THE THEOLOGY OF ENOUGH
The theology of enough might help us reach a more financially stable, greener future, says John Madeley
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/jan/31/face-to-faith-john-madeley
John Madeley, economic journalist and former lay member of the General Synod of the Church of England, is currently proposing the Theology of Enough to help us realise a more financially stable, greener future.
The economic headlines are all doom and gloom. "No growth expected for 12 months". "Recession to get worse". "Deep in the mire of recession". All the news is about cuts, job losses, cutbacks in health and education, the unemployed as shirkers and skivers, charities under pressure, food banks. Understandably, the focus is upon economic resources, their maldistribution and their diminution.
But there is also a sense in which the identification of economic growth with health and well-being has encouraged unrealistic expectations and disabled our ability to value genuine wealth. We need to decouple the conception of wealth from the capital economy and the way that its accumulative logic fosters unrealistic expectations. This is all part of replacing the GNP as a measure of a nation’s wealth. In the official definition, recession refers to negative growth in a country's national income (gross domestic product) for two consecutive quarters of the year, six months in all. There is no denying the depth of the economic crisis that the global economy currently faces. But there is plenty of reason to question this definition of recession as based upon a presumption of endless and quite unsustainable economic growth. To amplify, an economy that has been growing by, say, 3% or 5% or even 10% is in recession if it registers a fall in growth of 0.1% over two successive quarters. The doom and gloom that follows does not necessarily mean that society and the people in it are in penury. That may be the case, and there is certainly evidence for that in the current world recession. But it should be emphasised that the real crisis is systemic and pertains to the fact that in the capital economy capital must expand its values endlessly or collapse. If capital is not accumulated, then the capitalist economy goes into crisis, causing job losses, reductions in income and spending etc. This, even if the total GNP is at a higher level than, say, four or five years ago.
There is something awry in the way we define, calculate and evaluate value. We need to question why economic growth must keep on going up. It’s not just that we have unrealistic expectations. More important than subjective illusions is to identify the systemic imperative at the heart of the capital system. The capital system is a nihilism, an endless accumulation of means to further means, all subordinated to the overriding imperative of expanding capital’s values.
As we move towards the Age of Ecology, there is increasing emphasis upon sustainability - sustainable production, sustainable growth, sustainable development. I prefer the term sustainable living, a holistic conception that includes all aspects of human and planetary existence. One thing is clear, however – the capital system is not sustainable, its endless imperative colliding directly and disastrously with the world of finite resources. Sustainable living implies that we learn to live within planetary boundaries, learning to value natural resources, including our own capacities, rather than rely on economic growth delivering material substitutes all the time. Not only is that just greedy, it is lazy. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx wrote that ‘the production of too many useful things produces too many useless people.’ (Marx EW EPM 1975: 363).
This must generate a paradox of emancipation – how can such useless people develop the wit and the energy to join together to create the useful society? Marx’s solution was revolutionary-critical praxis, the changing of circumstances as a self-change on the part of the creative human agents. That still leaves the question of where this dialectic of change begins. People are addicted to their things, to their planes and cars, their plasma screen TVs and their celebrity sport.
If Madeley’s ‘theology of enough’ sounds familiar, then it should. He cites Rev. John Taylor's Enough is Enough from the early 1970s when he demands that we look at recession from a wider perspective.
Time to revisit John Taylor’s classic work Enough is Enough, and to look at recession from a wider perspective. In this book Taylor develops the theology of enough. The dream of the Biblical Hebrew people, he points out, is summed up in the word shalom, “something much broader than peace, the harmony of a caring community, informed at every point by its awareness of God”.
“At every point” is a key phrase. It speaks of a “wholeness that is complete because every aspect of life is included”, says Taylor. Economically and socially, the dream of shalom finds expression in the theology of enough, he adds: “There are many reference in the Old Testament to covetousness and greed … ordinary covetousness is simply a persistent longing for something that isn’t yours.”
In the New Testament, a word that is commonly translated as covetousness, pleonexia, means excess or wanting more and more, says Bishop Taylor. Mark’s gospel speaks of greed as an evil which makes a person unclean. In Colossians, Paul urges that greed be “put to death”. He warns in Ephesians that no greedy person “has any inheritance in the Kingdom of Christ and of God”.
In this book, Taylor emphasises that shalom was the dream of the Biblical Hebrew people, ‘something much broader than peace, the harmony of a caring community, informed at every point by its awareness of God’. The essence of shalom's meaning is contained in the phrase 'at every point'. ‘It speaks of a wholeness that is complete because every aspect and every corner of ordinary life is included’, argues Taylor.
http://www.episcopalcafe.com/the_theology_of_enough/
What the Hebrews seemed to have perceived with particular vividness and to have articulated most clearly was the fact that this all-embracing inter-relatedness and answerability arose from one primary relationship which God had initiated. All the threads in their network of relationships, their 'bundle of life', seemed to run directly to a single nexus in the hand of God. The shalom depended on him. It was the blessing, benediction and benefaction in one, which he had covenanted to give them for ever.
The blessedness of this inter-related, God-related community might be thought of either as wholeness or as harmony. The wholeness was the all-inclusiveness of the framework of reference; the harmony was the reciprocity of all the parts. It meant a dancing kind of inter-relationship, seeking something more free than equality, more generous than equity, the ever-shifting equipoise of a life-system.
Economically and socially, the dream of shalom finds expression in the theology of enough: "There are many reference in the Old Testament to covetousness and greed... ordinary covetousness is simply a persistent longing for something that isn't yours."
In the New Testament, a word that is commonly translated as covetousness, pleonexia, means excess or wanting more and more, says Bishop Taylor.
That sense of the totality of creation and the fitness of each part in proper proportion to the rest, is the reverse of the narrow-visioned sin of pleonexia which, disregarding the whole, grasps at excess and throws everything out of balance. True to this doctrine of creation, which modern ecology has strikingly endorsed, the disciple of Christ proclaims the kingdom of right relationships and calls on all men to make their far-reaching financial decisions with a sense of accountability for the whole system under God. Our concept of 'goods' must always include and yet distinguish between the primary goods (water, minerals, forests, energy, etc.), which may be either renewable or non-renewable, and secondary goods, which we produce from the primary either in the form of manufactures or of services. Each of these categories is essentially different from each of the others, yet our system of accounting is bound to lose touch with reality if it disregards any one of the four.
Taylor 1971: 46
The gospel of Mark identifies greed as an evil which makes a person unclean. In Colossians, Paul urges that greed be "put to death". He warns in Ephesians that no greedy person "has any inheritance in the Kingdom of Christ and of God". In the Divine Comedy, Dante identifies greed as the fundamental sin which leads human beings astray and takes them off the path leading to felicity, the happy ending, the Commedia which comes from seeing ourselves and playing our part within the divine whole.
The theology of enough has been espoused by others. For instance, Michael Schut, the author of Simpler Living, Compassionate Life, argues that it "allows us to move away from worshipping the gods of consumption and material need. In living out a theology of enough we will no longer expend our physical resources in consumption and our emotional resources in worrying over status.”
The message is clear: “We need to live within our resources and not expect that economic growth will rise all the time. That's just greedy.” The theology of enough espoused by John Madeley is the way to an economically stable, ecologically sustainable, bright green future. It might even be the condition of having a future at all.
John Madeley is an economic journalist and does not limit the theology of enough to spiritual concerns but identifies its economic implications. Whilst industries whose production exceeds "enough" may fall, with a consequent loss of jobs and incomes, government could stimulate more jobs in industries that make socially useful products - green technologies and infrastructures, for example. The manifest economic, moral, spiritual and ecological bankruptcy of the capital system means that now is the hour to embrace a more fulfilling, more rounded way of life, one which values socially useful and environmentally benign products rather than fosters unrealistic expectations of endless economic growth. Instead of churning out more and more and achieving less and less, we might come to realise that valuing enough as enough allows us to achieve the ever elusive goal of human happiness whilst also reducing our carbon emissions and diminishing our ecological footprint.
Above, and all around, is Nature’s unchanging harmony. Once we come to appreciate Nature’s plenitude, enough will be more than enough. Nature provides.
Sitting quietly, doing nothing;
Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.
(The Way of Zen).
There is a new breed of environmentalist who is abandoning politics and ethics in favour of technology in a desperate attempt to reconcile the economy with ecology. These technological fixers and fetishisers fail to appreciate that any such reconciliation must include a public dimension, ethics, spirituality, a sense of purpose and common good. As Goethe made clear, Invention must also be Discovery on our part, the conscious recognition that we are all parts of Nature’s web of life.
Everything that we call Invention or Discovery in the higher sense of the word is the serious exercise and activity of an original feeling for truth, which, after a long course of silent cultivation, suddenly flashes out into fruitful knowledge. It is a revelation working from within on the outer world, and lets a man feel that he is made in the image of God. It is a synthesis of World and Mind, giving the most blessed assurance of the eternal harmony of things. (Goethe The Maxims And Reflections Of Goethe, Translated By Bailey Saunders, 1906, 553).
This is truth in a much deeper sense than the factual knowledge of an external world and technical control of that world, but brings subject and object together in such a way as to create a single, conscious, divine substance. We need to rediscover Goethe’s profound feeling of the worth of life, the wisdom that he found in natural order. We need not only an ideal to pursue but also the cognitive and ethical means by which to achieve it, a plan of practicable perfection grounded in the realities of human affairs within nature’s boundaries. Technical capacity must be supplemented and guided by a moral capacity.
Alastair McIntosh wastes no time dismissing the techno-fix: ‘the harsh truth is that many don't add up when ripped from their contexts of honest-to-God simplicity and forced to serve industrial frenzy.’ Technologies must be integrated within a broader social, ethical and ecological matrix. The economic and climate crisis calls for the humanisation of our technics, not some crude instrumentalisation of nature, disguised as a humanisation, but which entails dehumanisation.
Alastair Mclntosh is a Quaker, an ecologist and the author of the magnificent, sound and wise Soil and Soul: People Versus Corporate Power (2001 Aurum Press). In an article entitled Economic growth and climate change are like a runaway train, McIntosh argues that politics, economics and technology on their own are not enough. ‘We must also tackle the roots of consumerism, consumption in excess of sufficiency - the idolatrous addiction that masks our inner emptiness and poisons deeper transformation. And so we must rekindle community, put love back into public life, and thereby rescue hope from the caverns of despair. We must call back the soul.’
Which brings us back to Dr Rowan Williams, who calls upon us to heed Moses and ‘choose life’. This begs the question of how we can come to live in a way that honours rather than endangers the life of the planet? Social and environmental justice are part of the same concern with the commons and the common good. We are called upon to live in a way that shows an understanding that we live in a shared world, not merely a world that belongs to us. This has been the central question of moral and political philosophy since Plato defined justice as the social virtue par excellence. No doubt, as part of our common human essence, the concern predates its rational philosophical delineation. The dangers attendant upon climate change and global warming gives this concern with sharing the commons renewed importance. It is a sign of the power of capitalist idolatry that this central concern of human life should ever have been lost. We now see the results of capitalist materialist progress - the extinction of species and the reduction of biodiversity, desertification and deforestation, shortages of fuel and food. We have dissipated our natural capital in order to turn a buck. If it profits a man nothing to exchange his soul for the whole world, if profits him even less to exchange his world for a few dollars more.
In his superb book, Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition, Alastair Mclntosh describes our addictive and self-destructive consumption patterns as "ecocidal". Living in dependence on things is to live at a less than properly human level. The latest advocates of Green techno-fixing – such as Brand, Lynas and many others – speak casually of ‘the humanisation of nature’. They would do well to understand that we need first to humanise ourselves and our technics before we are capable of humanising nature. We need to be aware that at present we are living inhumanly. Mclntosh suggests that it may take a "cultural-psychotherapy" to liberate us. Whether or not that liberation will be sufficient to avert disaster, we need to recognise that the climate crisis and eco-catastrophe we face is part of a bigger crisis concerning how we understand and actualise our humanity. Hegel and Marx use the concept of alienation, the idea that human creators objectify their creative essence and in the process lose themselves in a world that they have created, only to recognise and recover their power at a higher level of consciousness. In the process of alienation we lose our "feel" of the appropriately human. This loss lies at the heart of the capital system and, with the globalisation of economic relations, has been vigorously exported to the whole world.
In a lecture for Operation Noah delivered in 2009, Dr Rowan Williams describes at length how this loss manifests itself in a variety of ways.
It has to do with the erosion of rhythms in work and leisure, so that the old pattern of working days interrupted by a day of rest has been dangerously undermined; a loss of patience with the passing of time so that speed of communication has become a good in itself; a loss of patience which shows itself in the lack of respect and attention for the very old and the very young. It is a loss whose results have become monumentally apparent in the financial crisis of the last 12 months. We have slowly begun to suspect that we have allowed ourselves to become addicted to fantasies about prosperity and growth, dreams of wealth without risk and profit without cost.
This is where Alastair McIntosh is pertinent in referring to ‘displacement activity’. Many words have been uttered in TV debates and news and politics shows concerning the current economic crisis, many more have been written in the business pages of the newspapers. How many of these words have been relevant? There is a sense in which the arguments talk around the problem instead of seeing where the roots of the economic problem lie. The obsession is with economic growth. We need to hear more about personal growth, what psychologist Carl Rogers called ‘personal power’ (1979) and ‘a way of being’ (1995). It’s Plato’s old call for the examined life. "The noblest of all studies is the study of what man should be and what he should pursue." (Plato, Gorgias.) That question is integral to the human life. In the ancient Greek, ethics is not just the study of a system of beliefs and morals, it is ethos, a way of life, a life which we are all called upon to live.
Dr Williams refers to ‘our amnesia about the human calling.’ ‘We have seen growing evidence in recent years of a lack of correlation between economic prosperity and a sense of wellbeing, and evidence to suggest that inequality in society is one of the more reliable predictors of a lack of wellbeing. It looks very much as if what we need is to be reconnected rather urgently with the processes of our world. We shouldn't need an environmental crisis to establish that the developed world has become perilously out of touch with the experience of those living in the least developed parts, and with their profound vulnerabilities and insecurities.’
Williams comes to the fundamental question of whether our duty of care for life is compatible with the unquestioned assumption of endless, unchecked economic growth. Leaving aside desirability of this endless economic expansionism, its very possibility is certainly in doubt. ‘Unless we re-evaluate our obsession with growth in consumerist terms, we can be sure of two things: inequality will not be addressed (and so the powerlessness of the majority of the world's population will remain as it is at the moment); and the dehumanising effects of the culture of consumer growth will worsen.’
Williams thus sees the ecological crisis as a reality check which should reacquaint us with the facts of our interdependence within the material world, something which encourages us to recognise our responsibility for that world.
The Christian story lays out a model of reconnection with an alienated world: it tells us of a material human life inhabited by God and raised transfigured from death; of a sharing of material food which makes us sharers in eternal life; of a community whose life together seeks to express within creation the care of the creator. In the words used by both Moses and St Paul, this is not a message remote from us in heaven or buried under the earth: it is near, on our lips and hearts. And, as Moses immediately goes on to say in the Old Testament passage: "You know it and can quote it, so now obey it. Today I am giving you a choice between good and evil, between life and death... Choose life."