Year 9-9
2009 is going to be a colorful year, with lots of pink slips, bank statements printed in mostly red, people feeling blue, hairs turning prematurely grey. Blame the difficult economic times.
I grew up in such a time. I was born before the Great Depression, which ingrained frugality in me, something reinforced by five years of wartime experience in occupied Holland.
My earliest memories go back to two events: as a three year old I snatched a 2.5 guilders piece- called a ‘rijksdaalder’ and having the value of one US dollar then – from the kitchen table, the weekly pay for our live-in help, and went to the store to buy candies. My mother discovered my childish capitalistic venture when the merchant knocked at the door to bring back the change. My second recollection was when, at the North Sea, I was thirsty but unable to drink from the salty water, and suggested to my father to throw in a piece of wood, as Moses did when the Israelites were confronted with brackish water.
So, two things were drilled into me early in life: money and the bible, and I have maintained that interest. I also remember that, as a 10 year old, in those pre-penicillin days, I was ordered to stay in bed for 6 weeks to cure a bladder infection, where I read 100 books. That too has remained an abiding passion.
One of the books I treasure is Yale Historian Paul Kennedy’s 16 year old, “Preparing for the Twenty First Century”. It ends with a timely warning: “Nothing is certain except that we face innumerable uncertainties; but simply recognizing the fact provides a starting point, and is, of course, far better than being blindly unaware of how our world is changing.”
This point is affirmed by the “The Age of Extremes, the Short Twentieth Century- 1914-1991”, by Eric Hobsbawm, another historian.
This 600 page best seller also ends on a somber note: ”We live in a world captured, uprooted and transformed by the titanic economic and techno-scientific process of development of capitalism, which has dominated the past two or three centuries. We know that it cannot go on ad infinitum. The future cannot be a continuation of the past and there are signs that we have reached a point of historic crisis.”
Hobsbawm correctly stated that the 20th Century ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, which didn’t mean that at that point Century 21 started. The interim from 1991 to 2008, those 17 years of unprecedented profligacy, can be seen as its introduction. I have observed that the rain is always heaviest just before it stops; my chainsaw always has an extra burst of power just before the fuel runs out: that’s how I see the time-span of ‘irrational exuberance’ to quote Alan Greenspan out of context.
We now have reached the point of historic crisis Hobsbawm referred to. The End is here: the End of the Age of Abundance, the age of subdivisions and two cars and super markets and big box stores and drive-to and drive-through whatever, the age of unnecessary upgrading, the age of ‘shop till we drop.’
Welcome to a belated start of the real 21st Century, an era that will rule the rest of our lives as cruelly as the Age of Abundance spoiled us rotten. Welcome to ever greater scarcity and ever more necessary restraint. No market magic will remedy this malaise. No government stimulus will turn the tide. We have arrived at ‘The Limits of Growth” the title of a book that appeared some 35 years ago under the auspices of the Club of Rome.
Capitalism is defined as the perennial gale of creative destruction. Its goal: to maximize personal consumption, and was designed for a world with some 1 billion people and abundant natural resources. We now are approaching 7 billion of ever more greedy customers with shortages of arable land, fish, oil, water and trees.
The future of limits is here; the age of Capitalism is over.
There are simply not enough resources left to satisfy the needs of a rapidly growing population. If all of the world’s nearly 7 billion people consumed as much as we North Americans, we’d need five Earths to support us all. Earth’s 27.7 billion acres of biologically productive land and water can support only about 1.2 billion people at our standard of living and consumption.
I’ll make it through all right in the coming age of Scarcity, having learned a few things in life. But I worry deeply about our five kids – all in their first marriage – and 13 grandchildren. At the very least they will have less, a lot less.
Paul Kennedy ends his insightful volume with an appeal for spiritual renewal. I believe that all spiritual activity and renewal starts with creation caring.