April 27 2014.
WHERE ARE WE?
Part Two
IS EVER GREATER ECONOMIC GROWTH THE ORIGINAL SIN?
Barack Obama was one man who was influenced by a sermon. In 2004, as a senator, he recalled that his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., in a sermon, used the phrase: the Audacity of Hope. Obama says that this audacity is what “was the best of the American spirit,” namely “the audacity to believe despite all the evidence to the contrary.” That belief, he said, was to be convinced that America would always be on top, would have an ever-growing economy.
However, there is a major difference between the hope Christians have and what the politicians proclaim as “hope for an ever-growing economy”. Ten years later, today in 2014, there still is a completely unfounded and utterly irrational picture of the world being touted that claims all will be fine, just wait, be patient because soon, when the world economy rebounds, the wonderful certainty of unbounded growth will dissolve all debt and make us richer than we’ve ever been before. All we need is hope.
Actually it is all ‘hype’.
Of course hope and faith fit together like an automobile and fuel. We used to sing “love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage”, but that line now is totally outdated. Hebrew 11: 1 refers to both hope and faith: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see,” but the Americans, being very religious, apply this biblical definition of faith to Infinite Growth. For them this confession reads: “Faith is being sure of our hope for economic Growth and being certain that this will continue for ever and ever”. It’s also the “golden calf” of the Canadian Harper government which has three priorities: Growth, Jobs and lower Taxes.
The characteristic of an idol is that it does not condone critical views and questions. We can argue with God but an idol does not grant us this opportunity. The Growth God is such a powerful deity that taking on additional, even unlimited, debt, in order to get to the Promised Land of More tolerates no scrutiny.
The adherents of the Church of Forever Growth, having Faith in Infinite Economic Advance, far outnumber the believers in the God as confessed in the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Islam and Christianity. The faithful flock of “Forever More”, after having accumulated already infinite earthly possessions, blindly follows their Golden Calf along its unidirectional and one-dimensional path to more of the same, because The Lord of More demands that we shop till we drop. The Lord of More demands that we never question why. The Lord of More demands that we close our ears to the cries of creation. The Lord of More demands that we close our eyes to the floods, the droughts, the heat waves, the stress on trees, the dangers for our very lungs. The Lord of More demands that we close our hearts and minds to what the real Lord of the Universe is trying to tell us. The Lord of More demands that we dull our minds, never wondering what we wish to do with all the “more” we want to own. The Lord of More demands that we regard as false all the surveys that show that the happiest people on the planet do not live in the richest communities, but in the closest knit ones.
Stones for Bread, Snakes for Fish
The Lord of More gives us exactly what Jesus pointed at in Matthew 7:9: “Which of you, if his son or daughter asks for bread, will give them a stone? Or if he or she asks for a fish, will give them a snake?” Yet that is exactly what we are doing to our children where it concerns their future! We are sacrificing our children for the immediate gratification of our wants, which are never satisfied, and leave a world full of our toys and trinkets but empty of everything that guarantees life.
Still a bit hesitant to believe that the Lord of More is a real god? Christians believe that the Lord created the world ‘ex nihilo’ out of nothing. The banks, the real rulers of the world nowadays, have, since 1970, created 33 Trillions of virtual dollars ‘ex nihilo’, yes ‘money out of nothing’, making the bankers, including the head of the Federal Bank, Janet Yellen, the modern equivalents of ‘gods’.
No wonder the faithful followers of the Lord of More keep on chasing the ‘the golden calf.’ They do because they know of no other reality and have no other answer. The bitter truth is that only growth can rescue us from the economic situation we find ourselves in. Even though we can rationally understand that the principle of ‘always more’ is ridiculously impossible, and fatal to our survival, we cannot escape the trap it lures us into. The human mind is as unidirectional and one-dimensional as the Religinon of More. We simply have no other choice but to lie to ourselves about that. We must believe that we do the things we do because our rational brain tells us to, even though, when we take a step back, we are all perfectly capable of seeing that it just can’t be possible. There’s where the true faith of the Western World comes in, a faith inspired by the Great Deceiver, already present in the Garden of Eden where Infinite Growth had its birth.
A curious reversal
There is a curious reversal in the first few chapters of the Bible. Look it up, easily done by going to Google and type in Genesis 2:9. There the fruit trees are described as “trees pleasing to the eye and good for food.” In the next chapter, Genesis 3: 6, the order is reversed. Suddenly it says: “the fruit was good for food and pleasing to the eye.” It is exactly there that the economic desire, the Lord of More took over from the Lord of All, for whom beauty and splendour and the aesthetic always has preference over the economic, the urge for MORE.
Years ago, in 1972, when I read the first publication by the Club of Rome, the still utterly relevant The Limits of Growth, I had a real conversion: I saw the impossibility of Infinite Growth. Now this same Club of Rome- yes they are still there- has just published a new book: Extraction: How the Quest for mineral Wealth is Plundering the Planet. It emphasizes that as we dig, drill, and excavate to unearth the planet’s mineral bounty, the resources we exploit from ores, veins, seams, and wells are gradually becoming exhausted. Mineral treasures that took millions, or even billions, of years to form are now being squandered in just centuries–or sometimes just decades.
Will there come a time when we actually run out of minerals? Debates already soar over how we are going to obtain energy without oil, coal, and gas. But what about the other mineral losses we face? Without metals, and semiconductors, how are we going to keep our industrial system running? Without mineral fertilizers and fuels, how are we going to produce the food we need?
Ugo Bardi, the author, delivers a sweeping history of the mining industry, starting with its humble beginning when our early ancestors started digging underground to find the stones they needed for their tools. He traces the links between mineral riches and empires, wars, and civilizations, and shows how mining in its various forms came to be one of the largest global industries. He also illustrates how the gigantic mining machine is now starting to show signs of difficulties. The easy mineral resources, the least expensive to extract and process, have been mostly exploited and depleted. There are plenty of minerals left to extract, but at higher costs and with increasing difficulties.
The effects of depletion take different forms and one may be the economic crisis that is gripping the world system. And depletion is not the only problem. Mining has a dark side–pollution–that takes many forms and delivers many consequences, including climate change.
The world we have been accustomed to, so far, was based on cheap mineral resources and on the ability of the ecosystem to absorb pollution without generating damage to human beings. Both conditions are rapidly disappearing. Having thoroughly plundered planet Earth, we are entering a new world.
We are entering a new world.
Bardi draws upon the world’s leading minerals experts to offer a compelling glimpse into that new world ahead, a world filled with our toys, but empty of the basics of life, as we now have to deal with Peak soil, Peak Oil, Peak Water and still peaking populations and ever expanding desires.
We live in a time of glaring paradoxes. We have convinced ourselves that it is possible to take on more debt in order to get out of debt, as long as there is more growth awaiting us in our fantasy future. It’s no more than yet another lie we can’t escape, simply because we can’t escape who we are. The Lord of More will always in the end leave us with less. When we pursue the economic at the expense of all that is beautiful, we end up with total misery.
Where are we? Have we reached the End of the Line?
Suppose for a minute that we have reached the final stage of history, one where there not only is no longer growth, but where our ever-more complicated system collapses, a situation that is becoming ever more likely.
I am trying to determine where we are in the year of the Lord 2014. There is an urgent need for ideas about what to do in case growth does not return, in case there’s no going back to the golden era of ever more, even in case our house of cards, built in debt, collapses.
Do you have any idea? Do I? If you have, tell your politician because there are no such ideas. Politicians all over the world are desperate. That’s why war is becoming a real possibility, the last thing we need. China, with its teeming billions, is at its wits end. It needs growth. There are millions of peasants out there who want work. China needs growth but its previous growth came at the expense of poisoning its waters, its soil and its air. Now, with pollution saturating its very soul, where does it turn? How is growth possible when the system is so sick? More of the same will speed up the process of decay. Still the only real discussion is not whether we do or do not need growth, but is how much growth is needed. And the answer always is: as much as we can.
The world has a big problem. Economic advance has lately been seen as a sign of progress, and, for the last 200 years, even during the Dirty Thirties, our world has, indeed, seen steady growth. Yet for many countries in Europe, the 17th and 18th Centuries were The Age of Progress: Cultural Progress: Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Bach, Handel, Mozart come to mind: that was real progress: artistic advancement. Where are these people today? We are culturally deprived. The singular quest for economic growth has dulled our minds. And now we are stuck. Now nobody has any idea what to do without growth. There is no course that teaches “The No-Growth- Society.”
Herman Daly is the exception.
Herman Daly, formerly with the World Bank, now a professor at the University of the Maryland School of Public Affairs, and a recipient of the Heineken Prize for environmental science by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, has long advocated a fundamental change in economic thinking. In his book Beyond Growth he argues that we must conceive of the economy as part of the ecosystem and, as a result, give up on the idea of economic growth because it leads to universal destruction. He writes: “The value of a sawmill is zero without forests; the value of fishing boats is zero without fish; the value of refineries is zero without remaining deposits of petroleum; the value of dams is zero without rivers and catchment areas with sufficient forest covering to prevent erosion and siltation of the lake behind the dam….Our ability and inclination to enrich the present at the expense of the future and of other species, is as real and as sinful as our tendency to further enrich the wealthy at the expense of the poor. To hand back to God the gift of Creation in a degraded state capable of supporting less life, less abundantly, and for a shorter future is surely a sin. If it is a sin to kill and to steal, then surely it is a sin to destroy carrying capacity – the capacity of the earth to support life now and in the future.”
He concludes his book as follows: “We must face the failures of the growth idolatry. We must stop crying out to the growing economy, “Deliver me, for thou art my god!” Instead we must have the courage to ask with Isaiah (44:20, The Message) ‘This lover of emptiness, of nothing, is so out of touch with reality, so far gone, that he can’t even look at what he’s doing, can’t even look at the no-good stick of wood in his hand and say, “This is crazy.”’
Where are we? We are in the grip of the idolatry of Infinite Growth which is the ultimate destroyer.
Where are we? (All about food.)