafted, cobbled, nailed, baked, brewed, repaired, knitted, mended. They created tangible goods and services whose value could be determined because they directly were related to their daily needs. They made their own entertainment: brass bands, lots of church meetings, home visiting. Nobody was rich. Everybody had enough.
We now exist in a-typical times.
How immensely different is life today. I was struck this past week again when the new Apple I-Phone came out. Long line-ups and 10 million sets ordered or sold. People live for the moment, crave immediate satisfaction. Buy now, pay later. Food comes from the store, milled, molded, made to look good, to last long, and leading to obesity and diabetes. Fake food fosters fake folks. We live as if there’s no tomorrow, which perhaps is the case anyway. We push problems forward to the future. Our political institutions, once capable of mobilizing resources and people to win wars – witness the 1940-45 conflict and the Marshall Plan that helped to rebuild Europe ruins – now avoid complex and recurring challenges, of which there are aplenty. We do nothing about education reform, ignore climate change, and pretend that ever expanding debt is healthy. The church, even though it loses members left and right, continues in the same stale format. The worst recession in three quarters of a century should have led us to rethink the current economic model based on automatic upgrades and short-term gains. Instead, we’ve continued to focus our economic energies, our entrepreneurial talents, and all innovation on getting the biggest returns in the shortest time possible. Worse, we’ve done so even though fewer and fewer of us can afford to keep up with the futile pursuit of ever-faster gratification—a frustration expressed in the angry populism now paralyzing the politics in the USA. From top to bottom, we are becoming a society ruled by impulse, by the reflexive reach for rapid rewards.
There is no doubt that our lives have become luxurious, affluent and extraordinary self-satisfying. During my life-time, and especially the past four decades, we have created a sophisticated, self-feeding socioeconomic system that is marvelously efficient at catering to our fondest desires. Even the poorest in the Western economies – provided they don’t smoke or drink – thanks to the miracles of cost-reducing business strategies and powerful personal technologies have achieved a high level of economic well-being.
As I suggested in my previous blog – citing Psalm 115 – our preferences, attitudes, and identities have become so intertwined with the offerings of the marketplace that we have internalized many of the market’s values and reflexes: we are becoming the machines that serve us. We no longer can function without them. True, it also spreads the gospel to the very ends of the earth, overshadowed by such things as the I-Phone craze which typifies our religious urge to possess the latest, the fastest and most up-to-date gadget immediately when it is available. In other words, the marketplace and the self, our economy and our psychology, are fusing in ways we’ve never before experienced. We have become an extension of the industrial system. It’s not that we need these mechanical means. We want them. They define us. Psalm 115 again: Those who make the idols and use them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them. (verse 8).
We no longer are a ‘producer’ society. We truly have become a ‘consumer’ nation, which is rapidly also consuming us and our natural habitat, as our consumption is no longer driven by what we need – food, shelter, clothing – but by desire, by the ‘spiritual’ criteria of our inner worlds. Our aspirations, our hopes, our identity, are being cannibalized by the multi-media companies who are exploiting our cravings for the latest gadgets, and so succeeding in possessing our very souls.
Is that what the number 666 means in the book of Revelation? Does this development signify the final stage in human development?
Danger ahead
Jacques Ellul in his (1964) The Technological Society has foreseen this development. He writes that by not fully understanding the role of technique in the life of us today we modern human beings are beset with anxiety and feeling of insecurity. He prophesied that technology which we say is our servant, will overthrow everything that stands in the way in its quest to dominate the human race. Now 50 years later his words have come true. Technology is the victor and we are the willing victims.
For most of the 20th century, this merger between man and the machine proceeded at a gradual pace. But starting in the 1970s, the marriage moved into overdrive by two powerful shocks. The first was the collapse of America’s postwar economic boom in the face of high oil prices, inflation, and rising foreign competition. As corporate profits fell, it was clear that many multi-nationals had grown too complacent and inefficient to prosper in a faster, more global economy. With company shares trading at historic lows, activist investors launched an economic coup. They bought struggling companies, broke them up, and sold the pieces, often for substantial profit. As takeover fever spread even healthy companies embraced defensive strategies to boost profits and share prices and keep investors happy. Companies fired workers and began moving operations overseas. It was thought that the only way American companies could help society was to get rid of any separate, social obligations and pursue making maximum profit. The only way for government to make this happen was to cut taxes and regulations and allow the marketplace to find the most direct route back to wealth. Add new technology, the microprocessor, which made computing vastly more powerful and much cheaper, and here we are: the rich richer, the poor poorer, and no work for the middle class and no future for the young, by the grace of God forcing us to seek alternatives.
Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you not will receive any of her plagues; for her sins are piled up to heaven. Is it really a coincidence that Climate Change is a matter that is occurring in the heavens?
The most precious quality we have is our humanity. With every sinew of our existence, we are tied to the earth, which bears us, feeds us, and is our abode forever. By destroying the earth, we destroy ourselves; by separating our lives from the earth, we become estranged from our very source. My grandparents sensed this. It is to the life-giving earth that we must return that precious work of art our God created and gave us for safe-keeping.